THE TIMES OF INDIA, BENGALURU

WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 6, 2021 13

RUST USE IS GROWING Do you use Rust at work?

5.1 1.7
P rogramming language Rust continues to
make inroads as a language used for
production with roughly 40% of respondents that
No, my
company does
Not, sure

work in software noting in a survey that they use

Rust at their day job. The future of Rust on the
job is bright with nearly half of those who knew
saying that their employer planned to hire Rust
developers in the next year, according to Rust
Blog, a blog that announces big developments in
the world of Rust.
The use of Rust at workplaces seems to be
getting bigger with 44% of respondents saying
that the amount of Rust at work was 10,000 lines
of code or more, compared to 34% last year.
13.8
Yes, full-time Our discussion this week is on Docker,
the pioneering software container
53.3 technology. We’ll be talking with Ajeet
26.0 NO Singh Raina, a Docker Captain, and
Yes, part-time Live on Facebook today,
who runs the Docker Bangalore Meetup
January 6, from 6pm to 7pm.
community, one of the largest such
communities in the world with about Event page link:
10,000 members. http://bit.ly/techieswebinar32
Source: Rust Blog; survey had 8,323 respondents

Funds, local mkt key to reducing W

TECH I’D LIKE TO SEE
AI in mental wellness
hile multiple apps and issues happen in episodes.

China dependence in electronics

companies assist users The possibilities of the right
in meditating correctly and intervention at the right time
breathing properly, AI-based are endless as long as detec-
solutions will eventually tion is accurate. With grow-
enter the world of mental ing awareness, AI engines
health and transform the may finally have the neces-
How to build your semicon skills
India Has HIGH SENSE OF URGENCY IN INDUSTRY, GOVT, ACADEMIA Naik says if you are reasonably
good in math and physics, the rest
way we deal with mental
issues. Mental well-
sary data points to detect
such episodes accurately
I need orders. A local market for electronics has emerged,
Excellent Tech There’s a high sense of urgency now in
the different parts of the ecosystem – like controllers in washing machines, in of the stuff will fall in place if you
have the right attitude. “Also, get-
ness doesn’t revolve
around just anxiety
in the near future and
intervene with either
industry, government, academia – to create inverter-based fans. But the government should
Capabilities, but indigenous electronics & semiconductor mandate that all low-energy fans, ACs,
refrigerators should use local chips. It’s the
ting your hands dirty is as impor-
tant as clearing your examina-
and depression. I
am, for instance, a
existing solutions –
such as breathing
products. A major policy focused
That isn’t Enough on fabless product companies is
expected soon. Such companies
government’s job to help the local industry
tions. I have been a big advocate
of vocational training, the Ger-
nervous flier. Every
time I have to take
techniques – or new
solutions that haven’t
G S Madhusudan | man model. A lot of vocational a flight, my nervous- been developed before,
Sujit John & Shilpa Phadnis | TNN require a lot of funding, guys are good at semicon. In In-
CO-FOUNDER, INCORE SEMICONDUCTORS ness begins the those specifically
infrastructure dia, students and employees are
previous day. designed to
I’m optimistic about the whole ecosystem.

I
ndia imports most of its elec-
tronic products. It’s one of the
country’s biggest import bills.
Much of those imports are
from China. Semiconductor chips
are at the heart of electronics
products, and of everything
around us – smartphones, PCs,
cars, watches, drones, medical de-
vices, and modern defence equip-
ment. Senator Ben Sasse of the US
Senate’s intelligence committee
last year said that modern wars
are fought with semiconductors.
And India is almost totally depend-
ent on China and Taiwan for chips.
The country has fantastic sem-
iconductor design talent, but much
of that talent is in the India engi-
neering and R&D centres of global
semiconductor giants like Intel,
Samsung, and Qualcomm. Consid-
ering the tensions with China,
building an indigenous semicon-
ductor and electronics industry
appears urgent.
That urgency is visible across
government, industry and aca-
demia, says Satya Gupta, chair-
man of the India Electronics &
S e m i c o n d u c t o r A s s o c i at i o n
(IESA). The production-linked in-
centive (PLI) scheme announced
last year for electronics manufac-
turing was an indication of that.
Gupta says some 300-400 mean-
ingful startups are now working
on building electronics products.
Vinay Kumar’s PathShodh
Healthcare is one of those, and it
won IESA’s annual startup award
last month in the healthcare cat-
Satya Gupta | CHAIRMAN, INDIA
ELECTRONICS & SEMICONDUCTOR
ASSOCIATION
We do hard things, we do
semiconductor, we do telecom
infrastructure, which is even harder. It’s an
extremely long gestation period, 10-12 years.
You need investors who are really
patient. India now has a critical
mass of companies, people who
understand how to build such
products. What is lacking
is finance
Parag Naik |
CO-FOUNDER, SAANKHYA LABS
of Science (IISc), Bangalore, alum-
nus, has developed what he calls a
“lab in a palm.” The small device
can measure eight different pa-
rameters, including diabetes
markers like HbA1c, and markers
for early detection of kidney fail-
ure. “Normally, to test all this, it
will require five big machines that
collectively cost Rs 1.5 to 2 crore,”
he says. Hundreds of his devices
are being used to diagnose people
in remote areas.
Cardiologist Dr Srikanth Sola’s
Devic Earth is another success story.
The venture won IESA’s startup
award in the environment category
last month. Dr Sola, who was prac-
ticing in the US, moved to India in
2008, and immediately noticed how
pollution was causing cardiac is-
sues among many. He used his
knowledge of biomedical engineer-
more worried about the look and
About a decade ago, when I was in college, feel of the office, what kind of tea
Much like address a
this, mental particular
every technical entrance exam had the question, is served. We need to get over
what is the full form of VLSI (very large-scale that,” he says. health situation.
integration) and LSI. Now, these are common Madhusudan a g rees that
what’s essential is solid basics, Anjan Bhojarajan | VP - GROWTH & HEAD OF PRODUCTS, HEALTHIFYME
things that youngsters talk about every day
and most of our engineers don’t
Vinay Kumar | CO-FOUNDER, PATHSHODH HEALTHCARE have that. “If you are a semicon-
ductor person, your basic analog
When I came back from the US, I could see the
background, design and digital
impact of pollution on public health. Given
backgrounds must be solid. You
my knowledge of biomedical engineering, we
must focus on lab work. The sem-
hit upon the idea of pulsed radio wave icon field is hardcore engineer-
technology – which is how MRI scanners work – ing. It’s not like running an app.
to coalesce and contain air particles. It took If you get a chip wrong, it’s $20-30
five years to develop a commercial product million down the drain,” he says.
Gupta says all the foundation-
Dr Srikanth Sola | CARDIOLOGIST & FOUNDER, DEVIC EARTH
al resources needed are available
on the internet. “But when I go
trols pollution across large areas, which has developed a tracking and interact with students, I find
unlike traditional air purifiers that system for the Indian Railways. they are not leveraging these re-
can cover only small spaces. It’s now G S Madhusudan, co-founder of sources, many don’t have the
being used in offices and factories. InCore Semiconductors, which drive to do it,” he says.
Gupta, who runs a company builds processors that are used in a Madhusudan says the funda-
called Seedeyas Innovations, is variety of areas, attributes the lack mental characteristic of an engi-
also working on technology that of venture capital interest to the neer must be curiosity. “I don’t
can be installed on top of moving absence of a serious ecosystem de- need high IQ people. I need people
vehicles and which can absorb velopment plan by the government. who are curious,” he says. The
pollution particles.
Electronics products like these
take about five years to develop.
In the countries that have devel-
oped successful semiconductor
ecosystems, governments have
problem is, even colleges make it
difficult. “There are colleges that
close their labs at 4pm because the
Biologists should
have good math,
Kumar and Dr Sola developed them played big roles in providing fi- buses have to leave. If the kid
with grants from various organisa- nance and have also often helped wants to play around with an os-
tions, including governmental create local markets. cilloscope, how on earth are you
ones. Developing semiconductor Madhusudan says a local mar- going to turn an engineer out.
technology, however, is far more
expensive – many millions of dol-
lars – and may take 10-12 years.
“You need investors who are really
ket for semiconductors has
emerged, given the growing manu-
facture of electronic products in
India. But he says the government
And things like RF (radio frequen-
cy) are very tough,” he says.
Naik says the middle class
should also not obsess about sta-
programming skills
patient. And India just doesn’t have can do a lot more, such as by man- bility, that you have to work for an Avik.Das1@timesgroup.com Students often do not
that kind of money today,” says dating that all low-energy fans, Infosys or MNC brand. “If you get
like biology and think
Parag Naik, co-founder of semicon- ACs, refrigerators should use that out of your way, you’ll have

egory. Kumar, an Indian Institute
Indian engrs keep
ing to develop technology that con-
ductor company Saankhya Labs,
HOW ONWARD IS ASSISTING IN CANCER DIAGNOSTICS
B
iology finds a vast array of
of it as a subject only for
local chips. a great career,” he says. applications in engineering,
and just like other subjects, medicine. But that has vastly
it has become interdisciplinary, changed now
says Guhan Jayaraman, head of
biotechnology at IIT Madras.
“Students often do not like biol-
ogy and think of it as a subject
Guhan
Jayaraman |
HEAD, BIOTECHNOLOGY
DEPARTMENT, IIT

Amex fraud rates only for medicine. But that has

vastly changed now,” he says.
He says that there are numer-
ous engineers who specialised in
MADRAS

The application of biology in

engineering and vice versa has

at industry lows
Akhil.George@timesgroup.com
chemical and mechanical branch-
es before going on to do a PhD in
neuroscience. “I can cite my ex-
ample. I studied chemical engi-
neering before taking an interest
increased as the subjects become
interconnected. For example,
fluid mechanics, an essential
subject in mechanical engineer-
ing, explains how fluids flow
We have one global fraud in biology in the third year,” he through large scale systems. An
model that was developed advancement of the subject, mi-

T
here are billions of Visa and
Mastercard credit cards in the
world, but there are only 114
million American Express (Amex)
cards. Yet, Amex earns more revenue
than the other two major providers
combined. Amex provides a premi-
um suite of services for which its
customers pay an annual fee for
many of its cards -- like its famous
platinum cards.
One of the crucial services Amex
provides its users is protection
against fraud, and its centres in India
have been at the forefront of develop-
ing security solutions for the $24.5
billion company. Abhishek Khanna,
VP of fraud risk decision science at
American Express, leads the team in
India that builds machine learning
(ML) models to detect fraud. He says
CUTTING EDGE
MADE IN INDIA
the model is designed to detect anom-
alies. “Say, a customer uses his Amex
card to buy coffee at a shop, but then
a few minutes later makes another
physical transaction in another city.
That would naturally be impossible,
and would be flagged,” he says.
In 2010, American Express be-
came one of the early adopters of AI
and ML when it set up a Big Data
Labs in Bangalore. “Since then, we
have integrated AI and ML into our
core business process of credit risk
and fraud detection. Our pioneering
fraud model is a gradient boosting
out of India that makes a real-
time fraud risk decision on every
American Express transaction
anywhere in the world – more
than 8 billion decisions annually
Abhishek Khanna | VP, FRAUD RISK
DECISION SCIENCE, AMERICAN EXPRESS
machine-based model and is trained
on data from a recent static time pe-
riod. Before ML, we needed to create
150 separate models to identify fraud
risk around the world. Now we have
one global model that evaluates over
$1.2 trillion in transactions annual-
ly,” says Khanna.
The 10th generation of this ML
model is set to be launched. “We re-
place the model with a completely
new upgrade every nine months or
so. Every upgrade contains new data,
new variables or ML techniques to
ensure we keep our fraud rates low,”
says Khanna.
The speed with which fraudsters
learn new tricks means the company
always has to be on its toes. Amex
has the lowest fraud rate in the in-
dustry. “The latest Nielsen fraud re-
port showed our fraud rates were
half of that of our competitors. We
have found that the best machine
learning models are a combination
of the best algorithms and the hu-
man touch. Amex’s ML team is com-
posed of MS and PhD data scientists
who are never satisfied with their
status quo and are constantly up-
grading their skills,” Khanna says.
says. His primary research inter-
est is metabolic engineering and cro fluids, deals with how com-
synthetic biology. plex fluids flow through small
passages, which is literally mar-
HEAR THE PROF rying the traditional engineering
One of the applications of subject with medical technology.
Some of Onward Assist’s engineers biotechnology, Jayaraman says, Other applications of the subject
is precision medicine. “Once we include areas of biofuels, biotex-
Dinesh Koka and Vikas multiple places, including in healthcare companies understand the genome struc- tiles and biorefineries.
Ramachandra were working CureMetrix and Roche as data scientist, and as ture, which we are still far away Jayaraman is also the found-
on a startup when they faculty in US colleges. from understanding, it is possible er of the bioincubator facility at
happened to interview to make tailor-made medicines. the IIT Madras Research Park,
many oncologists. It struck Onward Assist helps improve cancer treatment For example, in Covid, some peo- established to incubate biotech
them that diagnostic and by equipping cancer pathologists and radiologists ple have mild symptoms while startups. “We have incubated
prognostic tools are either with automated analytics tools for faster others have severe ones, and this about nine companies in diag-
non-existent for cancer or, and better reporting. Its AI tools are built in is related to the immune system.” nostics, computational biology
if they are available, they collaboration with leading cancer institutes in Jayaraman encourages stu- and animal healthcare,” he says.
have been built for western India and the US, including AIIMS, New Delhi, Rajiv dents of biotechnology and bio- Computational biology is the sci-
populations. Dinesh Koka Gandhi Cancer Institute, HCG Oncology, and Yale engineering to brush up their ence of using biological data to
School of Medicine. The tools are now useful even math. “Good quantitative skills develop algorithms or models to
The two felt that if they could embed Indian patient for US populations. are becoming indispensable, understand biological systems
data into the prognostic tools, it would lead to much along with programming skills. and relationships.
better cancer treatment decisions for Indian patients. Among its customers are Krsnaa Diagnostics, one
of India’s leading diagnostics services providers, and
Biologists need to have some Jayaraman expects under-
“That was the driving force behind Onward Assist,” knowledge of programming lan- graduate students will become
says Koka. They started Onward Assist in 2016. leading academic hospitals in the US. guages like Python, because a lot more interested in the subject in
of the subject is about data inter- the times to come. Most under-
Koka, an MBA from IIM Lucknow, started his career in Koka says Onward has been able to differentiate pretation, extraction and under- graduate students traditionally
the healthcare sector with his first stint at GE Healthcare, due to its strong clinical partnerships in India and standing biological systems. ended up working in non-core
where he worked for 12 years. Ramachandra did BE in the US, algorithmic differentiation – the AI tools for They have to understand math- fields. With healthcare now top
electronics from BITS Pilani, and then Master’s and PhD pathology demonstrate good accuracy, and strong ematical modelling and handle of mind across the world, inter-
from the University of California, San Diego. He worked at technical and domain knowledge of the core team. huge volumes of data,” he says. est levels will inevitably rise.
How Noida’s Akash Mishra went from zero to hero
Swati.Bharadwaj ment at Gwalior, he had to do a Trailhead, a learning platform.
@timesgroup.com six-month internship at a hotel. My goal is to become That not only got him a break as
But a hotel kitchen can be like a the CTO of a company, a senior Salesforce developer at
and thanks to what I have US-based Iron Systems, but also

L
ife can be cruel if one is
stuck with the label of be-
Amex India team ing a below average per-
former in academics. More so,
if one comes from a family of
engineers and has to bear the
cross of being the black sheep
for choosing to stray off the
beaten path.
INSPIRATION
34-year-old Noida-based te-
chie Akash Mishra did just that.
“Cooking was my hobby and
sparked my interest in hotel
management,” he says. As part
of his food production course at
the Institute of Hotel Manage-
pressure cooker and soon he re-
alised it was not his cup of tea.
And he had absolutely no
clue what life was cooking for
him, till his father asked him to
reconsider his decision and
study engineering, where he met
his nemesis – maths.
“I chose computer science
because I thought it wouldn’t
require much maths, but it
chased me down. It took me
three attempts to clear my M2 in
engineering,” he says
sheepishly.
But engineering is also
where he found his mojo. “I was
usually at the bottom of the
learnt, I’m confident it’s a
dream I can achieve
Akash Mishra |
TECHNICAL LEAD, DAZEWORKS
class. But I completed my engi-
neering from LNCT Bhopal and
got a job in 2011 at Rs 6,000 a
month as a junior programmer
in a Noida company,” he says.
But he quit soon because he
could see the opportunities in
that company were limited.
That’s when he discovered the
world of Salesforce and in less
than a month snagged a job as
Salesforce developer at an IT com-
pany in Bhopal. “Salesforce was
a booming technology and helped
me get my second job at four times
the salary my first job offered,” he
says. A year and a half later, he
joined another Noida company.
Here he started exploring the op-
portunities offered by Salesforce
accelerated his career.
Today, he works as a technical
lead at Dazeworks, a platinum
Salesforce consulting and imple-
mentation partner.
“Trailhead is free and so easy
to learn. Today, I am handling
over seven projects and even
worked on one of the largest pro-
jects for my company developing
applications for airline part-
ners,” he says.
Mishra believes tech can re-
ally change lives. “If a below
average person like me can move
from zero to hero, anyone can
achieve anything,” he says.