Already you can tu lights, cookers or TV on and off, open doors, monitor your heart rate with a simple one-press pairing of Bluetooth devices. Today, it is the global wireless standard that fuels another technology of the future — the ‘Inteet of Things’.Creative Sound Blaster Roar 2: Renaissance speakerSingapore based Creative has long been a respected name for audio accessories. But in the telecom maidan, the fastest is not always first. Now, your Bluetooth enabled-phone or speaker will work beyond the walls of home or office.Hedy Lamarr must be chuckling in her grave. Sweet dreams!UE Boom 2: Say it, to play itIf you thought Apple’s Siri and Google Now, were just voice assistants for their respective browsers, think again. You need to install the Boom 2 app in your phone via iOS or Android.0 to reach products at year end or early in 2017. This is useful because the speaker can be used for more than just entertainment.

A USB port and a micro SD card slot allow you to stream audio or music from most devices, while a standard 3. But half century on, Bluetooth is living breathing evidence that it is indeed so. Practical Wi-Fi speeds have crossed 100 Megabits per second and the range can extend over dozens of metres. Clearly a speaker which works well for work and play — and at Rs 2999, a good deal in either role. But guess which wireless technology beats Wi-Fi in any race for maximum users: the humbler, slower, low-range technology known as Bluetooth. The buttons on the handset effectively convert the speaker into a media control centre for a small conference.In an Olympian year, we inevitably recall that ancient motto: Citius, Altius, Fortius — Faster, Higher, Stronger. Tap the top of Boom 2 once to play or pause a song and twice to skip songs. Available now for Rs 15,995.Last month saw the aouncement of an update to the standard — Bluetooth 5 — which will enable four times the range and double the data speed of the current version, without demanding more power.

With a push of the Bluetooth button on the Boom 2, you can convert the speaker into mic and say the title of a song. This it did by caily reinventing itself in a new low energy avatar — Bluetooth Smart.5 mm audio port lets you coect phones, notebooks or tablets. Ultimate Ears have smartly integrated it into the UE Boom 2 Bluetooth speaker. Gives a whole new angle to ‘aapki farmaish’!Spec-wise the speaker is a chunky, NFC-enabled, waterproof cylinder of just over half-a-kg, which promises to work for 15 hours on a full charge of its Li-Ion battery.0, the 3-watt Zebronics UFO produce good sound upto 10 metres away. Expect Bluetooth 5. But ask me what I found most useful, the speaker’s Bedtime mode, which gently reduces the volume before it switches off. With its latest wireless speaker, Zebronics takes the trend to its logical conclusion and incorporates a cordless handset atop the speaker! Based on the current Bluetooth 4. Developers are creating tiny sensors that can run for a year or more off coin-sized batteries which get recharged by the sun — or just by the kinetic energy generated when the wearer walks.Zebronics UFO speaker: For work-n-playFor users who want to untether their music from the limitations of the wired coection to a music source like phone or player, Bluetooth speakers provide an elegant answer.

It took decades for the scientific establishment to acknowledge that a cinema actress could have brains, besides beauty. Since its creation 22 years ago, it has become the most ubiquitous among technologies to wirelessly send data back and forth — eight billion devices from mobile phones to audio accessories to shoes and socks are Bluetooth-enabled. Nice target to set on the sports field. Sound Blaster Roar is their Bluetooth speaker range and the latest — Soundblaster Roar 2 — is smaller and lighter than its predecessor but belts out the same sound from its 5 speakers. Soon we will see such applications widen when a network of devices, called a Piconet, is coected by Bluetooth, much as Wi-Fi works today. This works with an entire play list too. But amid poolside fun-n-games, people want to take and make calls — so wireless speakers have generally offered phone alerts. When not busy giving Victor Mature a haircut in the biblical epic, ‘Samson and Delilah’, Hedy won the original patent for spread spectrum and frequency hopping: two key telecom techniques.

And in a throwback to its PC card days, the Sound Blaster 2 also works as an exteal sound card to a PC or Mac, if you coect it through USB. Hedy who The sultry Hollywood screen goddess of the 1940s and 50s, believe it or not, is the original source of two key technologies that fuel Bluetooth.Creative has bundled a host of useful functions that makes this the Renaissance Man among Bluetooth speakers: a socks machina built-in power source: a 6000 mAh battery; a one-touch voice recorder; Near Field Communication (NFC) technology that makes Bluetooth pairing a simple tap; a speakerphone mode that will be useful for a tele-conference and something that is always useful in a speaker — a built-in player for MP3 and WMA formats that plays directly from a microSD card.All go to make this one of the most versatile Bluetooth speakers at this price bracket (Rs 16,999). It will belt it out

Artificial Intelligence (AI) as an idea seems to have caught the imagination of both industry and academia alike. Although AI-related academic research has been in place since the late nineties but it is recently that products and services inspired by AI have emerged out of labs into our daily routine activities. Whether it is the buzz around autonomic vehicles, drones, speech recognition, various voice response systems like Alexa and Google assistant, every single one of these products has some form of AI at its core. Undoubtedly, ever-increasing processing speeds and storage capacities along with possibilities of machine to machine (M2M) communication have let the cat out of the bag. Today we produce more data in a single day then possibly we did in the entire year in the eighties. It did not take long for the industry stalwarts to realize that they were not storing and analyzing a lot of data that could help in offering completely new and customized services, thereby bringing completely new revenue streams in existence.

Now with every vertical across industry engaged in understanding exactly how AI and analytics could help them transform, education as an industry too followed suit. This article aims to differentiate the achievable from the hype in this arena.Various scholarly and popular articles over the years have identified domains within higher education where AI and analytics together could reshape the future. Let us break this down into in-classroom and leaing-oriented areas as well as beyond classroom processes. For leaing-oriented and in-classroom processes, traditional classrooms have often been blamed to be unresponsive and mass delivery focused. In other words, it does not enable personalization of educational experience (this needs to be interpreted as way beyond anytime access to material which is easily available today). Every participant irrespective of backgrounds might have different leaing needs and more importantly leaing may happen at a varied pace. AI-based algorithms could help assess beforehand the kind of leaing set-up and speed that would be suitable for a specific participant.

Subsequently, a blended, adaptive leaing environment could be implemented wherein the coursework could move with appropriate video lectures, forums and specific teaching assistance as is required by the participant. The most obvious impact of AI and analytics could be felt in evaluation methods. AI could help the participant in identifying the level of understanding reached after relevant sections by exposing students to adaptive evaluation, at times leading to participant going back to the sections where leaing is identified as inadequate. AI could also help in assessing the parts of coursework where greater human intervention may be required for higher leaing impact. Based on the leaing speed and interaction of China knitting machine Suppliers the student with the course material, final customized evaluation could be conducted, thereby establishing higher engagement among students as well as ensuring better leaing outcomes. In this regard, the role of IBM’s cognitive computing platform Watson based teaching assistant in a master’s level course at Georgia Tech is especially noteworthy.

Students were so impressed by the teacherbot that they nominated it as the best teaching assistant. AI could also help students in engaging in specific social groups by identifying groups among the leaing community that aid in leaing of each other and further help the instructors in identifying most effective leaing content amongst the myriad of choices. Lastly, the instructors could utilize AI to assess even the most complex answer sheets in a much more objective way as compared to today.Among the beyond classroom activities, AI could help the higher leaing institutions setup effective career counselling sections. AI and analytics could help the students identify various domains wherein they could do better or help them map leaing trajectories to be followed for specific career choices. Among more efficiency based aspects AI and data analytics could be used to answer various admission related queries thereby bringing down need more manpower, identifying parking spaces, lighting and facility maintenance using data from the Inteet of Things (IoT). Deakin University in Australia is a case in point as they have developed a 24/7 query response system for students that brings together over 90 servers and 200 million pages of data with the aim of cost-saving and better service.

Clearly, higher education world of tomorrow would be a lot more automated, more personalized and more impactful in its ability to enhance the leaing of the participants.However, a word of caution is to be put in place. We have still not reached a point where a teacher or classroom leaing could be completely avoided or made obsolete. A teacher in a classroom is here to stay for a very long time given the complexities and subtleties of human to human interaction based on real-time behaviour of the teacher and student alike. Nevertheless, there is a greater need to study and understand the newer and emergent paradigms of the human-machine interface that may impact the pedagogical methods for higher leaing in a futuristic world.-- Prof. Prageet Aeron, Assistant Professor, Information Management Area, MDI GurgaonDisclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the original author. These views and opinions do not necessarily represent those of Deccan Chronicle and/or other staff and contributors to this site.

Kaspersky Lab has published the results of an investigation into Genesis - an e-shop that is trading over 60,000 stolen and legitimate digital identities, making successful credit card fraud that is much easier to conduct. This marketplace, as well as other malicious tools, involve abusing the machine-leaing based anti-fraud approach of ‘digital masks’: a unique, trusted customer profile based on known device and behaviour characteristics.Every time we enter our financial, payment and personal information in an online transaction, advanced, analytics, machine leaing anti-fraud solutions match us against something called a digital mask.

These masks are unique to each user and combine the fingerprints of devices and browsers commonly used to make payments/bank online (like screen and OS information, a range of browser data like headers, time zone, installed plugins, window size etc.) with advanced analytics and machine leaing (the individual user’s cookies, online and computer behavior, etc.). That way, the financial organizations’ anti-fraud teams can determine whether it is truly us entering our credentials, or a malicious carder trying to buy goods using a stolen card, and either approve or deny the transaction or send it on for further analysis.

However, the digital mask can be copied or created from scratch, and Kaspersky Lab’s investigation has found that cybercriminals are actively using such digital doppelgangers glove knitting machine Suppliers to bypass advanced anti-fraud measures. In February 2019, Kaspersky Lab research uncovered the Genesis Darknet marketplace an online shop selling stolen digital masks and user accounts at prices ranging from $5 to $200 each. Its customers simply buy previously stolen digital masks together with stolen logins and passwords to online shops and payment services and then launch them through a browser and proxy coection to mimic real user activity.

If they have the legitimate user’s account credentials, the attacker can then access their online accounts or make new, trusted transactions in their name.Other tools enable attackers to create from scratch their own unique digital masks that won’t trigger anti-fraud solutions. Kaspersky Lab researchers have investigated one such tool, a special Tenebris browser with an embedded configuration generator to develop unique fingerprints. Once created, the carder can simply launch the mask through a browser and proxy coection and conduct any operations online.