Why should India focus more on the indigenization of AI and Big data science?

In the 21st century, war becomes multifaced, conflict is not limited to traditional weapons-based reprisal, rather it is turning into a multidimensional front, for example, cyber warfare, soft warfare, and economic warfare, and also in coming years conflict will involve artificial intelligence (AI) based warfare (already started, example, recent Israel Palestine conflict). Here, we will mainly discuss economic warfare. Before that let us understand a little about cyberwarfare. Cyber warfare is the use of computers by governments, state-sponsored groups, and individuals to attack other computers or networks for espionage, sabotage, and military purposes. Cyberwarfare may include computer attacks that are intended to cause physical damage to a target (e.g., a nuclear power plant), as well as the destruction of the data on computers and networks. This is done by controlling the computers of the attacked computer, thus shutting it down. For example, in 2007, a group of hackers known as "Lizard Squad" from the United States launched a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack on Sony.

Economic warfare is a type of war that involves economic actions and attempts to bring about political or social change via economic means with no regard for military confrontation. This can be done by using certain types of sanctions either against a country or companies in that country. In the past, this type of warfare has caused the countries to be affected by high obstacles, as well as leading to a weakening of their economy.

The first known use of economic sanctions was during the Peloponnesian War, which was between Athens and Sparta. Athens used them to hurt Sparta's economy by cutting off trade with Persia. In 1848, Great Britain used them against the United States because they ended up fighting with Mexico for possession of California. During World War II, Japan imposed an economic blockade on China. The country placed blockades on the Chinese ports and prohibited them from importing raw materials, such as steel, petroleum, rubber, paper, and wood.

In the 21st century, this form of war has become more common. It is used by many countries and organizations to put pressure on other countries and groups. This includes targeting companies that do business with a country or group that they are opposed to. It also includes denying a country or group access to international economic markets by blocking trade deals between other countries and the one they are targeting. However, in the age of AI and big data, economic warfare is going to be invisible to the common mass and even to the policymakers, which I am going to discuss in depth. In the coming sections, we will discuss, ‘How can access to big data combined with the analytical power of AI drastically give an edge over the country that lags behind these two?’ At this juncture, ‘I would say, giving away access and control over big data of a country to other countries is like giving them access to its nuclear weapon.’ This point would be clear as we logically evaluate the power of big data and its consequences on a country’s economy and sovereignty.  

Shortly (or even it has already started) war will involve artificial intelligence (AI). The reader who is unaware of AI, in simple terms, artificial intelligence is a human-made algorithm/computer program that is intended to learn itself, make decisions, and perform a particular/general task without the intervention of humans. The concept of a human-made algorithm for AI will remain valid till the AI itself writes its own program. The point when the AI will write its own program is popularly known as the point of singularity. Beyond this point humans need not improve the code of the AI, rather it will improve its code itself to make itself more intelligent. Although, in the present scenario, the AI is capable of gaining superhuman capability in specific fields say playing chess, however, general intelligence i.e. human level or super human-level intelligence is the ultimate goal of this field of computer science.

    In the age of information technology and artificial intelligence (AI), data would be a very important resource or a weak point of a country depending on how it protects and utilizes it. A country like India, where more than 1.3 billion people reside, generates a tremendous amount of data daily. Now before we discuss why the data is very important for a country to safeguard them, let us discuss how we generate digital data daily. More than 50 crore people in India use a smartphone, and at least each smartphone contains say 10 applications(app). There are various ways a smartphone user can generate data on a day-to-day basis. Let us first discuss the data generation due to social media, whenever you log in to a social media account, or even just connect to the internet, new data get generated, moreover, whenever we install an app most of the time, we give permission to the access of our location, camera access, and also access to our device’s mic. You must have realized the fact that sometimes you discuss any topics with your friend, next time whenever you open your social media or search engine, you get to see advertisements related to that topic. That means, your device was listening to your conversations and according to that, a feed was delivered. This implies most of these applications in our device constantly generate data of the location, discussion, videos, images, and sometimes physical parameters such as body temperature, sleep pattern, heart signal, etc, (provided such sensors are available to the device). Some of the data even are generated without our awareness. Another way data is generated is through your active participation. For example, you log in to social media, upload a photo, video, document, write a blog, etc. They even get generated when you like a social media post, comment on the post, post a photo, etc. Another huge data generation source is the video uploading platform e.g. YouTube. You click any photo, video, content, etc, and everything is monitored and analyzed by the artificial intelligence algorithm of the service provider. Your likings, dislikes, your thought processes are predicted by the AI, and accordingly, you are getting a regular feed from the internet advertisements, google search results, etc. Now it will not be exaggerated to say that at a particular point in life, the artificial intelligence in your beloved device/service provider will understand you more than you understand yourself. Even recent studies found that by using an AI algorithm, the service provider was able to manipulate the customer’s decision by consistently recommending biased content to the customer to manipulate the buyer’s decision to their benefit. Now, we have come to an understanding of what service providers with AI can do to our society. So what!!, they are manipulating the customer to sell their product. The concern is not selling a product, it may be very serious when the mass population is being manipulated for biasing towards some products from a particular country or creating less confidence among citizens about the home-grown product. This way, the economy of a country can be manipulated without even being aware of the policy-making body of the country. The lack of homegrown essential products especially lifesaving drugs, medical equipment, communication tools, and military equipment and weapons may be a concern during situations like a pandemic, international conflicts, natural calamities, etc.  

  Moreover, the selling of products with the aid of AI intervention of a particular kind is a threat up to a certain level. However, it is too risky to be influenced by the external force to advance a certain political ideology, not only by our politicians within our nation, rather it will be too unsafe to be manipulated by an outsider. In addition, surveillance cameras connected to public places generate enormous data, which is also a very important treasure trove for understanding public behavior at various stages of the time frame. The analysis of these data can give enormous information about the collective behavior of people from a particular place, community, etc, which otherwise can’t be understood using discrete human-centric analysis. Another important and easily accessible parameter is the live location data of a user of a smartphone user. Analyzing these data can help the Artificial intelligent algorithm to understand the movement of a particular person. How can these data be useful to make some meaningful decisions? Now let’s take one example, depending upon the distance covered by a person and also say other parameters, speed of his/her walking, driving, sitting time, etc, the AI algorithm could find that for some particular parametric value, people are suffering from blood sugar problems. Now, AI can help pharmaceutical company to make a prediction that in the coming few years how many people are going to affect by blood sugar disease. Accordingly, the company may produce that particular number of medicines. Another aspect of data generation and mass data access may be the outcome of the Internet of Things (IoT). For the reader, those who are unaware of IoT, the Internet of Things is the network of physical devices that may contain various sensors to generate data and connect through the Internet to share and analyze the data. For example, in a house, your TV, computer, table clock, refrigerator, washing machine, speaker, door lock, and air conditioning devices are connected to the internet through a smart AI device say Alexa. Now, you can program and monitor or even access the devices through the internet or even the AI can inform you about the vegetable inside your fridge or unlock your door whenever you reach home. Although, the IoT environment is in the very early stage of development in India, however, this is the right time to make policy about the fate of those enormous data in coming years. 

Now let us understand the scenario of Indian data generation and flow direction. The majority of individuals in India use social media sites that are largely controlled by other countries and data storage and access are likewise controlled by foreign nationals. As we know international relations are not permanent, which in simple language, no country is a permanent friend or permanent enemy. Before we discuss the data storage and access scenario, let us take the example of the scenario raised during the first wave of pandemic COVID 19 in India. We desperately felt the unpreparedness of our health sector to tackle the pandemic situation. Also, all kinds of restrictions on getting access to healthcare supplies and medications from outside country suppliers. Another problem we faced was the lack of home-grown virtual conferencing software, despite being one of the leading IT service providers in the world. Although, we tried to solve the problem with extreme urgency, however, the situation may not be the same in the case of data access and storage. Now let us consider a scenario where all the social media and search engines denied providing services to India, and also denied providing access to the data e.g. access to emails, saved passwords, cloud storage data, etc. The situation would be unimaginable, and a chaotic situation may arise. This is one of the simple examples. Now let us discuss a big issue in the long term, very few giant companies are only gathering all the data and also the analytical powers (AI) to extract and understand the big data. If things continue in the same fashion, a time definitely will come when those companies will be in a position to manipulate the government in the country by using the power of data access and AI. This has already started, even some of the social media are daring to challenge the ruling government due to their popularity, data richness or we may say AI power. This is the beginning of an unthinkable issue which going to be more prominent in the coming decades. If the monopoly of data access and data storage remains in the hand of a few industrial giants and the progress of artificial intelligence continues even on the same page, I speculate, in the coming few decades, these giant companies will have the ultimate power to topple any government where their presence is in dominant share. In such a scenario, India is no exception, if we don’t take any decisive action keeping in mind the possibility of power transition to a few giant companies or organizations, the outcome would not only be problematic to our country, but it may also have adverse effects throughout the world. 

By

Abhijit Chandra Roy

DST-Inspire Faculty

Department of Physics 

IISc Bangalore

E-mail: abhijit.ch.roy1@gmail.com

Photonic molecule: A small step towards quantum computer

Figure: Cartoon diagram showing entanglement of two photons making photonic molecule, Credit: NIST

       It would have been so amazing if we could have capture light photons in a container in the day time and use them at night for illumination, electricity, heating, etc. Wait for a minute, the idea is amazing, but isn't it a fantasy?  

    Hmm, surprisingly,  scientists have reached a step ahead to make the fantasy come true.
  
       The complexity and the vastness of the behavior of light are well-known, and which have even been acknowledged by the great scientist Einstein. One of the most interesting properties of light is its wave-particle duality. However, if we consider light as a particle, it consists of mass-less photons and these photons never interact with each other. For example, when two laser beams cross each other the direction and characteristic of the lights never change. However recently, Prof. Mikhael Lukin from Harvard University and Prof. Vladan Vuletić from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have demonstrated the bond formation of two photons as if they behave like a particle with masses. They have shown that when light photons pass through a super-cooled medium (Bose-Einstein condensate) of atoms, the speed of light can be reduced to zero. When the temperature of the medium restricted few nano-Kelvin, photons can behave like particles having masses and interact with each other to make bond like a molecule. 

   Although theoretical evidence of the photonic molecules has been described for quite a while, however, due to the technical challenges, until their effort, it was not observed. They have confirmed the bonding of the two photonic molecules by measuring the time interval between the detection of the first and second photons coming out from the super-cooled medium. Their finding shows, instead of a finite time interval between the two photons, they emerge together from the Bose-Einstein condensate. They have termed their finding as a new state of matter. Interestingly, they have shown that the polarizations of these photons change and entangled with each other in the medium when they formed a photonic molecule. 

Even though it seems science fiction, but in future scientists may create material or container loaded with high-density photonic molecules with adaptable releasing capabilities. For example, condensing or collecting sunlight photon in the daytime and can be used for required applications. Moreover, scientists have been already aware of the application of these photonic molecules to build the quantum computer for faster and complex calculations. 

    The basic blocks of any computing devices are its logic gates, and it is only possible to make the logic gate when the flow of input information interacts with each other to give an output. In the case of the quantum computer too, the same condition applies to make logic gates. Although photons are one of the best means to convey quantum information, i.e. quantum bits (qubits), however, normally these photons do not interact with each other. This non-interactive behavior of the photon restricts scientist to use them for making quantum photonic logic gates. Therefore, the recent discovery of the photonic molecule opens up a new window which shows evidence of the capability of photons to interact with each other. Hence, it promises a logical step toward the realization of the quantum information processing photonic gate, i.e. quantum computer. Even though the discovery shows a promising advance towards quantum computing, huge challenges are still there before making such quantum logic gates in practice.

What is molecular electronics?

Can you imagine electronic circuits being synthesized by pure chemical routes instead of the conventional top-down lithographic process? Irrespective of our imagination, scientists have already made electronic components using molecules from chemical species. In the picture to the left, one of the earliest computers can be seen, which was as big as the size of a house; the image to the right shows a modern computer, which is the smallest computer in contemporary times, the size of which is comparable to a matchbox. This huge miniaturization has been possible because of the integration of a large number of electronic components on a single silicon chip, which is again a gift of the advancements in nanotechnology (Nanotechnology deal with the engineering of systems having sizes in range of ~1-100 nm). The advancements in the miniaturization techniques using nanotechnology has made it possible to upgrade the performance of huge variants of electronic devices such as computers, cell phones, handheld PDAs almost on a day-to-day basis. The increasing numbers of electronic components on an electronic chip not only miniaturizes computers but also enhances their computing power. Our present semiconductor based solid-state microelectronics follows one of the most famous axioms in technology: ‘Moore's law’. He had predicted that the number of transistors that could be fabricated on a silicon integrated circuit would double every two years, and therefore the computing speed of such a circuit would also double every two years. However, if you look at processor speeds from the 1970’s to 2009 and then again, in 2015, you may think that the law has reached its limit or is approaching the limit. This can be attributed to the fact that the lithography-based miniaturization of semiconductor electronic components is not a never-ending process; instead, it has certain limits beyond which miniaturization of the components is not feasible. This limitation arises due to some physical problems like technical hurdles encountered during fabrication of smaller electronic components on a semiconductor chip, interconnecting the huge number of components, dissipation of heat from so many closed packed devices and the effect of stray signals etc. Therefore, it is appropriate to look for alternative approaches to avoid these problems and further progress in this field. Scientists today are trying to solve this problem using molecular chemistry. How does a chemist improve the performance of a computer circuit? You would be surprised to read this, but it is the ‘molecule’ that can not only solve the problem of further miniaturization of electronic chips but can also improve the performance as well as can reduce the cost manifolds. The branch of the science and engineering that deals with engaging a single and/or ensemble of molecules to fabricate electronic components is known as Molecular Electronics. In this field, it is possible to build individual electronic components using molecules that can perform functions identical or analogous to those of switches, transistors, conductors, diodes and other key electronics components. Molecular electronics can play an important role in overcoming the limits of semiconductor technology, and make the electronic circuitry way smaller, faster and more importantly, cheaper. It is an interdisciplinary area that spans physics, chemistry, materials science, biology, electronics, and computer science. The idea that a single molecule could be embedded between electrodes and perform the basic functions of digital electronics, such as rectification, amplification and storage, was put forward in the mid-1970s by two scientists named Ratner and Aviram, who were working for IBM. Due to the remarkable development of modern nanotechnology, the characterizations and measurement of characteristics of single molecular electronic devices are not out of reach. Though molecular electronics is comparatively a younger research field, huge efforts have been made in exploring experimental methods to fabricate molecular electronics devices. Recently, a scientist of Indian origin, Dr. Latha Venkataraman from the Department of Applied Physics and Department of Chemistry, Colombia University,  has explored a new technique to fabricate single molecule based diode (an electronic component associated with computer circuit) and interestingly the new molecular diode can perform ~50 times faster than all previous existing designs. Her research group is the first one to develop such real world application based molecular electronic components, which may change the entire scenario of electronic chips, their performance, and finally the cost of the electronic products. Their work was published in the journal Nature Nanotechnology in the paper entitled, "Single-Molecule Diodes with High On-Off Ratios through Environmental Control," on May 25th of this year.

To understand their work, let us discuss the basic functions of a diode. In electronics, a diode works as an electronic component that can allow current to pass in one direction, but blocks current flow in the other direction. Basically, it works similar to a valve. To make a similar diode using a single molecule, the molecule must be asymmetric in structure so that electricity can flow in one direction rather than in both directions. In order to fabricate these single molecular diodes, their group has developed a molecule with asymmetric structure, which allows current to flow in only one direction. Although such asymmetric molecules show diode-like properties, but they are not effective to be used in real life application. Therefore, they further modified the design of the asymmetric molecule to fabricate a real life application based single molecular diode. In this innovative design, instead of using asymmetric molecules, they have created an asymmetry in the environment around the molecular junction. This asymmetric environment was created by simply surrounding the active molecules with an ionic solution, and using gold metal electrodes of different sizes to contact the molecule. Because this new technique is so easily implemented, it can be applied to nanoscale devices of all types, including those that are made with graphene electrodes. 

One of the important advantages of molecular electronics is size miniaturization; therefore a molecular semiconductor made using this technique will be 3000 times smaller than a semiconductor transistor sized at 20 nm. The molecules not only provides thermodynamically favorable electron conduction, they can also work as current conduction wires due to their pi- conjugation electron. In addition, other advantages of the molecular electronics is that electronic devices are now faster, smarter, smaller and more of a  cost effective design as compared to metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) technologies which is leading the modern integrated electronic circuitry. Moreover, molecules are identical and can be fabricated defect-free in enormous numbers. Some molecules can self-assemble and can thus create large arrays of identical devices. Almost all existing inorganic semiconductors have their organic molecular counterparts to design the existing electronic circuitry. Molecules can also be designed to make p-type as well as n-type conductors to make acceptor and donor molecules respectively. Organic charge-transfer crystals and conducting polymers yield organic equivalents of a variety of inorganic electronic systems: semiconductors, metals, superconductors, batteries, etc. Some of the molecules show considerable electrical and electronic properties in bulk, in the likes of conducting polymers, organic light emitting polymers, piezoelectric polymers etc.   

As we have seen, a revolution in the electronic industry had occurred during the time (~1950) of the death of vacuum tube based electronic components and the rise of integrated circuits (IC). Similarly, in near future, there is a huge possibility of revolution to occur in the entire electronic and computer industry through the elevation of molecular electronics. Although an ample amount of research is going on in the field of molecular electronics, some of the basic problems of the integration of the electronic circuitry using molecular electronics, such as proper understanding of current flow behavior between the molecule/electrode junctions have to be addressed. In addition, another important challenge in the field is controlling the precise geometry at the molecule–metal contacts, which can determine the performance of single molecule devices. Scientists all over the globe are extensively trying to overcome the limitation in the path of advancement in molecular electronics and hopefully, we will soon have a workable faster, cheaper and smarter molecular electronic devices in the near future.

Image References

1. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7458479.stm 

2. http://www.cottoncandyusb.com/ 

3. http://www.int.kit.edu/1263.php       

---------

Dr. Abhijit Chandra Roy

Mobile No.  09935394366

E-mail.  abhijitroysoft@gmail.com