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OmniVis : Medical Science Meets Technology to Make the World Better and Disease Free

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In the bigger picture, the present condition of our world is no less than mayhem. On the one hand, science is creating wonders with technology making our lives easier but on the other hand, millions of people are dying every day due to lack of treatment and development in medical science. Who is to blame for this? Are we way too ignorant to make significant contributions in the medical community? Or the price is so high that we have blatantly stopped trying? There are so many people dying every minute suffering from incurable diseases or due to late detection of infections in their body. Though the renowned and biggest research centres of our world are working together to invent instruments that can easily detect diseases, they are way too costly for common citizens.

With the zeal to alter the future of our world and stop it from destruction, four scholars of Purdue University, Katherine Clayton, Tamara Kinzer-Ursem, Jacqueline Linnes and Steve Wereley, came up with a unique solution to detect infectious and deadly diseases, which are both times efficient and affordable. With the mission to create affordable medical equipment, these four enlightened minds founded OmniVis, a company that will reach out to common people, help them detect disease and make out society better in terms of well-being.

Founders of OmniVis

Currently, Katherine Clayton is the CEO of the company with Ursem, Linnes and Wereley working as the Advisors.

Katherine Clayton Founder OmniVis
Image Source: halcyonhouse.org

Clayton, who is originally from San Francisco, went to Pursue University to complete her PhD in mechanical engineering. When she was an undergraduate student, she had already decided to work with healthcare products and make easy infection and disease detection equipment available to common people. When Clayton was a kid, she lost someone very close to her, due to the absence of better tools in the medical field, and hence, this was the beginning of her dream to do better for the community. She, with other three scholars, co-founded OmniVis in 2017, and since then, it has received worldwide support and funding.

Ursem is associated with Weldon School of Biomedical Engineering as an assistant professor which is under Purdue University. Her main area of research involves molecular biology, computational biology and neuroscience.

Linnes is also an assistant professor in the Weldon School of Biomedical Engineering as well. The Linnes Lab basically works to create technologies that can detect pathogens in a time-efficient way and stop them from propagating. She also has her own start-up, PotaVida founded in April 2010. The company’s goal is to develop pocket-friendly water purifiers and reach to the rural areas of the entire world.

Currently, Wereley is a professor at the School of Mechanical Engineering at Purdue University. His specialised fields are fluid mechanics and optics. He is also the founder of a company called Microfluidics Innovations.

The Idea

Since all of them belonged to a strong research background, OmniVis emerged out as a successful idea. More than a business, it is really an idea that inspired every company, research institutes throughout the world. OmniVis has created products that can detect Cholera with less than an hour with its concepts and techniques.

Currently, OmniVis works with iPhone but soon it will incorporate the software in Android and start testing the beta version. OmniVis works in a simple process with few steps, collect the sample, detect pathogen and map location. OmniVis detects and shows the location on the map from where the sample was taken to alert the authorities. And all of these are getting done within 30 minutes with the technology of OmniVis.

The Achievements

In 2017, OmniVis acquired the first place in Vodafone Wireless Innovation Project funded by Vodafone Foundation. In 2018, OmniVis was nominated for World Changing Idea Finalist. In June 2018, the company received Phase I SBIR Grant from National Science Foundation. In the same year, OmniVis won the 2018 AMPLIFY Pitch Competition where participants from 46 different countries participated. After winning the Biological Innovation Award in February 2019, OmniVis took a step ahead and expanded out of Indiana. In May 2019, the team reached out to Bangladesh and shared the benefits of OmniVis products with them.

Some of the major investors at OmniVis are Vodafone Foundation, Deloitte, Fast Company, Purdue University, halcyon and many more.

copia

Copia : Founder Komal Ahmad Solving Hunger with Technology

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Two people sitting inside a restaurant orders the food of four, but can’t finish it. They pay for the food and leave the left-over on the table. What will happen to the left food? Obviously, the restaurant will throw it in the garbage. But is it right to do so? Komal Ahmad, the CEO of Copia, does not agree with that too. Throwing the food away is not the solution when many people out there are homeless and cannot afford a one time meal. But how to reach out to these people? Of course, there are many charitable organisations that partners with restaurants and other firms, to get the food, but these organisations have also rules about the food they accept.

While studying international health and global development at the University of California, Berkeley, Ahmad found it disgusting how the management used to throw the leftovers near the mess. Meanwhile, she met a former army man, who had just come back from Iraq, begging for food on the streets. He was waiting for his finances to come but had no money to buy food. Ahmad took the man for lunch, but a one-time meal could not fix the whole problem of wastage of food and poverty.

She thought of taking the leftover food from the mess to such needy people, but the process had many management rules to follow. This way, not even the home-less could have that food nor the charitable organisations would accept it. But Ahmad was too determined to solve this problem and with her college management produced new ways to donate the food to the needy. But this was not it. She knew that the problem is even bigger, and they need to manage all the food in the world. But there is a lot of difference in thinking and doing.

Komal Ahmad Copia
Image Source: generalassemb.ly

After digging deep, Ahmad decided to mix the technology with her food management plan. She was aware that there are many online car rental and food delivery services. So her idea was to get a similar app for picking up the wasted food and deliver it to the person in need.

She has mentioned a few times in her interviews that she finds the food-wastage problem as “literally the world’s dumbest problem.” Since she wanted to expand the idea of saving the food from wasting, she hired a development team, to develop a similar app, like Uber and other delivery services, where the working of the app was a bit different. Through the app, the corporate cafeterias, hospitals, universities, hotels, restaurants, and other businesses would book a pickup for the wasted food, and a delivery guy would pick it up and deliver it at a place where it is needed the most.

Finally, in 2016, Ahamd founded Copia, a non-profit company at the beginning, and an app for accessing the service. She put all her life-savings into the startup and with her team participated in the Y-Combinator accelerator program, where she learnt how to manage a business. Along with that Copia received a $120,000 in exchange for 7% of the company from Y-Combinator.

Since she was not from a business background, Ahmad had to learn a lot. She had devoted all her time to her startup, so she had to make the company a for-profit firm by charging a small fee from the restaurant or others who wanted to donate their food. In fact, the donors get the enhanced tax deduction of up to 15% of its fair market value. So they are also a profit. At the delivery, the donor gets full receipt and pictures as proof. The app includes a testimonial from the receivers like non-profits, as well as data analytics service too.

The delivery guys on Copia are mostly homeless people. There are eight permanent employees at the company, and around 200 people have been delivering the food as a part-time delivery person. The platform is responsible for recovering 900,000 pounds of food and feeding up to 2 million people a year. During the Superbowl event in San Francisco in 2016, the company fed 24000 people in two days.

In 2016, at the Women in the World Salon in Los Angeles, Toyota named Ahamd one of the company’s “Mothers of Invention” and awarded her a $50,000 grant to fuel the startup.

Komal Ahmad is happy how the company has grown in the past three years and want to include clothing, medicine and blanket supply into the service shortly. She also wants to expand the service in major cities of the U.S., and later, to the other parts of the world. According to some reports, the German and Austrian governments also contacted Ahmad in the same regard.

The inspiring startup story of Ahmad gives us hope for humanity and another example of how technology can help one change things in a better way.

Kailasavadivoo Sivan

Kailasavadivoo Sivan : The Rocket Man of India

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Amongst the innumerable number of successful entrepreneurs, and tech-savvies, there always emerges out a legendary person who creates history and breaks the records. Flourishing in the business world is not a big deal today given that we have developed so much in terms of technology, but how many of us dare launch spaceships and fly into the space to explore the galaxy?

All these sounds very astronomical, especially, for a developing country like India, isn’t it? Particularly, if the person behind the successful Indian space missions is a farmer’s son. A far-fetched dream, it seems like but turned into reality by none other than Kailasavadivoo Sivan, the chairperson of ISRO (Indian Space Research Organization). Today, because of this Indian scientist, India’s second mission to the moon was successfully launched. Outweighing other developed and superior nations of our world, Sivan is really creating a new era for India.

A Farmer’s Son

Born on 14th April 1957 in a small village called Tarakkanvillai in Kanyakumari district, Sivan belonged to a very poor household. Sivan’s father, Kailasavadivoonadar Sivan, was a farmer, so his family couldn’t afford a very good school for him.

Kailasavadivoo Sivan
Image Source: thehindu.com

He went to a government-sponsored school in his village, and later, went to ST Hindu College in Nagercoil for his graduation. Unable to afford any tuition or proper coaching, Sivan was a self-supported student and turns out, was the first graduate in his family.

After completing his undergraduate degree, he pursued aeronautical engineering from Madras Institute of Technology. After graduated from there in 1980, he received a master’s degree from Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore in 1982. Sivan took one more step forward towards his bright future, and also our nation’s when he completed his PhD from IIT Bombay in 2006. Sivan also received an honorary doctorate in science from Sathyabama University.

Journey to ISRO

Sivan joined ISRO long before completing his PhD, that is, in 1982. Sivan was a part of ISRO’s many projects, but one of the significant projects he participated in was the Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV) project. This was his first project after joining ISRO. Another big project where he made a significant contribution is the Geosynchronous Satellite Launch Vehicle (GSLV), and, later, he became a project director of GSLV. He majorly worked with designing and development of space vehicles for ISRO’s missions.

Sivan is famous all over the nation as ‘Rocket Man’ because he is probably the best-known scientist in India and has a significant contribution in building cryogenic rocket engines. Sivan became the director of Vikram Sarabhai Space Center on 1st June 2015, and before that, he served as the director of ISRO’s Liquid Propulsion Systems Center.

On January 2018, Sivan was declared as the ninth chairperson of ISRO after A.S Kiran Kumar.

Sivan’s Contribution to India’s Space Missions

Sivan’s unparallel contribution and untamed determination for the space missions of India led him to launch 104 satellites in one single mission. Had it not been for this devoted scientist, India would be still struggling to launch a successful moon mission for the second time.

Kailasavadivoo Sivan has been working for ISRO for more than three decades now. But, before Sivan became the chairperson of ISRO, he served at many powerful positions like Secretary of Department of Space, Chair of the Space Commission, Deputy Director (ISRO), Project Director (ISRO), and many more.

Today, due to Sivan’s sheer dedication, India is known as the first country in the entire world that is preferred for a soft landing on the moon. ISRO’s biggest mission, after Sivan became the chairperson, Chandrayaan 2 was launched on 22nd July 2019. But this braveheart shattered into pieces when the Lander lost all communications, but still, the mission was 95% successful, only because of this man.

Awards and Achievements

Since 1999, Sivan has been the recipient of many prestigious awards starting with Shri Hari Om Ashram Prerit Dr Vikram Sarabhai Research Award. In 2007, he received ISRO merit award, followed by Dr Biren Roy Space Science Award in 2011. In 2019, he was awarded A.P.J Abdul Kalam Award from Tamil Nadu’s government.

Sivan is also a Fellow of Indian National Academy of Engineering and the Aeronautical Society of India.

Personal Life

Kailasavadivoo Sivan is married to Malathi Sivan, and he is the parent to two kids, Siddharth and Sushant Kailasavadivoo Sivan. The family lives in the Bengaluru City of India.

Qualcomm Snapdragon 7 and 6 Series

The Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 7 and 6 Series will be the Low-Budget 5G Chipsets

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4G has made life a lot faster, and now, 5G is the next big thing the people are looking forward to. Till now, only a few companies have been able to get their hands on this technology, including Oppo Reno, Samsung Galaxy S, One Plus 7, etc., Qualcomm being the biggest chipmaker to provide them with the 5G modem.

Till now, Qualcomm had been offering the handsets makers with the separate 5G modem. But recently the company had announced that it will be including the 5G technology in its upcoming 8xx series 5G platform. That means, no separate modems but the 5G technology integrated to the processor itself. Adding to that, now the company has announced that the mid-range Snapdragon 6xx and 7xx chipsets will also have the 5G technology included into them.

The company announced its new Snapdragon 7xx and 6xx series 5G processors at the ongoing IFA event in Berlin, Germany. The announcement also revealed that there will be an extended range of 5G technology that will offer the support for technologies like the sub-6Ghz and mmWave spectrums, TDD and FDD modes, 5G multi-SIM, and Standalone (SA) and non-standalone (NSA) network architectures, etc.

Qualcomm Snapdragon 7 and 6 Series
Image Source: techblog.comsoc.org

Also, the new Qualcomm chipsets will make a large range of devices, mid-price or expensive, support 5G.Which is kind of the main purpose behind the release of the new chipset, i.e., to make the 5G technology available to almost everyone, not to the ones with expensive devices. “The transition to 5G is going to be faster than earlier transitions. Now we have to bring it to everyone,” said the Qualcomm President Cristiano Amon.

According to the announcement, the company has already partnered with twelve smartphone makers for integrating the new Snapdragon 7 series 5G chipset into their upcoming 5G smartphones. This list of partners includes names like Oppo, Vivo, Nokia, LG, etc.

The announcement by the company did not reveal the actual dates of availability of these new chipsets in the market but has given us the time slot when the markets can have them. Qualcomm has already talked about releasing the 8xx series 5G platform by the end of this year, whereas we can expect the Snapdragon 7xx series 5G platform to roll out by the fourth quarter of this year, and the release of the 6xx series 5G platform may take place in the second quarter of 2020.

Graphcore

Simon Knowles : A Pioneering Engineer in the Field of AI-ML

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In the 21st century, Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning have spread a cloak of mystique around the world that no one wants to drop off. Today, the prime area of learning, research and improvement have been revolving around these two things which so far seems to the two most important and necessary development of science.

With science already bringing a new wave of inventions to the shore of computation, Simon Knowles is ruling the world with his idea of creating chips for AI and ML which will make the computer’s brain work more like a human’s brain.

Simon Knowles is a famous entrepreneur and an engineer who is the co-founder of Graphcore, a semiconductor company that he founded along with Nigel Toon. Knowles’s main aim is to create an IPU (Intelligence Processing Unit) that can allow humans to explore the scope of AI more freely and not just scraping the surface.

Education and Early Career of Knowles

Simon Knowles
Image Source: http://scaledml.org

Simon Knowles graduated with a degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Cambridge. After graduating, he went to study early neural networks at a UK government research lab.

He co-founded his first start-up, Element 14, a wireless processor developing company in the 1990s, which came under the acquisition of Broadcom Inc. in 2000. He sold the company for $640 million and co-founded his second start-up, Icera, in partnership with Toon. The company was established for mobile chip making in 2002, which later was acquired by Nvidia for $436 million.

The Idea of Graphcore

After selling Icera to Nvidia Corp. in 2002, both the co-founders were trying to settle on one single idea, which could be their next field of research or next chance to make billions. Not being able to make a choice, Knowles decided to attend the series of lectures at Cambridge University. One day, he attended the presentation of Steve Young, a Cambridge professor of the Information Technology department, who was elaborating the limits of computational dialogue systems. Young is also known to invent a speech processing service which is now used in Siri.

While Knowles listened to Young’s speech, the former asked him multiple questions about numerical precision and energy efficiency. But, it seemed like Knowles’s questions were out of the field for Young, but that is where Knowles’s interest was stuck as he wanted to invent something instead of just swallowing the lump of information.

Few days after the lecture, Young contacted Knowles to tell him that his students found out that they were using 64 bits of data for one single calculation. They realized that this can be replaced by 8 bits data per calculation, as Knowles suggested in the lecture, which will save the energy that is consumed before. But the calculations won’t be that precise. Well, Knowles said that was his entire idea to manipulate the brain of the computer and make it more human-like. Knowles, in one of his interviews, said that if they could build this kind of processor, the performance factor will be increased by one thousand.

Everyone including, Young and Toon, was very impressed with his idea, and hence, Knowles and Toon decided to found Graphcore, to build this new kind of IPU. They started raising capital from 2013 and were finally able to launch Graphcore in 2016.

Success of Graphcore

After carrying out thorough research, for three years, to create energy-efficient and a cost-efficient chip, that can harness all the power at one single time, but uses less energy than a GPU, they designed a chip with 1,216 processor cores with 24 billion transistors. This chip was manufactured in 2018 and turns out, it was able to detect 10,000 different images per second.

The company is still working on these chips and making it recognize more complex data and not just simple objects. Knowles’s main goal is to provide the machine with lots of data, and the machine should find out a way to complete the given task. Knowles’s dream to make machines behave human-like is bringing a new era, an era of Artificial Intelligence.

The first funding round of Graphcore was led by Robert Bosch Venture Capital in 2016, followed by a round B funding in 2017 by Atomico, and a few months later, by Sequoia Capital. In 2018, Graphcore raised $200 million in series D funding from investors like Dell, Microsoft and Samsung, which resulted in its net worth to $1.7 billion in December 2018. The company also announced that it might hit $50 million revenue this year.

Graphcore also provides server blueprints to many big companies to guide them on how they should manufacture next-generation computers.

voicemail

Gordon Matthews : The American Inventor Who Invented the Voicemail

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Some inventions have become such an integral part of our lives that we cannot imagine our lives otherwise. One can even go to the extent and say that we have almost taken such services for granted. The biggest such example is a subtle yet impactful invention- the Voicemail. This telephone service has been a part of our life for a very long time. It is almost impossible for us to imagine our mundane lives complete without this. But the voicemail is the result of sheer hard work and novelty. Gordon Mathews, the inventor of Voicemail, teaches us some of the most important lessons of life as we unfold the story of how a normal man went on to become the visionary who changed the way people communicate.

The Beginning

Gordon completed his graduation in engineering science from the University of Tulsa in the year 1959. Soon after his graduation, Gordon joined the U.S Marine Corps, and this life decision laid the first foundation stone for Voicemail. We can all agree on the fact that there comes a day in everyone’s life when they have the make it or the break it moment. For Gordon Mathews, this time was when he witnessed the accident of his fellow pilot.

A part of him believed that he had a role to play in it. Soon after he was discharged from the U.S Marine, Gordon went on to join IBM and contributed hugely in developing voice-activated cockpit controls that would play a major role in decreasing air catastrophes such as his friend’s. The incident managed to influence and affected him in such a way that the man decided to dedicate the rest of his career trying to find a solution for such problems in transmitting information between people.

Gordon Matthews
Image Source: ithistory.org

There are a lot of stories that revolve around how Mr Mathews invented Voicemail. The most famous and widely accepted one among them is of his travel to his office in Dallas on a rainy day. On his way to the office, Gordon noticed a trash-filled with pink slips full of while-you-were-out messages and other important information. This sparked an idea in him, and later, led to the invention of the Voicemail.

Gordon once said that if he sees anything that irritates him, he tries to fix it. This was exactly what happened with Voicemail. At the time of his invention, there was already the existence of a simple home answering machine that could only store messages. It uses an ordinary typewriter to do its function. The system found by Gordon did so much more than just record and save messages, i.e., send, forward, receive, store and even erase messages.

VMX

With the rocketing success of voicemail, Gordon started his very own company called ECS Telecommunications, which later on went on to be known as VMX. Soon enough, he received a patent for his invention of Voicemail and sold his first system to 3M (Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing Company). It is believed that his wife Monica was the one to send the first commercial voice message over it.

Later on, Mr Mathews went on to sell major shares of his company to huge firms such as 3M, Intel, Hoffman La Roche and Zenith Data Systems. But later in the year 1988, VMX went into the verge of a major bankruptcy and was soon acquired by a firm named Opcom. This firm was in turn obtained by Octel communications which were then, the largest provider of voicemail services and equipment across the world.

The Legacy

The legacy that Gordon Mathews left behind is huge. He is someone who believed that he could make the world a better place and actually went on to do the same. Even though he did not have much of a success story to tell as a businessman, everyone has a lot to learn from Gordo, as an inventor. The world is always in dire need of new inventions and people like Gordon Mathews, who indeed makes a huge difference in how we perceive the world.