PULSE May '23 Edition

This edition of the Pulse was released alongside Vision ‘23

VISION, a national-level inter-college technical symposium is the pinnacle event of ECEA, a tech-fest for ECE students. It is an annual summit for Electronics and Communication Engineers from all over the country to come together and share their knowledge and expertise. It has an excellent variety of technical and non-technical events along with workshops about new and advancing technology. It acts as a platform for students to exhibit their prowess in cutting-edge technologies.

VISION 23

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PULSE

MAY 2023

Pulse is the official magazine of the ECE Association, in which students showcase their creativity in various aspects. In the 5th edition of the magazine, both the recent and past trends and technologies of the world are presented in the form of four sections. So buckle up! It’s going to be an exciting journey.

THE TEAM

MAGAZINE OFFICE BEARERS

HARISH M R

KEERTHANA N S MADHUMITHA R V

SURIYA PRAKASH

PHOTOGRAPHY

JEGADHEEP EDWIN A

CONTENT EDITING

SHRIEYA SHREE S HARINI V K

KISHEN KANTH J

SANTHOSH M MRUDHULA VIJAYAKUMAR

AKASH KUMAR K

DESIGN

DHEEPAN RAAJ S SIDDHARTH K

THAMIL SELVAN MM

V LA HARIVARADAN SARAVANAN SIVAKUMAR

ChatGPT is an artificial intelligence chatbot created by OpenAI which was initially released as a prototype but quickly gained popularity for its detailed replies and articulate answers across a wide range of knowledge areas. ChatGPT is a linguistic model from the generative pre-trained transformer (GPT) family based on a language model trained using a collection of text data to generate humanoid text.

The popular version of ChatGPT is the GPT-3 model. Because of its ability to generate humanoid text in reaction to any given prompt, it is considered the most effective model. GPT-3 can generate realistic responses or actions without further training. You can use this technology to build your own ChatGPT chatbot or to power current bots like Neox.

Although ChatGPT’s goal is to create human-like conversations, it can also

perform other tasks such as composing student essays, answering queries, and writing and debugging computer programs.

It can emulate a Linux system, simulate a full chat room, write poetry and song lyrics, play tic-tac-toe and pretend to be an ATM.

Even though ChatGPT can respond to any query, some filtering occurs before a specific question. Queries are filtered through OpenAI’s company-wide moderation API to prevent offensive outputs from being presented to and generated by ChatGPT. ChatGPT has only limited knowledge of events that happened after 2021. It is not permitted to express political opinions or engage in political activism.

“Chatbots represent a new trend in how people access

By Sindhu S U, 2nd Year

On March 14th, 2023, a new updated version of ChatGPT 4 was published. GPT-4 is the ideal option for businesses or customers who want to interact with customer support agents efficiently and in a personalized manner.

ChatGPT 4 outperforms earlier iterations in every category, including creativity, collaborative prowess, editing, iteration, and technical writing.

Outstanding features of ChatGPT4 include Image recognition, multilingualcapabilities and steerability. Image recognition is a massive feature of the new ChatGPT 4. Previously, ChatGPT could only recognize and comprehend text, but with this version, users are able to create content through images as well. ChatGPT 4 is significantly more multilingual than

the prior ChatGPT version. According to reports, ChatGPT can respond to MSQs in approximately 26 languages. Steerability is a new feature that was not accessible in earlier versions. Users can modify the AI’s behaviour. As a result, you can now train the AI Chabot to comprehend your commands more precisely.

Drawbacks of ChatGPT include the possibility of large-scale disinformation and the provision of inaccurate or incorrect responses because GPTs are trained through trial and error, and their accuracy is limited to the data and algorithms.

Though there are many agreements and disagreements regarding ChatGPT, it is clear that these AI technologies are developing rapidly and have a high probability of replacing human jobs, which is undeniable.

access information, make decisions and communicate.”

DALL·E 2

By V La Harivardhan, 2nd Year

Dall-E 2 is a deep learning model (AI system) developed by Open AI. In its essence deep learning is a type of machine learning, in which a computer system learns to perform tasks directly from input (text, images, sound, etc.,). This article briefs about the AI system “Dall-E 2”.

Dall-E 2 is an AI model which generates high resolution images or art from abstract texts. It is the successor of Dall-E which generates unique images from texts. Dall-E was launched in January 2021 and it uses a version of GPT-3(the predecessor of chatgpt) to generate images. In September 2022, Dall-E 2 came into use and it is capable of generating realistic images with higher resolution and more detailing. The word Dall-E is derived from the sound blend of Spanish artist Salvador Dali and Pixar’s animated robot character WALL-E.

Dall-E2 offers significant improvements comparing to the older version Dall-E, which took much longer time and always produced grainy outputs. In November 2022, Open AI released Dall-E 2 as an API (Application Programming Interface). API is a type of software interface which provides a path for two or more computer programs to communicate with each other.

Microsoft implemented Dall-e 2 in their designer app “Bing” and image creation tool in “Microsoft edge”. It operates on the basis of cost per image and volume discounts are available to companies due to large number of images in its commercial deployment.

Now the model can run with a text prompt of upto 400 characters. It can create images in multiple styles. For example, by simply adding “in pencil drawing” to the text description will give a pencil art. It can also rearrange and manipulate objects in the image. It can produce images for wide range of arbitrary descriptions. For each Input, Dall-E 2 returns four images. It can be downloaded in .png form or can be shared as an URL. Rather than text, it can also receive an image as input and give variations and edit them.

Variations and edits return a maximum of three images. It has another option called “out painting”, which allows to extend the images beyond the current established boundaries.

Dall-E 2 combines two processes to generate image from the text – diffusion models and CLIP (Constastive Language Image Pretraining) by Open AI. CLIP is a multimodal model that combines English concepts with knowledge of images. Quite the marvel of Dall-E 2, it has certain limitations-it can’t differentiate between red flower in a yellow vase and a yellow flower in a red vase. Requesting in numerical format also leads to error in images.

We live in a era where things are furthured by AI systems. In near future most of the human activity is going to get automated and a huge role is played by AI systems in doing so. These small AI systems are root to the emergence of fully functional AI systems in future.

Prompts given to DALL·E 2 (From top left, clockwise)

1) A raccoon astronaut with the cosmos reflecting on the glass of his helmet dreaming of the stars.

2) A bowl of soup that is a portal to another dimension as digital art

3) Space suite of an astronaut in a retro colour mixed theme

4) Geometric rain, like debris and digital combined, raining down on a dystopian world, with a crow in the center.

ANALOG COMPUTING FOR EDGE AI

By Sivaram Durai, 3rd Year

Analog computers were the dominant computers for many centuries, enabling the prediction of eclipses, the tracking of tides, and the guidance of anti-aircraft guns. However, the development of solid-state transistors led to the rise of digital computers, which have since become ubiquitous. But today, a perfect storm of factors is setting the scene for a resurgence of Analog technology.

AI compute is mostly matrix-vector multiply and add operations. The problem with digital processors is that they spend time and energy fetching weight values from memory instead of performing matrix multiplication. This can significantly slow down the performance of the DNN and increase energy consumption, especially when dealing with large and complex neural networks. Even a simple task like detecting an object in the camera can bog down a modern processor. Finally, there are some fundamental physical challenges to further miniaturizing the size of the transistor (Moore’s law saturation).

Analog computing is a breakthrough technology that delivers better performance and power efficiency than the digital technology that modern computers use. Analog computing enables high-speed and low-power computation of matrix math, building blocks of AI. Here the math is done using electrical currents inside flash memory banks. This eliminates the major bottleneck of loading data into memory and sending it to a processing unit. The key idea is to eliminate those read and write access and to perform computing directly in the memory.

Developed by a US-based start-up Mythic, this processor is called Mythic Analog Matrix Processor, the first commercial edge-AI processor featuring inmemory computing. It is capable of running multi-million neural network models. Fabricated in a 40nm CMOS process node, M1108 Mythic AMP can perform up to 35 TOPS (trillion operations per second) of AI computing taking up just 4 Watts of power. If we compare mythic to NVIDIA Xavier Ai SoC, an

Edge Ai processor with a conventional digital compute engine delivers up to 32 TOPS per 30 Watts means about one TOP per Watt. Hence, Mythic claims better performance at about one-tenth of the power of its digital counterpart.

Mythic has repurposed digital NAND flash storage cells as variable resistors. A single flash cell multiplies two values together, voltage times conductance. To run an artificial neural network, they first write all the weights to the flash cells as each cell’s conductance. Then input the activation values (as the voltage). The resulting current is the product of voltage times conductance, which is activation times weight. The current from each multiplication adds together, completing the matrix multiplication. In practice, you would need a bunch of ADCs and DACs to apply inputs to these resistors and read the outputs. This processor perfectly fits a wide range of applications like smart homes, autonomous driving, video analytics, and augmented reality and in edge devices where latency and power consumption matters the most.

It is important to note that analog computing research continues to advance, paving the way for the development of sophisticated AI applications capable of solving complex problems efficiently and effectively.

Mythic Analog Matrix Processors (Mythic AMP™) offer huge advantages in power, performance, and cost. They lower the barriers to innovation, bringing powerful AI solutions to the edge

ALAN TURING

By Niranjan Prasad J N, 3 Year rd

Alan Turing was a computer scientist and cryptanalyst who is widely regarded as the father of modern computer science. His work on breaking the Enigma code (Enigma was a cipher device used by Nazi Germany’s military command to encode strategic messages) during world war II was a crucial point in the defeat of Hitler in WWII . This contribution saved countless lives by reducing the span of the war by 2 to 3 years. More importantly, he laid the foundation for the development of modern computers.

test” published in 1950 talks about a machine that has the po tential to mimic human intelligence. This innovation became a milestone in AI research and laid the foundation for most modern chatbots and robots.

BRAIN READING ROBOTS

By Swasthiga R, 3rd Year

euroscience is no longer simply the science of the nervous system. It is the actual empirical science of self-awareness. Scientists and entrepreneurs have been working on tapping into the versatility of the human brain to bridge the void between human ability and objective possibility. The trends in neurotechnology are nothing short of stories from science fiction.

Baxter, a brainchild of Rethink Robotics and the inventors of the Roomba, is a robot that functions alongside humans to fill the gaps presiding in traditional automationalso known as a cobot. With the help of MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), they developed Baxter to “read the minds” of subjects. The team of researchers led by

Rodney A. Brooks with Baxter, a robot he developed with an array of safety mechanisms and sensors

Daniela Rus, the director of CSAIL, have built Brain-Computer Interfaces to capture, identify and classify human brain waves.

These systems exploit a specific set of signals emitted by the brain called the error-related potentials (ErrPs), which arise when there is a disparity between human expectations and actual results. Baxter works in an ecosystem that requires the subject to wear EEG scalp electrodes. This EEG monitor is used to detect if the subject notices a mistake when the bot categorizes binary objects, under the span of 10 to 30 milliseconds. Instead of the user adapting their thoughts regarding the machine, the machine constantly analyses and classifies the user’s thoughts.

The Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) demonstrated that the human brain interprets and stores abstract concepts in a universal neural framework. Using Functional MRI (fMRI), the brain’s reaction to the triggers was visualized based on blood flow patterns to specific brain areas at different times. Harnessing this common ground, Scientists at Carnegie Mellon University have created a technology that can comprehend complex experiences consisting of linguistic inputs, human behaviour and other changes in the immediate environment to understand the category of thought under contemplation. After accessing the mental triggers for 239 sentences, the program predicted a 240th phrase with 87% accuracy.

Another company Looxid Link has created a noticeable range of VR-compatible brain-sensing technology. At its crux, this helps us create solutions by amalgamating the results of neurofeedback and virtual reality. The EEG signals from the brain are acquired by their devices and are used to create custom-made experiences for the user. A hands-free virtual environment is possible using this and eye-tracking technology. The realms of entertainment, neuromarketing, and healthcare could witness breakthroughs from this technology.

With such immaculate advances in the BCI discipline, an inevitable disruption like human-machine interaction is waiting to occur. Integrating these applications with appropriate ethical agendas will bring out changes in the factions of rehabilitation, recovery, lifestyle and automation.

DANIELA L. RUS

Director of the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory

Looxid Brain connected VR headset (Concept art)

As you watch the robot, all you have to do is mentally agree or disagree with what it is doing - Rus

“ “

PEPPER BOT

By Reema, 1st Year

The Pepper robot is the world’s first social humanoid robot capable of recognizing human faces and emotions. Introducing the first robot with a “heart”, Pepper is optimized for human-computer interaction and can interact with people through chat and touchscreen. Manufactured by SoftBank Robotics, it can read emotions.

It was launched at a launch event on June 5, 2014, and was shown at a SoftBank mobile phone store in Japan the following day. Sensors and equipment used in the robot include NVIDIA’s Jetson Nano development kit, Intel’s RealSense depth camera, and different sensors, motors, and touch screens. The robot can run some of the latest artificial intelligence and deep learning algorithms, coupled with Intel’s depth cameras and other sensors, allowing it to perform highly intelligent tasks.

Pepper has two siblings: little Nao is shorter, and big Romeo is taller. As a receptionist in several offices across the UK, Pepper can use facial recognition to identify visitors and send alerts to meeting planners. Pepper can chat with potential customers independently. Japan uses robots in banks and medical institutions. Pepper is used in airports to greet travellers and provide menus and recommendations. A team of Pepper robots serve as cheerleaders at

a baseball game between the Fukuoka SoftBank Eagles and the Rakuten Eagles, supported by a team of Boston Dynamics Spot quadruped robots. Pepper can be used as a research and teaching robot in schools, colleges and universities to teach programming and conduct research on human-computer interaction. It is not intended that Pepper will be a functional robot for use in the home. Instead, Pepper stands for “allowing people to enjoy life”, improving people’s lives, fostering relationships, having fun with people, and connecting people with the outside world.

The creators of Pepper hope that people will create new content and use Pepper soon. Pepper is not only known for his interactivity but also for his great sense of humour.

At Pepper’s launch event, SoftBank CEO’s son, Masayoshi asked the robot to describe some of its functions, and Pepper replied, “Masa, I don’t mean to brag, it may take more than 100 hours”.

Pepper went on sale in June 2015, and the first batch of 1,000 sold out in just 60 seconds. Pepper production ceased in June 2021 due to low demand. Hopefully, it re-enters the market and is a great help to us and everyone around us.

a

“AI and neuroscience researchers agree that current forms of AI can mimic emotion, such as empathy”

NVIDIA’s Jetson Nano development kit

SAUL BOT

By Amrutha Dhanabalan, 3rd Year

Patient care is a high priority in hospitals. The sick should not get any sicker due to the hospital environment. Therefore, cleanline ss in hospitals is not just a rule but a dire necessity.

Most hospitals recruit a human workforce to do the cleaning so that germs from one person do not spread to another. However, humans are not physically capable of killing all the microscopic microorganisms that are not visible to the naked eye. Some can have strong cell walls and protective envelopes that protect them from the germ-killing solution a human would employ to succeed.

A germ-zapping robot named “Saul” 5 feet 2 inches tall, was US Air Force’s newest staff member. The potential to kill pathogens like Ebola makes this robot a hero in a hospital setting. This is something straight out of a fictional movie, but reality can often surprise you.

The bacterial cell walls can be highly resistant, making them tough to beat. But these are easily split open by the robot’s high-intensity pulses, and high-energy ultraviolet rays which are 25,000 times brighter than fluorescent lights. It has been found that hospitals that were using

Saul achieved 60 per cent drop-in infection rates, which in many cases, was able to combat dangerous pathogens that can be life-threatening in many cases. These infection rates are known to cause about 45 per cent of deaths during the treatment procedure, so we are essentially talking about saving lives here, not just keeping a place clean.

There is no denying that viruses can cause chaos, and we are more than willing to agree with that statement concerning the pandemic we survived. The Ebola outbreak, which has had an average death rate of about 50 per cent, shook the planet in 2014 when Saul was being developed. And its use has only become more prevalent since then.

Saul can kill a single strand of ribonucleic acid within 5 minutes at an efficiency of 99.9 per cent. Viruses like Ebola are no exception to this. What a human cannot do in many hours, the robot does in a few minutes with efficiency unmatched by any cleaning chemical or equipment. This technological marvel is simply a revolution in the medical industry.

About testing, Xenex Healthcare Services, credited with developing

the robot, has tested it on 22 microorganisms and has studied nearly 2000 samples in several labs. It kills pathogens two meters out in any direction. Saul performs the task of treating soldiers returning from West Africa. Hospital workers are learning this technology to disinfect the operating rooms between treatment procedures. It wouldn’t be wrong if one said Saul is preventing a pandemic here and eradicating and controlling disease-causing pathogens.

Saul is a germ-zapping robot developed by XENEX to eliminate traces of Ebola

ARTWORK

Vishnu Priya K T, 1st Year

Divya Bharathi K, 1st Year

Jenifer B, 1st Year

Jenifer B, 2nd Year

PHOT

Sai Kumar D, 3rd Year

Harish Gokul J, 3rd Year

Deepak Vasan R, 3rd Year

Harisha R Sivakumar, 4th Year

,

Vibushita Srinivasan, 4th Year

PHOTOGRAPHY

Murthy Spandhana, 2nd Year

Mithun Balaji R M, 2nd Year

Suwetha K, 2nd Year

Siddharth K, 3rd Year

Saranya Ravi, 4th Year

ARTWORK

Mohana Selvi R, 2nd Year

Suwetha K, 2nd Year

Nandhini M, 1st Year

INVENTION OF INTEGRATED CIRCUITS

By Shalini Devanand, 3rd Year

From time immemorial, the idea of not underestimating the power of something common has been forever imprinted in our minds. Be it cinema to dishwashing brands (yes, one spoon may/may not be enough!), we get the fact that small does have a lot of power! And who can appreciate this fact better than us engineers?

From building large structures around the world to having the world in the palms of our hands, we have seen it all!

But how would the world have been if we didn’t have I2C i.e. Invention of the integrated circuit in our lives? Would we still be able to live life carefree but securely as we are doing right now?

A circuit is not just about its components, it is also about its connections. Stable connections allow the electron or the currents flow from one component to another. Connections are the lifelines of each circuit. And an error-prone channel would make the whole circuit go kaput.

Two problems posed in circuit design is - Handmade circuits involved workers soldering the different components to vacuum tubes with metal wires. Now, when the size of components got down, the errors are

unavoidable and there was no way to maintain a quality check. The second problem was the size. A complex circuit relied on speed. If the metal wires were too long, the electric signals wouldn’t move fast enough. This would make the circuits inefficient.

These two problems, together, were the problems of numbers; are infamously called The Tyranny of Numbers that made the birth of an advanced circuit that would have so many parts and connections, look impractical to happen.

British radio engineer Geoffrey Dummer optimistically addressed the tyranny of numbers, way back in 1942 .He had gave a theoretical solution of connection-free circuits.

We have then come a long way since Jack Kilby developed the prototype of IC. This rapid growth in miniaturization techniques was made possible by the vision of the prototype of Kilby, and of the shrewd practical improvements of Noyce. Recognizing the same, the Nobel committee awarded Jack Kilby the Nobel Prize for Physics in the year 2000.The credit for the invention of IC is given to the two engineers jointly.

It is all thanks to the IC, that we can make even the most complex of tasks seem small, get new versions of electronics in the stores every six months, and in short, live our lives to the fullest – electronically! If there’s a soul to every living being, there’s an IC to every modern electronic product.

The Integrated Circuit was technically developed and invented by three different individuals, all unaware of each other’s work.

Geoffrey Dummer conceptualized the design, Robert Noyce was granted the first patent, and Jack Kilby’s application was being reviewed while the first patent was granted.  Kilby and Noyce were awarded the National Medal of Science in 1979

Jack St. Clair Kilby, realized the first IC

TELEPHONE

By Sofiya Saffrin S, 2nd Year

For every mode of modern communication that we use today, the telephone laid the first stone. We all know that Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone. It was not only him. There were a series of attempts before that. Some even succeeded, but they were not fit for commercial use.

Around 1840, American Charles Grafton Page used a wire coil between a horseshoe magnet’s poles to conduct electricity. He noticed that reversing the current produced a ringing sound in the magnet. This effect was termed galvanic music by him. The first make-and-break telephone was proposed in 1854 by French telegraph engineer Charles Bourseul.

Meucci spent many years learning the fundamentals of electromagnetic voice transmission, and in 1856 he made his goal of speaking through wires a reality. To talk with his unwell wife at the time, he placed a telephone-like device inside his home. The fundamentals of electromagnetic voice transmission, or the telephone, are described in some of Meucci’s notes in 1857.

From 1857 onward, the Reis telephone was developed. Since the relative positioning of the needle and the contact was essential to the transmitter’s functionality, using the device was challenging. While it did transfer voice sounds electrically over distance, it was barely a commercial telephone in the contemporary sense. Standard Telephones and Cables, a British corporation, tested the Reis device in 1874. (STC). The outcomes showed that speech could be sent and received with high quality but at a modest volume.

In New York, Antonio Meucci exhibited a voice-activated electric device. Philipp Reis created the first telephone capable of transferring speech. Graham Bell employed a two-way “gallows” phone in 1875 that sent “voice-like sounds” but not intelligible speech. The membrane electromagnet devices used in the transmitter and receiver are the same. The same year in November, Thomas Edison constructed an electro-dynamic receiver as part of his acoustic telegraphy research but did not use it. Elisha Gray created a liquid transmitter for a telephone in 1876. Bell broadcasted the following in 1876: “Mr Watson, come here! I want to see you!” employing an electromagnetic receiver and a liquid transmitter. Bell places a call on the telegraph line connecting Brantford, Ontario, and Paris, Ontario, which is eight miles (13 kilometres) away. This call is known as the “world’s first long-distance call.”

From the string telephone to the iPhone, we have seen a revolution in telecommunication that’s still evolving. Our day-to-day requirements are increasing, and so are the developments in telecommunication. After food, clothing, and shelter, telecommunication has become a necessity. Not a single day passes without the use of a phone.

Telecommunication has brought the world to our hands. Today we can do anything and everything with a phone and the internet. Like others, it has its own disadvantages. With the correct use, it’s possible to accomplish great things.

Alexander Graham Bell

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About ECEA

The Department of ECE of CEG has always enjoyed a reputable status among the students and thus the ECEA was set up with the objective of organizing various activities that contribute to the academic and professional development of students along with leadership qualities, teamwork and other essential employability skills. Technical Symposiums such as Resonance, an intra-college tech festival targeted primarily at firstyear students, and VISION, an inter-college tech festival, are both organized by the ECEA.

The ECEA launched a new initiative this year to assist lateral entry students in keeping up with the curriculum, which was highly received by the student community. Students from higher semesters offered their time to make this endeavour successful.The ECEA has always attempted to impart knowledge to the students and to foster excellence and throughout the year, they have strived to contribute to the holistic development of students of the ECE department as a whole.