Vijay Krishna's Notes http://vijaykrishna.posterous.com Most of my notes as a student of computer software and everything around it. posterous.com Mon, 14 Feb 2011 17:09:42 -0800 An Early Draft: IC 2009 http://vijaykrishna.posterous.com/an-early-draft-ic-2009 http://vijaykrishna.posterous.com/an-early-draft-ic-2009 This was a portion of one of the 1st drafts I wrote with Kuldeep and Nagesh for our Mobile and Online Voting System, when we took part in the Imagine Cup 2009. We went all the way to the Semis of the Design for Development Award, after which we choose the University Exams over IC. I still have fond memories of those hours of intense brain storming, when the mind was free of technology and strong with ideas and concepts. Take a look at what we came up with. The ELECTION If every section of the society worked towards its own progress successfully then there wouldn't be anything to worry about, barring the conflict of interests between people which can be resolved through amicable means. However, that can never be true as, not all are fortunate in that regard. And thus the need for an unbiased governing body which can look to everyones' welfare. However, if this governing body isn't elected properly by taking everyone's opinion into account then there is bound to be some section of the country that will be left behind(in the race of progress and development.) The lack of interest or inability of the people to participate in the process of electing their own governments has become an acute problem for many developing and under developed countries over the past few decades. This hampers the formation of stable and proper governments. In such a vacuum of good governance one cannot expect a country to meet The Millennium Goals set in front of us by the United Nations irrespective of any measures that are taken otherwise. The voter turnout for an election is generally low and many factors are attributed to this:
  1. The lack of time for many, due to the wait in the long queues.
  2. The lack of interest amongst the younger generation(18-30 yrs of age).
  3. The inability of people to vote from their electoral zones due to their unavailability in their respective zones during elections (due to migration to other areas for higher education, business,employment, etc).
  4. The inability to reach out to the poorer sections of the urban population.
  5. The inability and the inefficiency to reach out to the remote and rural areas of a country.
Thus, there is a lack of an efficient, fast and reliable voting system that can mitigate the above mentioned problems. The SOLUTION With the growing number of INTERNET and mobile phone subscribers in the developing countries, reaching out to the uninterested and remote population of a country for during elections can become more efficient, faster and simpler. With the use of INTERNET, a mobile platform and short messaging service (SMS), people can cast their votes through their mobile phones and their personal computers sitting at home or while on the move. If votes can be cast through mobile phones then the people in the rural and remote areas  can easily participate in the elections on a much more regular basis. The vision of villagers having mobile phones with the SMS application, is no longer a vision of the future. It is happening and it is time that we took full advantage of it. Further, a person would no longer be required to be present in his electoral zone for casting his vote. He can simply specify the same over the Internet or a Mobile SMS. Plus, as far as those people who are pressed for time, they would no longer have to worry about standing in long queues and “wasting” their time. They would now only have to shoot a text message for their vote to be counted. This use of the Internet and the mobile services would not only make the entire process of voting faster but more secure. Against the usual fears of a hack or data corruption of the system, we believe if the entire system is designed properly then all these baseless fears can be easily cast away. After all, we are living in an age where we trust computer based systems with our hard earned money, then why not our votes? To further amplify the basis of the just point, Booth Capturing will be virtually non-existent. The amount of violence can be drastically reduced on the election days. People will no longer be bullied into casting their votes against their own choices. All these factors will contribute in the overall increase of turnout during elections and will also help in holding voters for the future. Adding on to the list of advantages, this form of voting can reduce the costs involved in voting exponentially both for the government and the common man. No longer will, countries have to sit in a vacuum of  leadership while the results of elections eat into months. Electoral results will be processed in matter of days and speed up the formation of Governments. Thus, reducing money and time to very large extents.

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Tue, 11 Jan 2011 16:45:09 -0800 My Final Year Project Problem Brief http://vijaykrishna.posterous.com/my-final-year-project-problem-brief http://vijaykrishna.posterous.com/my-final-year-project-problem-brief This is a snippet of my Final year Project's Problem Brief. It was an adventurous project, had loads of fun doing it. BTW, the next tutorial on Silverlight is coming up soon, so stick around. In this project we are trying to address the problems of Comprehension and Reduction of Java Code. While writing programs a programmer looses track of the flow of the code and at times even the logic of the program that he is writing. This is a very common problem for many coders, especially when they are writing lengthy programs. Such situations quite often result in the coder writing code which is never reached during execution. This is because he does not have a clear picture of the program flow. As a result many programmers have to put in an additional effort to keep track of the flow and logic of the program. This diverts the programmer’s attention from his actual task, which is solving the problem at hand by using programming as a medium or tool. So we find that programming, which was intended to help the process of problem solving, has actually become its biggest hurdle. Thus, it becomes important to show the programmer exactly what the program flow is at any given point of time without a great effort from his side. All this finally boils down to the automation of the analysis of the code by a software tool, with which both the flow of the program and possible reductions can be shown to the programmer from time to time.

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Sun, 09 Jan 2011 16:33:02 -0800 Public Key Cryptography using ANNs http://vijaykrishna.posterous.com/public-key-cryptography-using-anns http://vijaykrishna.posterous.com/public-key-cryptography-using-anns Well, i took this post as a chance to show some of my undergraduate work i did. This was a part of my curriculum and it was one of the First things i really really like working on. But before i give you the link, let me brief you on what the whole thing was all about. ANNs or Artificial Neural Networks are an attempt to capture the neural nets of sentient beings. Its final purpose in my opinion is to model the Human neural network and finally the Human Brain leading to a better understanding of how things work. What they are has been given in the presentation that is to follow. What they do is actually quite simple: they learn.They are a system of logical entities which try and develop logic by a process of learning just like any sentient being. It has a teacher which is likely to be a teaching algorithm or another neural network. The neural net basically tries to formulate results for a given problem. In doing so it attains a state which can be determined by the values held by all its underlying sub-entities. It then compares its final Output value or results with the actual results. Based on the difference between the two, it corrects its own internal state and tries to recompute the results. It does so on a different problem but of the same type. If you recall this is how we would practice our Math sums as well, back in school. It does so till it starts to get the right set of results again and again and then declares its then corresponding internal state as the correct solution or approach to solving problems of that category. Now, if you fast forward to your college days you will remember that mutual learning or learning by discussion was faster. The same applies to Neural networks as well. When learning takes place between two untrained neural networks, it is very fast and they achieve a state of Neural Synchronization in a very fast manner. In this state their internal states are the same and it is this information which is used as the public keys for the encryption and decryption of messages. Now, this is not a classical public key crypto-system with a public key and a private key. There is in essence only one key which is known to the two mutually learning networks, and no one else. Now here is the good part: between the two neural nets, one does do not even know the state of the other. The moment they start communicating the correct results they are convinced that they have a common internal state (or understanding and approach in human terms) for the problem. That is the beauty. And this whole process can actually take place over a public network without compromising any level of secrecy. Having said all that, there are issues and in overcoming those issue lies our challenge. One of the major issues is that it might get highly computationally demanding. Well, enough said. Here is the link to the presentation i made for the technical seminar: Click here. Hope you find it interesting. It was at a very basic level. And do be critical of this work. How else will i improve.

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