“Advances in Digital Technology to Change Lifestyle in the Years Ahead”


By Raghav S. Khanna 

Raghav Khanna, who grew up in Allentown, PA, is a graduate student in EE at University of Pittsburgh. Here he summarizes a recent meeting organized by Triveni International at Carnegie Mellon U.

In a meeting organized by Triveni International Club, a Pittsburgh organization for promoting cultural and social interactions among South Asians, professors working on the different facets of digital technology and engineering education at Carnegie Mellon University shared their insights on the changes ahead in the coming decades. 

L to R Dr. Ramayya Krishnan, Dr. Juginder Luthra, Dr. Raj Reddy, Dr. Praful Desai, Dr. Pradeep Khosla. Photo by Mr. Vivian Lee of the Computer Science Department.

Prof. Raj Reddy, a member of Triveni, with his illustrious accomplishments on robotics research at the university, summarized the session thus:“The impact of the [IT-driven] technological changes in the next thirty years will be larger than the changes in the last 100 years.”  Dr. Reddy is the University Professor in Computer Science and Robotics at CMU.
 
After Dr. Reddy’s brief welcoming remarks, Prof. Ramayya Krishnan, the Dean of Heinz School of Public Policy and Management, spoke on the interdisciplinary field of human behavior in information technology (IT) environments. The thesis of his research is to address the question, “How does one quantify the probability of being compromised with all kinds of personal information of people now available in the digital world?”  Given the proliferation of online social media and networks and the personalization of computers, many bits of of our personal information, including what we buy, where we buy, our reading preferences, and many other details — not to speak of our Social Security #s, Bank Account #s — are in the open. So protecting the privacy and confidentiality of these data is a fertile field for research.

Dr. Pradeep Khosla, the Dean of the College of Engineering, spoke next, informing about CMU’s innovative approaches for furthering engineering education globally. The resources crises around energy and water, he said, will have severe ramifications on generations to come, if scientists do not begin solving the problem now, piece by piece. Dr. Khosla highlighted CMU’s quest as a world-class academic institution to disseminate its influence to the rest of the world by citing the details of CMU’s undergraduate engineering programs in Rwanda and India.

Finally, Dr. Reddy spoke of his major accomplishments, one being the founding of Rajiv Gandhi University in India, an institution dedicated to enrolling exclusively the top-performing students from rural and economically disadvantaged background in Andhra Pradesh, India. All the needs of the students — housing, food, clothes, books and fees – are fully paid.  Dr. Reddy also highlighted the challenges in providing a permanent footing to the program.  Another of Dr. Reddy’s major achievement is the on-line University Digital Library System with over a million books globally accessible recently implemented .

Dr. Juginder Luthra of Triveni thanked the speakers for sharing with the audience their seminal work, and the audience for their presence on a Sunday morning. CMU provided a very Indian luncheon.

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