28 SEPTEMBER 2015: SASTRA award goes to Oxford prof

Ø  The heads of top tech firms in Silicon Valley took note of Modi-U.S. 2.0, the Silicon Valley saga, and supplied a bounty of investment and development plans. Prime Minister Narendra Modi was not only at his oratorical best during a “Digital India” dinner but also appeared to strike a chord with the community here, building on the same diaspora ties as he did one year ago at Madison Square Garden in New York City. In response to his “Digital India” road show here, the commitments made include a $150-million investment by Qualcomm into a fund for Indian start-ups, an ambitious project to let Google users be able to type in 10 Indian languages. Microsoft’s promise to open up cloud computing services out of Indian data centres and critical proposals from Tesla and Apple for long-term solutions in solar energy and the app economy. Microsoft’s promise to open up cloud computing services out of Indian data centres and critical proposals from Tesla and Apple for long-term solutions in solar energy and the app economy. Leading the list of strategic policy announcements, Qualcomm boss Paul Jacobs emphasised his company’s support for the “Digital India” and “Make in India” agenda by establishing a $150-million India-specific Venture Fund formed exclusively to fuel innovation and foster promising Indian start-ups that were contributing to the mobile and the “Internet of everything” ecosystem. Google’s Chennai-born CEO Sundar Pichai was not to be outdone as he promised that next month the Internet search giant would announce a new approach to Indian language typing. Mr. Pichai said, “Android is today available in many Indic languages but we know that to push digital literacy forward it is really important for people to be able to type in Indian languages. So next month, we will make it possible for people to type in 10 Indic languages in India, including the Prime Minister’s mother tongue, Gujarati.”

Ø  The 2014 SASTRA Ramanujan Prize will be awarded to Dr. James Maynard (27) of the Oxford University. The prize, established in 2005, is awarded annually to young mathematicians for outstanding contributions in the areas influenced by the mathematical genius Srinivasa Ramanujan. The age limit for the prize has been fixed at 32 to reflect Ramanujan’s achievements in his brief life span of 32 years. The prize will be awarded on Ramanujan’s birth anniversary that falls on December 22 at the SASTRA University in Kumbakonam. Dr. Maynard will receive the cash award of $ 10,000 along with a citation. He will deliver the Ramanujan Birthday Commemorative Lecture. Dr. Maynard, who received his Ph. D from the Oxford University two years ago, is currently a post-doc at the University of Montreal, Canada, and still holds a position at the Oxford. In the last two years, he has obtained spectacular results in prime number theory, especially on the small gaps problem. In the preceding few weeks, he had solved the famous problem of Paul Erdos on large gaps between primes, taking the world of number theory by storm. The SASTRA Ramanujan Prize is his first major one. Previous winners of the prize are Manjul Bhargava and Kannan Soundararajan in 2005 (two full prizes), Terence Tao in 2006, Ben Green in 2007, Akshay Venkatesh in 2008, Kathrin Bringmann in 2009, Wei Zhang in 2010, Roman Holowinsky in 2011, Zhiwei Yun in 2012, and Peter Scholze in 2013.

Ø  CSIR on 26 September 2014 announced the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Awards 2014 for ten scientists in recognition of their work. The awards were announced by Director General of Council for Scientific & Industrial Research (CSIR) Dr. Paramvir Singh Ahuja during the CSIR’s 72nd Foundation day celebrations in New Delhi. The Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize for Science and Technology consists of a citation, a plaque and a cash prize of 5 lakh rupees. The selected awardees in different fields are  Biological Sciences: Dr. Roop Mallik of Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Mumbai
• Chemical Sciences: Dr. Kavirayani Ramakrishna Prasad of Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru and Dr. Souvik Maiti of Institute of Genomics and Integrative Biology (CSIR-IGIB), New Delhi
• Earth, Atmosphere, Ocean and Planetary Sciences: Dr. Sachchida Nand Tripathi of Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur
• Engineering Sciences: Dr. S Venkata Mohan of Indian Institute of Chemical Technology (CSIR-IICT), Hyderabad and Dr. Soumen Chakrabarti of Indian Institute of Technology, Mumbai
• Mathematical Sciences: Dr. Kaushal Kumar Verma of Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru
• Medical Sciences: Dr. Anurag Agrawal of Institute of Genomics and Integrative Biology (CSIR-IGIB), New Delhi
• Physical Sciences: Dr. Pratap Raychaudhuri, Tata Institute of Fundamental Research of Mumbai and Dr. Sadiqali Abbas Rangwalaof Raman Research Institute, Bengaluru