The Magical World of Data Science

“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

– Arthur C. Clarke

With the advent of technology and its incorporation in our life has led to generation of data in huge amount. Data is extracted from various resources such as Social Media, e-commerce sites, Mobile phones, Healthcare, internet searches, online surveys etc. This variety of data has lot of hidden insights which can produce magical results with the help of emerging field called ‘Data Science’.

Science has provided us an empirical field where discovering and describing the things are done by observing and experimenting. Data Science is a form of applied science which carefully studies large amount of data using various analytical techniques and then describing the results.

Earlier the Business houses were totally dependent on the intelligence and gut feeling of few bunch of people. Nowadays, this work has been taken up by intuitive tools and techniques which has provided a significant shift in policy making in various areas such as healthcare, travel, shopping, social and political issues etc.

Data Science performs magic using various tools resulting in analysis that converts annoying data storage into useful insights.

 A very interesting example of data science we use in daily life is Google maps. Many people are using Google maps but not knowing how they work, it is we or the people using it provide all the information regarding traffic and routes. Whenever a car drives through a route and a person sitting in the car has a cell phone with Google maps installed and connected to internet, then the data such as speed of car, route etc. is send to the Google maps server which is analyzed resulting in the real time traffic reports to other users.

Various tools that can be used to show magical results with Data sets:

S.No.	Name of the Tool
1	Rapid Miner Not just a GUI, it also extends support to people using Python & R for model building. Their product line has several products built for big data, visualizations, model deployment, some of which (enterprise) include a subscription fee.
2	Rattle GUI This GUI is built on R Programming Language and is a free software. It’s also more than just data mining tool. Rattle supports various ML algorithms such as Tree, SVM, Boosting, Neural Net, Survival, Linear models etc.
3	Orange It is an open-source data visualization, machine learning and data mining toolkit. It has an extensive library of data mining tasks which includes all classification, regression, clustering methods.
4	Weka It is free software and provides options for data pre-processing, classification, regression, clustering, association rules and visualization.

Puja Munjal

Assistant Professor 

Dept. of Information Technology

The ‘enemy’ within us

As Donald trump stood on the podium to announce his candidacy for the President of The United States, he launched a scathing attack on Mexican Immigrants in USA. Much of his campaign revolved around this rhetoric from then on. He created a narrative that much of the problems faced by US citizens in the ‘rust belt’ are because of ‘these immigrants’. Not only were the immigrants taking jobs away from U.S citizens, they were also the root cause of rise in crime and the drug problem which plagues the cities, his campaign stated. I think it’s important to mention that none of these claims were backed by data but why spoil a good story with useless facts. The narrative plus the inherent misogyny of much of the electorate made sure that a candidate so clearly unfit for office won the presidency.

Whereas the world’s oldest democracy was busy fighting within itself, pitting one American against another, capturing eyeballs from all over the world in 2016-17. The world’s largest had done the same thing in 2014. One party left no stone unturned in order to find ‘anti-nationals’ that they could send to the neighboring country. Remarks were made about ‘pink revolution’ and how ‘minority appeasement’ has ruined the country. The prime ministerial candidate even went so far to suggest that Hindu immigrants from other countries seeking shelter in India should be welcomed with open arms and in the same speech explicitly suggested that the ‘other’ immigrants are a burden. Again I think I should mention that no data was provided to back this but the common thing among politicians is they always remember not to spoil a good story with facts.

Every country has its own set of problems and every country has chosen a political mechanism to solve it. Whether single party system is better or a multi party democracy, nobody seems to know but one thing is for sure that these political ‘masters’ are not to blame for any of our problems. It is always the fault of ‘others’ among you, at least that’s what we are told and we take it as a gospel truth.

I tried to find the reason as to why we always need an ‘enemy’ to band together, I couldn’t. Maybe it is the evolution process, maybe it is something else. But one thing is clear that our ‘Political masters’ have understood this. They want majority of us to band together and vote for them, stand beside them. Easiest way to do this is give us an enemy, scare us and become our savior by the way of vote of course.

These ‘enemies’ used to be foreign powers, USSR for USA. Pakistan/China For India, but if the enemy is hundreds of miles away and the secret gets out that these ‘enemies’ are just trying to survive as us, the fear fades. So the new propaganda is ‘The enemy is within us’, it has infiltrated our society and we don’t even know when they will attack. Well at this point I don’t need to mention that these ‘claims’ are also not backed by any data but let me share a data with you. The global terrorism index points out that 2014 was the worst year as per terrorism deaths go, the number was 32,765, whereas the number of children in India alone who die because of diarrhea are 1.2 lakh every year, health ministry said. But these facts spoil a good story so forget them. So for us ‘real’ issues shouldn’t matter, what should matter is that we need a ‘strong’ leader to save us from all the ‘terrorists’ among us.

Now everyone is free to come to their own conclusions but I do support the narrative that ‘the enemy is within us’, but it is not the immigrant, it is not the infidel, it is not the Muslims. The enemies are the ones who divert our attention from problems like hunger, shelter, health, education etc. by pitting us against one another, by scaring us. Be scared, be very scared but not from one another but from these ‘Political Masters’ of ours.

Mr. Rajvinder Singh Johal

Assistant Professor

Dept. of Management 

LOAN FINANCING

Loan financing can be defined as an agreement between the lender and the borrower where the borrower borrows the money or property from the lender and agrees to return the property or repay the money, usually along with interest, at some future point(s) in time. The time to repay the loan is fixed in advance, and generally the lender has to bear the risk that the borrower may not repay a loan in future.

The borrower borrows an amount of money from the lender, which is called the principal amount. The interest is charged on the principal amount. The borrower is obliged to pay back the money or property at the decided time or can repay an  amount of money to the lender in installments. If the borrower repay in equal installments at regular interval of time , then it is known as an annuity. In such type of installments usually the amount paid is same and it contains both the principal amount and the interest amount.

Types of Loan

The loan can be classified as under:

Open ended and closed ended loans

Open ended loans can be borrowed again and again. Some examples of open ended loans are such as credit cards and lines of credit. In such kind of loans the borrower has a credit limit against his purchase. Each time the borrower purchases , his available credit limit decreases. As the borrower makes the payment , his available increases and he can borrow the same credit again and again.

Closed ended loans cannot be borrowed again and again. Once the borrower makes the payment the loan is ended. If the borrower needs to borrow more money , then he have to apply again for another loan. Mortgage loan, auto loans and student loans are some types of closed ended loans.

Secured and Unsecured Loans

Secured loans are the loans in which the collateral security of an asset is there. If the borrower fails to repay the loan amount then the lender can take the possession of the asset and use  it to cover the loan. Secured loans have less rate of interest than that of unsecured loans.

Unsecured loans are the loans in which there is no collateral security of an asset. It is more difficult to get such kind of loans had they have higher interest rates. An unsecured loan is issued and supported only by the borrower’s creditworthiness. Generally, a borrower must have a high credit rating to receive an unsecured loan. If the borrower fails to repay such loan then the lender has to exhaust collection options including debt collectors and lawsuit to recover the loan.

Working capital loan

A working capital loan can also be used to finance everyday operations of a company.

Bridge loan

A bridge loan, also known as "interim financing," "gap financing" or a "swing loan," is a short-term loan that is used until a company secures permanent financing or removes an existing obligation. This type of financing allows the user to meet current obligations by providing immediate cash flow. The loans are short term (up to one year) with relatively high interest rates and are backed by some form of collateral such as real estate or inventory. As the term implies, these loans "bridge the gap" between times when financing is needed.

Dr Himani Gupta

Associate Professor

Dept of Management

Practical  Applications of Deep Learning

Automated systems are being developed to emulate the human learning approach. This feature of Artificial intelligence is known as ‘Deep Learning’. In simple words, deep learning can be considered as a method to automate predictive analytics. It is treated as a sophisticated extension of Machine Learning. If we compare machine learning with deep learning, then we can say that the algorithms used in traditional ML are linear whereas deep learning algorithms are stacked in a hierarchy of increasing complexity and abstraction. Lots of researchers are working on applying deep learning algorithms to automate some manual activities which are unbelievable to be done automatically without human intervention. Some of the interesting applications of Deep Learning are

1.      Automatic Integration of Sounds With Silent Movies

Researchers at MIT have demonstrated an algorithm that has effectively learned how to predict sound. The advance could lead to better sound effects for film and television and robots with improved understanding of objects in their surroundings. For this research,  in training phase of the data, a number of videos(around 1000) representing various sounds (around 46000) were recorded and provided to the system based on deep learning algorithm to deconstruct the sounds to analyze pitch, loudness and other features and then in testing phase to predict the sound of new video the system based on this algorithm, associates the video frames with a database of pre-recorded sound to select the best matching sound.

2.     Automatic Colorization of Black and White Images

In recent past a very old Hindi black and white movie was re-released with colors. Have we ever wondered how it has been possible to color each and every frame of a black and white movie?   It is definitely very time consuming and difficult task to be done by hand with human effort. With the use of Deep learning it can be done to color image in a similar way how a human operator might approach the problem. The deep learning  approach involves the use of very large convolutional neural networks and supervised layers which recreate the image with the addition of color.

3. Automatic Machine Translation

Automatic translation of given words, phrase or sentence in one language, into another language can be done with deep learning. The two specific areas in which deep learning is achieving top results are.

•                 Automatic Translation of Text.
•               Automatic Translation of Images.

With Deep learning algorithms, text translation can be performed without any preprocessing of the sequence. The learning of the dependencies between words and their mapping to a new language can be done through these algorithms.

Identification of letters in images and converting them into text and then recreation of text in images are done with convolutional neural networks which is also called instant visual translation. This task requires the classification of objects within a photograph as one of a set of previously known objects. Amazing results have been achieved using deep learning on benchmark examples of this problem using very large convolutional neural networks.

4. Object Classification and Detection in Photographs

This task requires the classification of objects within a photograph as one of a set of previously known objects. Another variation of this task which is more complex and called object detection involves identifying specifically one or more objects within the scene of the photograph and drawing a box around them.

5. Automatic Handwriting Generation

Generating new handwriting for a given word or phrase from a given corpus of handwriting examples can also be performed using deep learning. First the handwriting is provided as a sequence of coordinates used by a pen during creation of handwriting samples. From this corpus the relationship between the pen movement and the letters is learned and new random examples can be generated. The most remarkable part is the learning of different styles and then their impersonation.

6. Automatic Text Generation

In this very interesting task, a corpus of text is learned and from this model new text is generated, word-by-word or character-by-character. This is a very powerful model and is capable of learning how to spell, punctuate, form sentences and even capture the style of the text in the corpus.

7. Automatic Image Caption Generation

A capable system can be made to generate  a caption describing the contents of a given image. Many researchers came up with various deep learning algorithms in 2014 for solving this problem and had achieved very impressive results.

8. Automatic Game Playing

In this task, a model learns how to play a computer game based on the pixels on the screen only. This is a complex and very difficult task in the domain of deep reinforcement models and is the breakthrough that DeepMind (now part of google) is well-known for achieving.

Summary

In recent years, Deep Learning has become a buzz word. It has been the most researched and talked about topic in data science. It is due to some of the recent breakthroughs in data science which have been provided by the deep learning. According to predictions by researchers, many deep learning applications will affect our life in the near future and we must be prepared to witness this revolutionary technology.

Prof. (Dr.) Meenakshi Narula

Department of Information Technology

BBA Programme at JIMS, VK

There are mainly two types of students, one who plan their career much in advance and another who decide to choose their path during last year of schooling. The first category choose their career at the time of passing 10^th standard in terms of streams they opt for like science, commerce and arts . The second category of students includes those who wish to become managers and pursue BBA and MBA after schooling.

 I am going to talk about those who opt for BBA after 12^th Class. In Delhi two main Universities offering BBA are the state universities, Delhi University and Guru Gobind Singh Indraprastha University. There are limited colleges in Delhi University offering BBA and as such the eligibility for BBA in Delhi University is very high. All the students passing out from schools in NCR cannot be accommodated in Delhi University. Next option is GGSIP University. In fact GGSIPU offers best curriculum in BBA.

The students opting to study BBA look for best BBA colleges in GGSIP University. While searching for Best College in Delhi under IP University, one looks at the overall facilities available in the college. Judging by this criterion, Jagannath International Management School, Vasant Kunj stands out prominently.

JIMS, Vasant Kunj is one of the best college in New Delhi because of the following reasons:-

1. JIMS affiliated to GGS Indraprastha University, New Delhi has been consistently ranked among top 10 leading management institute in Delhi/NCR.
2. It is one of the premier management institutes in Delhi/NCR with A Grade accreditation from NAAC.
3. ‘A’ Grade certifications from the state fee Regulatory Committee of the Govt. of Delhi.
4. The management department of JIMS Vasant Kumj has achieved excellent results in academics.

Ms. Varsha Sharma of JIMS, Vasant Kunj bagged Gold Medal in BBA (2013-16) batch in IP University. JIMS Vasant Kunj students have done extremely well in the field of sports.

Prof.(Dr.)Avtar Singh Sethi with Ms. Varsha Sharma(Gold Medalist, Batch-2013-2016)

Look for my next blog for complete information on sports and some other activities.

Prof. (Dr) Avtar Singh Sethi

Prof of Management

Head of the Department

A True Friendship

People often say that one should have many friends. If is often said that “One who is delighted in solitude is either a wild beast or God. ”But in my opinion Ideal conversation is always checked among too many people. Natural and frank conversation is only possible between two close friends. But the friend should be a true friend, not a false designing, treacherous creature who becomes a friend to serve his own end and become a cancer to other people. Indeed a true friend is a divine gift. With a true friend, one can express  his griefs, joys, fears,and suspicions.True counsel can also be a solace for a bewildered mind.In ancient times kings, patrons, and great men greatly valued the true friendship.When they   like the qualities of the certain person, they used to raise his status, making him their equal.They enjoy his counsel and jokes.

“Akbar the Great” made Birbal rich and enjoyed his witty remarks.Bacon has said “Friendship improves happiness and abates misery.” Sweet words and an open house attract many friends. They eat your bread, drink your tea,and try to please you and pose as if they are your excellent advisers and well-wishers. So before making a friend one should judge them first. One should never be hasty in choosing a friend because generally such friends seek advantage for their own interests.They do not help one in adversity or trouble. As soon as their purpose is served they become indifferent and often turn your enemy and thus try to harm you. Be careful about such false friends.

“A friend who is your friend in need is a friend indeed “The famous English writer Addison has said that a false friend is a great defense. Friendship is a sheltering tree. Some people have the curious habit of changing friends.Never do that. Do not give up your old friends as it is said, “old is Gold “. Always welcome healthy criticism, If your friend has criticized you, Do not be angry, because it is for your own good.Do not break a bond of friendship. If you yourself have rebuked your friend for his short comings, do not be afraid. Try to reconcile with him at the first opportunity. Love your friends and be faithful to them. Do not betray your friend, as the quarrel with can be patched up, but there is no hope for a friend who has betrayed your secrets. No other relationship can give the solace which a true friend can give you.

The quality of a true friend is consistency and faithfulness. A friend must have virtue, knowledge and a sweet temper. Similarities of age and fortune should be actual quality of a true friend.A true friend is great boon imparted by the heaven.Try to recognize your true friend among numerous companions and make a few friends. Be careful about false flatterers, who will ruin as soon as you become weak and will certainly console you in the hour of distrust.

Dr. Hakimuddin Khan

Associate Professor

Dept. of Management Studies

                          Alternative Media: Counter Public Sphere

Today when the whole country is hailing the conviction of Baba Ram Rahim and mainstream media reporters are jostling to show its full coverage and take credit, we should remember the courage of a small evening newspaper “Poora Sach” who, unlike mainstream media, did not shy away from exposing the powerful godman Baba Ram Rahim.

This is the power of media, when big newspapers cannot muster the courage of exposing an influential person, a small newspaper can do that.

Such fringe newspapers or media make the backbone of alternative media or radical media. As name suggests, Alternative Media is a media that stands opposite to the established or dominant types of media in terms of their content, production or distribution.

It is also known by various names like radical media, critical media, citizen Journalism, Public Journalism. It exits in various forms like small newspapers, magazines, community radio, independent documentaries, blogs, social sites and news websites.

Emergence of Alternative media can be seen as a response to the problems generated by the profit-driven mainstream media system in which only a few organisations or conglomerates (oligopoly) dominate and only a particular ideology rules. Due to this, media’s credibility is going downhill.

This paves way for a different kind of critical media which gives voice to those unheard issues which hardly get noticed in the Mainstream Media. Indeed, it is proven time and again that whenever mainstream media has faltered from its path of objectivity and truth; the radical news has found its manifestation in the form of Alternative media.

French revolution, Indian freedom Struggle and Arab spring are some of epochal event that resulted from the unprecedented mobilization of alternative media like oral media, pamphlets, magazines and social media.

Theoretically, it is an offshoot of “public sphere”, a concept envisaged by Habermas, a great communication thinker, wherein all competing groups and parties should indulge in public discussion and help facilitating political solutions. Unfortunately, this public sphere (mainstream media) is hijacked by the elite ideology of rich and resourceful people.

So, we had “Counter Public Sphere” in the form of alternative media for less heard voices.

Generally, alternative media is produced outside conventional media system. It includes the media of protest groups, dissidents, fringe political organisations, extremists and thinkers.For example Al Jazeera, TV news channel, stationed in Doha , Qatar, initially launched with the purpose of combating Western point view of Arab World. The channel claims to broadcast dissenting views.

In India too, we have various fora for critical views. Publications like Caravan, Samayantar; websites like The hoot, Kafila, Counter Currents, News click, India resists and The Wire give in-depth stories on the issues which are not covered in detail by the Mainstream Media. Most of them claim to be not for profit.

The upsurge in the Alternative media can be seen worldwide.Like “Voice of the People” of Zimbabwe; "radio schools“ in Ecuador; news analysis sites like La Silla Vacia,  and Las Dos Orillas in Colombia; Midia Ninja, a website by a group of citizen journalists, in Brazil.In fact, Pakistan too has presence of community radio channel with critical coverage in its FATA (Federally Administered Tribal Areas) region.

Ms. Geetika Vashishata

Assistant Professor

Dept. of Communication Studies