Tag: computer science

Digital India Hackathon

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Description

ACM India is hosting a one-day Digital India event in conjunction with VLDB 2016 and Persistent Systems Ltd. We are very excited by the opportunities presented by the ambitious Digital India program launched by Hon. PM Narendra Modi. It is a grandeur vision of uniting a large nation like India via high-speed digital highways. 1.2 billion Indians will be connected together and will have access to open information. Data takes the center stage in this vision due to the sheer size of India’s population. With ~1 billion Aadhar cards, 200+ million Jan-Dhan Yojna accounts, the magnitude of India-scale data is humongous. Such large data processing will need specialized big data and analytics expertise.

Digital India event aims to address these India-scale data problems and how technology can be instrumental in solving those. It will also facilitate an innovation showcase for Indian startups especially working in big data area.

Very Large Data Bases (VLDB) is a premier annual international forum featuring research talks, tutorials, demonstrations and workshops in areas like data management, database and information systems research. It is aimed at database researchers, vendors, practitioners, application developers, and users. VLDB 2016 will be held at the Leela Hotel Gurgaon from 5th to 9th September 2016.

The concluding ceremony of Digital India Hackathon is planned in two steps. The presentation round will happen on 4th September where top 6 teams on 6 criteria will be chosen. These teams will pitch final presentation at Leela Hotel on 5th September and final 2 winners will be announced.

For more information about VLDB 2016 and Digital India Event, please visit http://vldb.org/2016

Rules

  • This is a team participation hackathon. You can have at most 4 members in your team.

  • You can either invite your friends to form a team or you can request other teams to add you as a member.

  • The hackathon will start at 20-06-2016 06:00 PM and end at 20-08-2016 11:55 PM, you work on your hack during the allotted time only.

  • It’s an online hackathon, you can participate from anywhere.

  • There are 5 themes of the hackathon, you must submit a hack that is in one of these themes.

  • Once the hackathon starts, you will get an option to submit your hack, you can submit as many times as you want, the last hack will be considered as the final submission.

  • You are expected to come up with new and innovative ideas, any idea that has been copied from somewhere will be disqualified.

  • Your hack must be developed entirely during the Hackathon duration. You may use open source libraries and other freely available systems / services such as Google Maps, Facebook Connect, Twitter feeds etc.

  • The intellectual property of your code belongs only to your team.

  • By participating in the hackathon, you agree to the terms and conditions of HackerEarth.

    Themes

    Candidates can use innovative ideas along with data-driven solutions such as prediction systems, statistical analysis, and/or data visualization to develop Web/mobile applications, visualizations, recommendation engines for fellow citizens, proposals about common standards for data sets. They can also create their own datasets from open government data and process it over a cloud platform of their choice. Alternatively, they can scrape/pull data from data.gov.in to make it available for others.

    Let your imagination explore the use of data analytics to its visualization to create solutions for data-driven India. The solutions could range from reservations to payments solutions, ancillary offerings to crisis management, and more!

    Healthcare

    We believe that healthcare innovation is fueled by diverse data and analysis. Data-driven health solutions aim at transforming healthcare segments by connecting healthcare data with developers, innovators, and entrepreneurs enabling them to build realistic, human-centric solutions for key healthcare problems.

    Resources:

    Employment

    Create data-driven employment solutions that will allow citizens to plan and excel in their respective careers. You can also help to simplify the current process that is set for looking for jobs on government job portals. You may append statistical analytics and heat map-based solutions.

    You can leverage below APIs/Resources:

    Citizen Services

    Citizens can avail Government services (without visiting a government office) through the Internet with the help of various services. You can build services related to Passports, Aadhaar cards, PAN cards, railway reservations, police stations, water/waste management, and much more.

    Social Media and Government

    Government agencies are increasingly using social media to engage with citizens, share information, and deliver services more quickly and effectively. You can use innovative ideas to create solutions that will help the government to connect more openly with its citizens.

    Agriculture

    Help build a sustainable food system by providing publicly-available data to farmers, researchers, and consumers. You can source data from market reports, weather forecasts, surveys, and sensors that provide on-demand GPS monitoring and mapping tools.

    Reference sources:

    Prizes INR 350000 in prizes

    Main Prizes

    1st Prize INR 250000
    2nd Prize INR 100000

    Special Prizes

    Most innovative solution Monetary reward
    Most technically complex solution Monetary reward
    Excellent user experience and engagement Monetary reward
    Power of women award for all-women team or teams with maximum female participants Monetary reward
    Best idea in terms of Best business angle and proposal

    Most scalable and deployable performance

    Source:- HackerEarth

Microsoft to buy LinkedIn for $26.2 billion in its largest deal

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Source:- REUTERS

Repost By:- Mukesh Kumawat 

Microsoft Corp will buy LinkedIn Corp for $26.2 billion in its biggest-ever deal, a bold stroke by Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella in his efforts to make the venerable software company a major force in next-generation computing.

By connecting widely used software like Microsoft Word and PowerPoint with LinkedIn’s network of 433 million professionals, the combination could enable Microsoft to add a suite of sales, marketing and recruiting services to its core business products and potentially challenge cloud software rivals such as Salesforce.com Inc..

“LinkedIn and Microsoft really share a mission” of helping people work more efficiently, said Microsoft CEO Nadella in a conference call with analysts. “There is no better way to realize that mission than to connect the world’s professionals.”

The $196-per-share price tag represented a premium of almost 50 percent over LinkedIn’s stock market value as of Friday, but was still well below the social media company’s all-time high of $270. Analysts said the price was rich, and Microsoft’s stock closed down 2.7 percent at $50.14.

Still, there was cautious optimism that this could be one of the relatively few tech mega-mergers that works out well. “It’s a massive growth play for Microsoft,” said Forrester analyst Ted Schadler.

The deal may also help spur further mergers and acquisitions in the tech sector, where a broad correction is bringing down the prices of public and private companies even as a handful of major players sit on large cash piles.

For LinkedIn, founded in 2002 and launched the following year by Reid Hoffman, one of Silicon Valley’s most-visible investors and entrepreneurs, the sale marks the end of a classic startup run: funding from top-tier venture capitalists, a long period of building the company and developing a revenue base, then a big initial public offering, followed by a roller-coaster stock price and finally an acquisition.

The company makes most of its $3 billion in annual revenue from job hunters and recruiters who pay a monthly fee to post resumes and connect with people on what’s often known as the social network for business.

The company’s growth has slowed recently and investors have become far more cautious on the high valuations of many tech companies – both of which likely figured into LinkedIn’s decision to sell, analysts said.

For Microsoft, the LinkedIn deal is a chance to reverse a terrible track record with acquisitions, including paying $9.4 billion for phone maker Nokia in 2014 and $6.3 billion for ad business aQuantive in 2007. In 2012, it wrote down its aQuantive acquisition by $6.2 billion, and its cumulative writedowns for Nokia total $8.55 billion.

It also paid $1.2 billion for business network Yammer in 2012 and $8.5 billion for video-calling tool Skype in 2011.

The LinkedIn acquisition could help Microsoft play to its strengths in analytics, machine learning and artificial intelligence, Nadella said on the investor call. LinkedIn and Microsoft both have enormous amount of data about their customers that can potentially be mined to offer automated suggestions and other features that make business processes quicker and simpler.

Microsoft noted that the deal brings in a big new customer base: after adding in LinkedIn, the total potential market size of Microsoft’s productivity and business-process segment sits at $315 billion, up from $200 billion without LinkedIn.

Microsoft Chief Financial Officer Amy Hood said the deal would be financed mainly with debt, a way for the cash-rich company to reduce its tax bill. The company has $105 billion in cash and other liquid assets. Moody’s said it was reviewing Microsoft’s rare AAA debt rating for a possible downgrade.

LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner will remain with the company, which will be operated as a separate unit and retain its name.

CHASING GROWTH

Nadella has been trying to reinvigorate Microsoft since taking over the lumbering giant two years ago, and has helped build more credibility around the company’s efforts in areas such as cloud-based services. When he took the top job in February 2014, the company’s share price was $34.20; early Monday afternoon, it was trading around $50.

 

With LinkedIn, Nadella is solidifying Microsoft’s focus on the business market, where it has retained a much stronger position than it has in the smartphone-centric consumer technology business.

In touting the synergies of the deal, Nadella gave an example of a customer walking into a meeting scheduled on a Microsoft Outlook calendar integrated with LinkedIn. That person might receive notification that one of the people in the meeting went to college with a colleague, enabling another level of connection.

“The future of productivity is around people, identity and data and the relationships between the them,” said Matt McIlwain, a portfolio manager at Madrona Ventures.

“Microsoft is buying LinkedIn for the opportunity to leverage these capabilities and combine them with Microsoft’s strong but complementary assets in those three areas.”

The strategy in many ways is similar to that of Salesforce.com, whose CEO, Marc Benioff, just last month told investors he believed artificial intelligence and machine learning would drive growth at his company.

Salesforce.com had once been considered a possible Microsoft acquisition target. Microsoft has its own salesforce automation product, called Dynamics, and integration with LinkedIn could help it become a much more formidable competitor in that market.

 

Despite Microsoft’s weak track record in M&A, the one prior major deal on Nadella’s watch – the $2.5 billion purchase of video game maker Minecraft in 2014 – is generally considered a success, complementing Microsoft’s work on augmented-reality projects such as the HoloLens headset.

Weiner of LinkedIn said on a call with Reuters that he met Nadella two years ago at the Microsoft CEO Summit – a meeting of top executives at the software company’s campus near Seattle – and started serious talks about an acquisition in February. That was shortly after LinkedIn’s stock fell by 40 percent following a weak earnings report.

TWITTER NEXT?

Weiner added LinkedIn would remain its own entity in the way that YouTube is relatively independent from parent Alphabet Inc, or Instagram from parent Facebook Inc. That could ease concerns that users might have about Microsoft being in control of their professional information – though the kind of integration Nadella cited suggests that LinkedIn might not be its own entity forever.

Monday’s deal raised investors’ hopes that another social media company, Twitter Inc, could be the next acquisition target, sending that company’s shares up almost 4 percent.

The Microsoft-LinkedIn deal, which won the unanimous support of both boards, is expected to close this year, the companies said.

After the deal, which will require approval from regulators in the United States, the European Union, Canada and Brazil, LinkedIn will become part of Microsoft’s productivity and business processes unit, the companies said. That unit generated $6.52 billion of Microsoft’s $20.53 billion in revenue last quarter.

Microsoft’s financial adviser was Morgan Stanley and LinkedIn’s financial adviser was Allen & Company LLC and Qatalyst Partners, founded by Silicon Valley dealmaker Frank Quattrone.

Microsoft’s legal adviser was Simpson Thacher & Bartlett LLP and Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati and Professional Corp advised LinkedIn.

(Reporting by Supantha Mukherjee and Anya George Tharakan in Bengaluru, Sarah McBride and Liana Baker in San Francisco; Editing by Jonathan Weber, Nick Zieminski, Bill Rigby and Diane Craft)

CS50

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cs50

This is CS50, Harvard University’s introduction to the intellectual enterpris computer science and the art of programming for majors and non-majors alike, with or without prior programming experience. An entry-level course taught by David J. Malan, CS50 teaches students how to think algorithmically and solve problems efficiently. Topics include abstraction,algorithms,data structures, encapsulation, resource management, security, software engineering, and web development. Languages include C, PHP, and JavaScript plus SQL, CSS, and HTML. Problem sets inspired by real-world domains of biology, cryptography, finance, forensics, and gaming. As of Fall 2014, the on-campus version of CS50 was Harvard’s largest course.

Students who earn a satisfactory score on 9 problem sets (i.e., programming assignments) and a final project will receive a certificate from HarvardX. This is a self-paced course–you may take CS50 on your own schedule.

HarvardX pursues the science of learning. By registering as an online learner in an HX course, you will also participate in research about learning. Read our research statement to learn more.