Biological Research Regulatory Approval Portal (BioRRAP)
Why in News: In keeping with the spirit of “One Nation,One Portal”, Union Minister of State (IC) Ministry of Science and Technology launched Single National Portal for Biotech researchers and Start-ups.
What is the purpose ?
• The Portal “BioRRAP” will cater to all those seeking regulatory approval for biological research & development activity in the country and thus offer a huge relief for “Ease of Science as well as Ease of Business.
• Help India to be a Global Bio-manufacturing Hub and figure among the top 5 countries of the world by 2025.
• “Biological Research Regulatory Approval Portal (BioRRAP) will help in ease of doing science, scientific research and ease of Start-ups in India
Data & Trends
• India is among the top 12 destinations for biotechnology globally and 3rd largest biotechnology destination in the Asia Pacific region.
• The Indian biotechnology industry in the global biotechnology market is expected to grow to 19% from a mere 3% in 2017.
• The Bio Economy’s contribution to the national GDP has also grown steadily in the past years to 2.7% in 2020 from 1.7% in 2017 and will touch new heights after 25 years of Bio-economy journey in the Centenary year of 2047.
Raja Ram Mohan Roy
Why in News: One of the most influential social and religious reformers of the 19th century, Ram Mohan Roy, born on May 22, 1772 in what was then Bengal Presidency’s Radhanagar in Hooghly district , would have turned 250 years.
>Early Life
• He was born into a prosperous upper-caste Brahmin family,
• Roy grew up within the framework of orthodox caste practices of his time: child-marriage, polygamy and dowry were prevalent among the higher castes and he had himself been married more than once in his childhood.
• The family’s affluence had also made the best in education accessible to him.
Academics
• A polyglot, Roy knew Bengali and Persian, but also Arabic, Sanskrit, and later, English.
• His exposure to the literature and culture of each of these languages bred in him scepticism towards religious dogmas and social strictures.
• His education had whetted his appetite for philosophy and theology, and he spent considerable time studying the Vedas and the Upanishads, but also religious texts of Islam and Christianity.
Religious Beliefs
• He was particularly intrigued by the Unitarian faction of Christianity and was drawn by the precepts of monotheism that, he believed, lay at the core of all religious texts.
• He wrote extensive tracts on various matters of theology, polity and human rights, and translated and made accessible Sanskrit texts into Bengali.
• “Rammohun did not quite make a distinction between the religious and the secular.
• He believed religion to be the site of all fundamental changes. What he fought was not religion but what he believed to be its perversion.
Roy, the first among liberals
• Even though British consolidation of power was still at a nascent stage in India at the time, Roy could sense that change was afoot.
• His mind reveals a wide range of interests, rarely paralleled in the history of Indian thought.
• He was simultaneously interested in religion, politics, law and jurisprudence, commerce and agrarian enterprise, Constitutions and civic rights, the unjust treatment of women and the appalling condition of the Indian poor.
• He studied matters not in the abstract or in academic solitude but with the practical objective of securing human happiness and freedom. That made him a modern man.”
Establishments
• In 1814, he started the Atmiya Sabha (Society of Friends), to nurture philosophical discussions on the idea of monotheism in Vedanta and to campaign against idolatry, casteism, child marriage and other social ills.
• The Atmiya Sabha would make way for the Brahmo Sabha in 1828, set up with Debendranath Tagore, Rabindranath Tagore’s father.
Abolition of Sati, educational and religious reforms
• During the course of his time in Kolkata (formerly Calcutta), a period of about 15 years, Roy became a prominent public intellectual. He campaigned for the modernisation of education, in particular the introduction of a Western curriculum, and started several educational institutions in the city.
• In 1817, he collaborated with Scottish philanthropist David Hare to set up the Hindu College (now, Presidency University). He followed it up with the Anglo-Hindu School in 1822 and, in 1830, assisted Alexander Duff to set up the General Assembly’s Institution, which later became the Scottish Church College.
• It was his relentless advocacy alongside contemporaries such as Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar that finally led to the abolition of Sati under the governor generalship of William Bentinck in 1829. Roy argued for the property rights of women, and petitioned the British for freedom of the press (in 1829 and 1830).
• His Brahmo Sabha, that later became the Brahmo Samaj, evolved as a reaction against the upper-caste stranglehold on social customs and rituals. During the Bengal Renaissance, it ushered in sweeping social changes and birthed the Brahmo religion, a reformed spiritual Hinduism that believes in monotheism and the uniformity of all men, irrespective of caste, class or creed.
AI chips
the adoption of Artificial Intelligence (AI) chips has risen, with chipmakers designing different types of these chips to power AI applications such as natural language processing (NLP), computer vision, robotics, and network security across a wide variety of sectors, including automotive, IT, healthcare, and retail.
What are AI chips?
• AI chips are built with specific architecture and have integrated AI acceleration to support deep learning-based applications.
o Deep learning, more commonly known as active neural network (ANN) or deep neural network (DNN), is a subset of machine learning and comes under the broader umbrella of AI.
o It combines a series of computer commands or algorithms that stimulate activity and brain structure. DNNs go through a training phase, learning new capabilities from existing data. DNNs can then inference, by applying these capabilities learned during deep learning training to make predictions against
previously unseen data.
o Deep learning can make the process of collecting, analysing, and interpreting enormous amounts of data faster and easier.
• There are different types of AI chips such as application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs), field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), central processing units (CPUs) and GPUs, designed for diverse AI applications.
Applications
1. Natural language processing (NLP)
2. Computer vision
3. Robotics
4. Network security across a wide variety of sectors, including automotive, IT, healthcare, and retail
Are they different from traditional chips?
• Traditional chips, containe processor cores and memory, perform computational tasks, they continuously move commands and data between the two hardware components.
• AI chips generally contain processor cores as well as several AI-optimised cores (depending on the scale of the chip) that are designed to work in harmony when performing computational tasks.
• AI chips, essentially, reimagine traditional chips’ architecture, enabling smart devices to perform sophisticated deep learning tasks such as object detection and segmentation in real-time, with minimal power consumption
What are their applications?
• Some of these chips support in-vehicle computers to run state-of-the-art AI applications more efficiently.
• AI chips are also powering applications of computational imaging in wearable electronics, drones, and robots.
• The use of AI chips for NLP applications has increased due to the rise in demand for chatbots and online channels such as Messenger, Slack, and others.
• AI processors with on-chip hardware acceleration, designed to help customers achieve business insights at scale across banking, finance, trading, insurance applications and customer interactions.
• As AI becomes pervasive across different workloads, having a dedicated inference accelerator that includes support for major deep learning frameworks would allow companies to harness the full potential of their data.
What can be expected in the future?
• The human brain contains on the order of 100 trillion synapses, a popular firm said, adding that a single CS-2 accelerator can support models of over 120 trillion parameters (synapse equivalents) in size.
• Another AI chip design approach, neuromorphic computing, utilises an engineering method based on the activity of the biological brain.
• An increase in the adoption of neuromorphic chips in the automotive industry is expected in the next few years, according to ResearchAndMarkets.
• Additionally, the rise in the need for smart homes and cities, and the surge in investments in AI start-ups are expected to drive the growth of the global AI chip market, as per a report by Allied Market Research.
• The Worldwide AI chip industry accounted for $8.02 billion in 2020 and is expected to reach $194.9 billion by 2030, growing at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 37.4% from 2021 to 2030.
What is ‘storage gain’ in wheat
Why in News: After Centre relaxed the Fair and Average Quality (FAQ) norms for wheat procurement this season raising the permissible limit of ‘Shrivelled and Broken grains’ from 6% to 18%, Punjab’s state procurement agencies (SPAs) are now seeking a waiver of ‘storage gain
What is ‘storage gain’ in wheat?
• Wheat, considered a ‘living grain’, tends to gain some weight during storage. This is known as ‘storage gain’.
• It mostly happens due to absorption of moisture.
• There are three parts of the grain
o Bran (outer layer rich in fibre),
o Germ (inner layer rich in nutrients)
o Endosperm (bulk of the kernel which contains minerals and vitamins).
• The moisture is mostly absorbed by the endosperm.
Who compensates whom for ‘storage gain’?
• State procurement agencies, which purchase and store wheat at their facilities, are required to give one kg wheat extra per quintal to the Food Corporation of India (FCI), the Centre’s nodal agency for grain procurement, to compensate for storage gain.