NEPAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY

Introduction

The National Information Technology Center (NITC) was established in the year 2002 in line with IT Policy 2000 under the then Ministry of Science and Technology (MOST). NITC has the main objective to build knowledge based society by supporting knowledge based institutions and industries as well as promote and develop Information Technology (IT) by making it accessible to the general public. Executive director of NITC has the primary responsibility to implement or get implemented the policy and the plan on information science and information technology, monitor and supervise the same and regulate the activities carried out by the private sector.

Nepal has been a late starter in modem science and technology. In pursuance of self- reliance, it developed technological capabilities in some specific areas such as agriculture, civil engineering, architecture, metallurgy, water management, medicine, textile and paper manufacture, dyeing and food technology. Its isolation for over a century, coinciding with the Industrial Revolution in the West and colonial incursion in India, deprived the country from the advances in S&T elsewhere. After the advent of democracy in 1950, the country embarked on the path of modernisation. An initiation in S& T activities took place, along with the inception of a development plan, in 1956. The S& T sector received its due impor tance in development plan in the Sixth Plan (1980-85). Nepal's new constitution, promul gated in 1990, has emphasised the importance of S&T explicitly by including a Directive Principle to promote its advancement. Major S&T organisations, including a science academy, the Ministry for Science and Technology, and several research centres and insti tutions for higher education in science have evolved during last five decades. However, with the low ratio of S&T manpower (0.4 per 1, 000 population) and low R&D expenditure (0.35 per cent of GNP), Nepal faces formidable challenges seeking political commitments with long-term vision and recognition of S&T as the strategic variable for overall national development

DIFFERENT SORTS OF TECHNOLOGY STILL USE IN NEPAL

Tuki-mara: Power outage is a very well known phenomena in Nepal. Techno-entrepreneurs have found an innovative way to address such problems. The device, as shown in the picture, is made up of four LEDs connected to a box with a switch. One needs to put three batteries inside the box to operate the LEDs. Such device "eTuki" and can be bought for less than 150 rupees. I took this picture in a hotel in Jiri (188 northeast of Kathmandu at 2074 mts). The word "Tuki" is a name of lamps made up of glass bottle filled with kerosene and a cotton wick. Most village people use "Tuki" to "electrify" their homes. These days eTukis are replacing the traditional Tukis and hence are called Tuki-mara (mara means killer). Seems technology is slowly finding its place in rural hinterland.

Generation: This picture of a 6 years old girl playing with laptop was taken in CAN InfoTech 2006. Nepal's ICT future lies in the hands of such young people. It is interesting to see a student of class one using a computer without any inhibitions.

Electro-Hat: One evening I was walking downtown Thamel in Kathmandu and ran across a person who has a funny looking device on his head. This device, though is a prototype in design, but was able to attract lots of foreigners and locals. The device consists of air spray, fan, torch-light, alarm etc. The person seen in the picture is a trained electrician and makes several such devices.

FIFTH GENERATION COMPUTERS IN TECHNOLOGY

INTRODUCTION

Fifth generations computers are only in the minds of advance research scientiets and being tested out in the laboratories. These computers will be under Artifical Intelligence(AI), They will be able to take commands in a audio visual way and carry out instructions. Many of the operations which requires low human intelligence will be perfomed by these computers.
Parallel Processing is coming and showing the possibiliy that the power of many CPU's can be used side by side, and computers will be more powerful than thoes under central processing. Advances in Super Conductor technology will greatly improve the speed of information traffic. Future looks bright for the computers.

The Fifth-Generation Computer was to be the end result of a massive government/industry research project in Japan during the 1980s, which aimed to create an "epoch-making computer" that would leapfrog more evolutionary designs by using the Prolog programming language to create a desktop system with supercomputer-like performance and usable artificial intelligence capabilities.
The term "fifth generation" was intended to convey the system as being a leap beyond existing machines. Computers using vacuum tubes were called the first generation, transistors and diodes the second, ICs the third, and those using microprocessors the fourth. Whereas previous computer generations had focused on increasing the number of logic elements in a single CPU, the fifth generation, it was widely believed at the time, would instead turn to massive numbers of CPUs for added performance.
Throughout these multiple generations since the 1950s, Japan had largely been a follower in terms of computing advancement, building computers following US and British leads. The Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI) decided to attempt to break out of this follow-the-leader pattern, and in the mid-1970s started looking, on a small scale, into the future of computing. They asked the Japan Information Processing Development Center (JIPDEC) to indicate a number of future directions, and in 1979 offered a three-year contract to carry out more in-depth studies along with industry and academia. It was during this period that the term "fifth-generation computer" started to be used.
The primary fields for investigation from this initial project were:
Inference computer technologies for knowledge processing
Computer technologies to process large-scale data bases and knowledge bases
High performance workstations
Distributed functional computer technologies
Super-computers for scientific calculation
The project imagined a parallel processing computer running on top of massive databases, as opposed to a file system, using a logic programming language to access the data. They envisioned building a prototype machine with performance between 100M and 1G LIPS, where a LIPS is a Logical Inference Per Second. At the time typical workstation machines were capable of about 100k LIPS. They proposed to build this machine over a ten year period, 3 years for initial R&D, 4 years for building various subsystems, and a final 3 years to complete a working prototype system. In 1982 the government decided to go ahead with the project, and established the Institute for New Generation Computer Technology (ICOT) through joint investment with various Japanese computer companies.
So ingrained was the belief that parallel computing was the future of all performance gains that the Fifth-Generation project generated a great deal of apprehension in the computing field. After having seen the Japanese take over the consumer electronics field during the 1970s and apparently doing the same in the automotive world, the Japanese in the 1980s had a reputation for invincibility. Soon parallel projects were set up in the US as the Microelectronics and Computer Technology Corporation (MCC), in England as Alvey, and in Europe as the European Strategic Program of Research in Information Technology (ESPRIT).

The Fifth Generation. It's Japan's concerted project to design computers that really understand their users. That takes Artificial Intelligence-and the language of the Fifth Generation Project is Prolog. Join AI expert Christopher Chabris and programmer Gene Weiss for a tour of the Prolog world on the ST-including a ready-to-run version of Prolog on your START Disk!