Security implications for a wired India: Challenges ahead
Abstract India has earned a significant place in the global Information Technology (IT) industry and aspires to be an IT superpower in the future. With an expanding IT infrastructure, the nation is getting ‘wired’ to the ‘global village’ at a rapid pace. Ironically, the technology that empowers us also exposes us to new threats. These threats do not recognise borders and impinge on nearly every cross‐section of our society. The article covers the security implications for a ‘Wired India’ under the military, political, economic and social dimensions. While information security as a concept is gaining ground, a more holistic and integrated approach is imperative for bridging the gaps and warding off the threats successfully.
Unique Biometric IDs: Governmentality and Appropriation in a Digital India
On a global scale, the usage of a variety of digital ID and surveillance technologies in both civic and security governance is increasingly taking place, leading to standardised forms and practices. India is implementing the largest biometric scheme in history. As part of a larger plan to digitalise the country’s governance, the objective of the Unique Identification (UID) project is to enrol the entire populace, roughly speaking 20% of the world’s population. This dissertation investigates the implementation of biometric IDs in India, asking what are the governmental rationales of biometric identification in India? How does national conditions of possibility for governing conbiometric identification shape the duct? And, how do people utilise and appropriate digital, biometric IDs? Based on observation of enrolment sites, semi-structuredand narrative interviews of officials, as well as persons enrolled into the scheme, the dissertation shows how biometric IDs are imagined and experienced. Analytically, the dissertation places the Indian project within the larger framework of governmentality in the post-colony. The concept of appropriation is developed to describe the processes by which governmental schemes are altered or modified to benefit local contexts. I investigate the identification of the homeless in Delhi, narratives on fraud by inhabitants in the northern Indian town of Vrindavan, and the daily utilisation of software by Indian bankers, to describe such processes of subversion. The dissertation shows that standardised biometric tools, albeit applicable to multiple contexts and usages, become enmeshed and appropriated in the contexts in which they are implemented.
Benchmark database for fine-grained image classification of benthic macroinvertebrates
Abstract Managing the water quality of freshwaters is a crucial task worldwide. One of the most used methods to biomonitor water quality is to sample benthic macroinvertebrate communities, in particular to examine the presence and proportion of certain species. This paper presents a benchmark database for automatic visual classification methods to evaluate their ability for distinguishing visually similar categories of aquatic macroinvertebrate taxa. We make publicly available a new database, containing 64 types of freshwater macroinvertebrates, ranging in number of images per category from 7 to 577. The database is divided into three datasets, varying in number of categories (64, 29, and 9 categories). Furthermore, in order to accomplish a baseline evaluation performance, we present the classification results of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) that are widely used for deep learning tasks in large databases. Besides CNNs, we experimented with several other well-known classification methods using deep features extracted from the data.