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Global fin giant reviews UP's skill development efforts

Global fin giant reviews UP's skill development efforts

Time of India07-05-2025
Lucknow: In its mission to empower youth through
skill development
and take the state's economy to trillion-dollar target, minister for
vocational education
and skill development, Kapil Dev Agarwal, on Wednesday met representatives from
Deloitte India
.
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Reviewing progress of various skill development schemes and discussing future initiatives, Agarwal said govt's focus was on quality training and making youth employable. According to Agarwal, govt planned to combine local needs with modern technology while training youths.
Additionally, govt is working with industrial training institutes and Skill Development Mission to launch job-oriented courses that will help young people find employment easily.
The minister urged Deloitte representatives to participate in regular meetings for next two years and come up with progress report. Agarwal instructed his team to provide quality training to youth to help them get jobs and earn livelihood.
During the meeting, Agarwal said promoting apprenticeships is one of the top priorities and all stakeholders must have effective communication with each other so that there was no dearth of opportunities for youth.
He also asked officials to review schemes based on feedback from students, including random calls and field inspections to engage directly with students. The minister suggested that organising programmes and meetings at divisional level will expedite implementation of schemes.
For effective monitoring, data on training given to youths, including their trade and mobile numbers, should be recorded on the Skill Mitra portal, he said.
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During the meeting, some of the youths who underwent training were contacted by phone and positive feedback was received about the schemes.
Principal secretary, vocational education and skill development, Hariom and director, Skill Development Mission, Pulkit Khare, participated in the meeting.
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Two of this century's breakthrough technologies are on a collision course. Investors in Bitcoin should pay attention. Experts say that ultrapowerful quantum computers could eventually crack the security codes of blockchain, the underlying technology for Bitcoin. That would be a hacker's dream. And it could deal a severe blow to investors' trust in the $2 trillion-plus market for the leading cryptocurrency. Roughly a quarter of all Bitcoins are now protected with algorithms that could be cracked by quantum computers in five or 10 years, Gartner analyst Avivah Litan tells Barron's. Those are mostly older Bitcoins housed in digital vaults, or wallets, that date back as far as 15 years. As quantum computing keeps advancing, the damage could spread to newer wallets, and then to the market's broader structure. The computers 'might eventually become so fast that they will undermine the Bitcoin transaction process," experts at Deloitte have written. 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Some three-quarters of Bitcoins have an additional layer of cryptography that keeps them out of imminent danger. However, the threat is nothing to scoff at, according to Michael Osborne, chief technology officer at IBM Quantum Safe. 'Assets can be stolen from existing wallets if fairly simple actions are not taken to protect them," Osborne says. The most immediate fix may be to move funds from old or reused addresses to new wallets that don't have their public keys exposed, in anticipation of the day quantum computers gain the ability to determine a private key using a public key. As quantum develops in the coming years, protective measures may well become harder to devise. Hackers could gain the tools to disrupt Bitcoin mining and the basic operations of the market, such as rewriting transaction history. Gartner's Litan says that some experts place the odds of this happening at 50% by 2037. 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In March 2025, Quantinuum teamed up with researchers at JPMorgan Chase for an experiment demonstrating how a quantum computer could best a classical machine at a random-number-generation problem. As random numbers are used in everything from computer simulations to cryptography, the study had important real-world implications. 'Forever the race will remain, right?" Hazra says with a chuckle. 'We see it in the classical world, and we'll see it taken to the next level with quantum." Researchers at D-Wave Quantum have approached the challenge by developing a blockchain architecture that runs on quantum computers. 'The distributed nature of the Bitcoin network is based on a bunch of miners collaborating and each doing a hard cryptographic puzzle, which requires a lot of classical computational power," explains Trevor Lanting, D-Wave's chief development officer. Blockchains rely on hashing, a mathematical function that acts like a digital fingerprint by converting an input into a string of characters. Hashing is used to encrypt transactions, and 'proof of work" algorithms validate those transactions. D-Wave aims to replace this process with a quantum proof of work, which the company describes as a new way to securely and efficiently create hashes. In a preprint submitted to research-sharing platform arXiv in March, scientists showed how they had tested a prototype blockchain on four D-Wave processors scattered across North America, 'demonstrating stable operation across hundreds of thousands of quantum hashing operations." The race is far from over. Insights from IBM suggest cryptographically relevant quantum computers could arrive in a decade, while some organizations anticipate it may take up to 12 years to become quantum-resistant. There's an expression in the crypto community that might be appropriate here: 'HODL," or hold on for dear life. Write to Mackenzie Tatananni at

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