Latest news with #IITKanpur
Business Standard
14 hours ago
- Business
- Business Standard
CARD91 Promotes Puneet Mathur to Chief Information Officer
PRNewswire Bangalore (Karnataka) [India], July 22: CARD91, a leading innovator in payment infrastructure, is pleased to announce the promotion of Puneet Mathur to the role of Chief Information Officer (CIO). This leadership move reflects CARD91's ongoing commitment to building secure, intelligent, and future-ready payment infrastructure for banks, fintechs, and regulated financial institutions. Puneet joined CARD91 in 2020 as Vice President - Client Solutioning, where he led the company's solution architecture and enterprise-grade integrations across both card and UPI rails. With nearly 24 years of experience in enterprise architecture, technology implementation, and systems integration, Puneet has played a critical role in delivering scalable, compliant, and high-performance solutions for CARD91's clients. An alumnus of IIT Kanpur and IIM Calcutta, Puneet's professional journey spans leadership roles at Citigroup, a successful tenure as Partner & CTO at HytechPro, and as Co-founder & CTO of YoGems. In his new role as CIO, Puneet will lead CARD91's technology strategy--focused on accelerating platform innovation, strengthening the technology backbone, and driving collaboration with ecosystem partners to deliver intelligent, resilient, and compliant payment solutions. "I'm privileged to step into the role of CIO at CARD91," said Puneet Mathur. "My focus will be on strengthening our technology infrastructure, ensuring platform scalability, enhancing system security, and embedding robust compliance frameworks. I will be focused on driving innovation across our products, building resilient architectures, and delivering high-performance, future-ready payment solutions that meet the dynamic needs of the fintech ecosystem." "Puneet's leadership has been pivotal to our growth," said Ajay Pandey, CEO of CARD91. "His deep technical acumen and customer-first mindset will accelerate our mission to simplify and modernise digital payments for the industry." About CARD91 CARD91 is an Issuance Platform-as-a-Service company providing unparalleled technology infrastructure to Banks, Prepaid License holders, and Authorised Dealers. The company helps them issue various payment instruments (PPI, Debit, Credit, Multi-Currency, UPI, and now, Credit Line on UPI) to their customers, ensuring seamless issuance and enhanced control. CARD91's support for multiple use cases aligns with its vision of making issuance seamless and swift for issuers. With a team strength of 100+ professionals, CARD91 operates across key financial hubs, including Mumbai, Bangalore, Delhi, and Chennai.
The Hindu
a day ago
- Science
- The Hindu
The workings behind television screens
After a few months of a hectic summer, the rains are here. The IIT Kanpur campus is green and nature's colours abound once more. With monsoon, however, comes alive the age-old tradition as well: Sunday evenings of guilt-free laziness, together with the music of the rain's patter, a Bollywood classic on the TV, and some hot, simmering tea. Over the years, the world's technologies have changed shape and form, including the TV. Blinking tubelights have turned to LEDs and televisions have changed from being cubic boxes to flat screens. Why and how did this happen? It has something to do with physics discoveries behind the scenes. Electrons to light When you switch on the TV, you really just switch on the electrical socket where the TV plugs in. We know sockets carry electric currents transported by electrons. But how do these electrons become light? This isn't unusual if you think about it. We see it all the time in our houses. The protagonist of this puzzle is a class of materials called phosphors. The phosphors (which are different from the element phosphorus) are also called fluorescent compounds because they have something magical about them. When an electron hits a phosphor, the material throws out light. This has to do with the way electrons are arranged inside these materials. When another electron falls on them, the electrons in the phosphor become excited to higher energies. When they relax back, they throw out some of that energy as light. Phosphors are thus used to cover the insides of tubelights and fluorescent bulbs. It's the reason we call white bulbs 'CFLs', short for compact fluorescent lamps. Inside the bulb or tubelight, one just needs flying electrons or other charges to hit these materials. If you have ever seen an old broken tubelight, the powder inside the glass tube is nothing but phosphor. Moving pictures In a tubelight, since we just need the light, we can uniformly coat all sides with a phosphor and the whole frame will light up when electrons strike it. But to create a picture on a TV screen, we need a few regions to light up and a few regions to remain dark. That way we can see the landscape of lit regions as a single image. We also need the lit regions to be able to change quickly — so quickly that as the pictures change, our brains think it's a moving scene rather than a series of still images. Enter: a major invention of the early 1900s, the cathode ray tube. A cathode ray tube creates a stream of electrons through the tube flowing towards the screen. Imagine electrons as a flock of birds flying in one direction towards a wall, which in this case is the screen. Now imagine a bird traffic signal manager that can direct birds towards different points on the wall. We similarly need a way to direct electrons to different points on the screen. If we know how much to deflect them, and how fast they are moving, we can plan exactly the location on the screen they will strike. And where an electron strikes, the region will light up. Just like the conductor of an orchestra, if our bird traffic manager can direct birds to different locations on the wall, we can continuously change the parts of the screen that will light up, creating a moving picture. Magnetic fields Now, even as we have a stream of electrons, how do we deflect them at will? This is done with the help of magnetic fields. Electrons have a charge, and one can move charges using two kinds of forces. Electric fields can make them faster or slower. This is what we see in clocks, wires, and torchlights, where batteries create the fields. A magnetic field, however, can do something more interesting. It doesn't change the speed of charged particles but it can make them move in a circle. It's like when you tie a ball with a thread: you can pull the ball towards yourself, or you can try to swing the ball around. This other kind of force is called the Lorentz force — and it is applied by magnetic fields. We can use magnetic fields to move the electrons to the location we are interested in, and thus we have our traffic police. A bunch of copper wires and coils can be used to create these fields. Such electronic circuits are called analog. While a lot of physics and engineering goes into creating the perfect images you see on TV, the basic physics is simple. We understand how electrons get directed to different locations on the screen. As they strike various locations, the phosphor lights up. As the TV signal changes the points where the electrons strike, the screen changes continuously, playing for us our favourite Bollywood film. Boxes to screens to…? With time of course, physicists discovered new concepts and we didn't need all those coils of wire to move electrons. In 1947, scientists at Bell Labs in the U.S. invented the transistor. This device led to the computer boom and eventually semiconductor electronics. Here, too, the physics concepts are similar. Instead of phosphor, we have another light-emitting material called gallium-arsenide-phosphide (GaAsP), which throws out light when electrons go into them. And instead of rays of electrons, we can direct electrons more precisely using electronic motherboards like in our laptops. If you're wondering how these newer technologies work, that's a story for another day. The reason we could make moving pictures was the magnetic field's ability to deflect electrons. Here the electrons were moving in three dimensions, the same number of dimensions we live in. The dimension of space is the number of directions in which we can move. For example, if something can move in all directions — right-left, front-back, top-down, it's said to exist in three dimensions. A TV of the future may just take advantage of electrons forced to move in two directions: front-back and right-left, like an ant on a table. This happens in some particular materials that physicists can make in the lab. It turns out there is a big difference in physics between two and three dimensions. In two dimensions, if temperatures are very low, a group of electrons can behave in a funny way. They form what is called a fractional quantum Hall state. Here, effectively new particles emerge that have just one-third of an electron's charge, and they can move only along the edges of the material. Robert Laughlin, Horst Ludwig Störmer, and Daniel Tsui won the physics Nobel Prize in 1998 for discovering such particles. These kinds of particles are called anyons. They are completely different from the particles we usually encounter in three dimensions, like electrons and photons. Scientists are trying to build a new, powerful kind of quantum computer using anyons as their qubits. These machines could be responsible for bigger technological revolutions in future, and not just TVs. But for now, we still don't understand all the physics of anyons. The Wolf Prize, one of the most prestigious physics prizes, was given to Jainendra Jain among others in 2025 for developing the basic understanding of some of this physics. Interestingly, Prof. Jain, who now lives in the U.S., did most of his early studies in India including in Maharaja College in Jaipur and at IIT Kanpur. If you are inclined to understand some of the physics that goes on here, you'll need to learn quantum mechanics and condensed matter physics. You can consider taking a course in physics here in IIT Kanpur, where some of us teach. Future TVs Just like the invention in 1947 of transistors soon gave rise to the first TV, the discovery of particles with fractional charge may turn contemporary TVs into something we can't even imagine now. We never know how discoveries in quantum condensed matter physics today will change the world in the next 30 years. But just like the warmth of a hot tea on a monsoon evening, the charms of Bollywood classics and basic physics never get old. The next time you watch an emotional scene unfolding on your TV, don't forget to thank the electrons and the magic materials working away behind the screens. Adhip Agarwala is an assistant professor of physics at IIT Kanpur.
The Hindu
2 days ago
- Science
- The Hindu
Ladakh's Sindhu Central University gets transit campus
The Sindhu Central University in Ladakh, the world's highest university situated around 3,500 metres above sea level, now has a transit campus which will function as an academic centre till the construction of the permanent campus is completed, according to officials. The transit campus of the university was inaugurated on Sunday by V Kamakoti, Director of the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Madras, and the Chair of the Executive Council of Sindhu Central University, paving the way for the establishment of Ladakh's first central university. According to university officials, this transit facility will function as a temporary academic centre until the construction of the permanent campus is completed. The main building, once ready, is expected to be operational within 36 working months. "India has often spoken about sustainable development through deep-sea research. With Sindhu Central University coming up at over 3,500 metres above sea level, we now have a rare opportunity to lead high-altitude research in atmospheric and climate science, environmental sustainability and renewable energy," Prof. Kamakoti said. He emphasised the academic potential of Ladakh's geography and culture. "This university is located in one of the highest regions in the world and is surrounded by the rich heritage of Buddhism. When Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced this university, it felt like a golden opportunity to bring focused scientific and cultural research to this region," he said. IIT Madras is the mentor institute for Sindhu Central University. "We (IIT Madras) have been working in the areas of atmospheric and climate science, environmental sustainability, and renewable energy for some time now. We also have strong centres in Physics and Astronomy, which can support world-class research from this campus," Prof. Kamakoti said. "The university is in the process of signing MoUs with six Indian research and academic institutions. We hope that some truly out-of-the-box research will emerge from Sindhu Central University, work that will make Ladakh proud and contribute significantly to India's scientific growth," he added. As part of the broader academic vision, officials said the university also aims to provide cutting-edge medical infrastructure in collaboration with IIT Kanpur, making it relevant to the local community. Sachin S Gunthe, faculty member at IIT Madras and Faculty Coordinator at Sindhu Central University, said, "We are working on designing a more organic and context-based academic curriculum for Ladakh. This region demands specialised courses and that is what we are trying to build." Prof. Gunthe explained that the university has already launched programmes like MTech in Atmospheric and Climate Science and MA in Public Policy, both hosted at IIT Madras, and MTech in Energy Technology and Policy at IIT Kanpur. "We are happy to share that a student who pursued an degree through Sindhu Central University has secured a Ph.D. opportunity at IIT Delhi. That's the kind of academic quality and outcome we are striving for," he added. In February 2024, Prime Minister Narendra Modi digitally inaugurated and laid the foundation stones for various projects sanctioned at Centrally Funded Higher Educational Institutions under the Ministry of Education, including Sindhu Central University. The university is named after the ancient river Sindhu and is also India's first trans-Himalayan central university. Its campus spanning 110 acres will be built in Khaltsi village, situated between Leh and Kargil.
News18
3 days ago
- Business
- News18
Banks need to build resilience against cyber threat: DFS Secretary
Agency: PTI New Delhi, Jul 19 (PTI) Financial Services Secretary M Nagaraju on Saturday cautioned banks to bolster their defences against the growing menace of cyber threats. Speaking at a prize distribution ceremony of the 'Code Against Malware' hackathon at PNB headquarters here, Nagaruaju highlighted the growing importance of cybersecurity in the banking sector. Such initiatives align with the national goal of building resilience against emerging digital threats, he said. Launched in December 2024, the 'Code Against Malware' hackathon invited student teams from IIT Kanpur and other premier institutions to develop endpoint security solutions to detect ransomware, using behavioural analysis, artificial intelligence, and heuristic techniques. The hackathon was conducted in collaboration with the IIT Kanpur, under the guidance of the Department of Financial Services (DFS) and the Indian Banks' Association (IBA), with the objective of fostering innovation in cybersecurity and engaging India's young technical talent. PNB MD and CEO Ashok Chandra, in his remarks, underscored the institution's commitment to driving innovation, strengthening cyber defences, and promoting collaboration between industry and academia. PTI DP BAL BAL First Published: Disclaimer: Comments reflect users' views, not News18's. Please keep discussions respectful and constructive. Abusive, defamatory, or illegal comments will be removed. News18 may disable any comment at its discretion. By posting, you agree to our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy.
Time of India
3 days ago
- Business
- Time of India
Banks need to build resilience against cyber threat: DFS Secretary
Financial Services Secretary M Nagaraju on Saturday cautioned banks to bolster their defences against the growing menace of cyber threats. Speaking at a prize distribution ceremony of the 'Code Against Malware' hackathon at PNB headquarters here, Nagaraju highlighted the growing importance of cybersecurity in the banking sector. Such initiatives align with the national goal of building resilience against emerging digital threats, he said. Launched in December 2024, the 'Code Against Malware' hackathon invited student teams from IIT Kanpur and other premier institutions to develop endpoint security solutions to detect ransomware, using behavioural analysis, artificial intelligence, and heuristic techniques. The hackathon was conducted in collaboration with the IIT Kanpur, under the guidance of the Department of Financial Services (DFS) and the Indian Banks' Association (IBA), with the objective of fostering innovation in cybersecurity and engaging India's young technical talent. PNB MD and CEO Ashok Chandra, in his remarks, underscored the institution's commitment to driving innovation, strengthening cyber defences, and promoting collaboration between industry and academia. Stay informed with the latest business news, updates on bank holidays and public holidays . AI Masterclass for Students. Upskill Young Ones Today!– Join Now
