Emerging Technologies: AI, Cloud, IoT and Blockchain

The correct answer is B, John McCarthy. The American computer scientist John McCarthy used the phrase artificial intelligence in the proposal for the Dartmouth conference of 1956, the meeting generally treated as the birth of the subject as a separate field, and he is therefore called the father of artificial intelligence; he also created the programming language LISP, long used for such work. Option A is wrong because Alan Turing came earlier and asked the deeper question whether machines can think, giving the Turing test in 1950, but he did not use the term artificial intelligence. Option C is wrong because Charles Babbage designed the Difference Engine and the Analytical Engine in the nineteenth century and is called the father of the computer, not of artificial intelligence. Option D is wrong because Marvin Minsky, although a founder of the field and a participant at Dartmouth, did not coin the name. Keep the two fatherhoods apart: Babbage for the computer, McCarthy for artificial intelligence.

The correct answer is B. Alan Turing proposed in 1950 that instead of arguing about what thinking means, we should set a practical trial: a human questioner communicates in writing with an unseen machine and an unseen person, and if the questioner cannot reliably tell which is which, the machine is said to have passed. The test therefore judges behaviour from the outside and says nothing about how the machine works inside, which is exactly the point Turing was making. Option A is wrong because processor speed is measured in clock cycles and by benchmark programs, not by a conversation. Option C is wrong because storage is simply counted in bytes and their multiples. Option D is wrong because the strength of an encryption key is judged by its length in bits and by the effort needed to break the cipher, a matter of cryptography. Note the year and the paper together: Turing's question whether machines can think came in 1950, six years before the term artificial intelligence was coined.

The correct answer is C, Software as a Service. In this model the provider runs the finished application on its own servers and the user simply opens it in a browser, managing nothing but the data and a few settings; a web mailbox, an online office suite and a hosted customer records system all work this way. Option A is wrong because Infrastructure as a Service supplies only the raw building blocks, virtual machines, storage and network, and the customer must install the operating system and every program above it. Option B is wrong because Platform as a Service supplies a ready environment with the operating system, the runtime and the database already in place, so that a developer need only upload the application code; it is aimed at developers, not at end users. Option D is wrong because network as a service is not one of the three standard models, which are infrastructure, platform and software. A simple memory rule is that the higher the model, the less the customer manages.

The correct answer is D, hypervisor cloud, because no such deployment model exists. A hypervisor is a piece of software, also called a virtual machine monitor, that divides one physical server into several virtual machines; it is the tool that makes cloud computing possible, not a way of deploying a cloud. Option A is wrong as an answer because the public cloud, open to any customer who pays for it, is a genuine deployment model and the commonest one. Option B is wrong because a private cloud, built and reserved for a single organisation so that it keeps full control of its data, is equally standard. Option C is wrong because a hybrid cloud, which joins a private cloud to a public one so that sensitive workloads stay inside while sudden peaks of demand spill outside, is the third. The fourth, which the question does not list, is the community cloud, shared by several organisations with a common concern. Do not confuse the four deployment models with the three service models.

The correct answer is B, Kevin Ashton. The British technologist Kevin Ashton used the phrase Internet of Things in 1999 while working on radio frequency identification tags for tracking goods through a supply chain; his point was that if every object could report its own position and state, the internet would no longer depend on people typing data into it. Option A is wrong because Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web at CERN in 1989, along with the first browser, the first server and the HTTP protocol, which is a different thing from the Internet of Things. Option C is wrong because Vint Cerf, with Robert Kahn, designed the TCP and IP protocols and is called a father of the internet itself. Option D is wrong because Ray Tomlinson sent the first network email and chose the at sign to separate the user from the host. A useful line to remember is that the web is for documents, the internet is for computers and the Internet of Things is for objects.

The correct answer is A, Radio Frequency Identification. An RFID system has a tag carrying a tiny chip and an antenna, and a reader that sends out radio waves; the tag answers with its stored identity, so an object can be recognised without being seen or touched and without a line of sight, unlike a barcode that must be shown to a scanner. Passive tags carry no battery and draw their power from the reader's signal, which is why they can be made as thin as a label. RFID is used in toll collection, library books, baggage handling, warehouse stock and animal identification, and it was work on exactly such tags that led Kevin Ashton to the phrase Internet of Things. Option B, option C and option D are all invented expansions that do not correspond to any real technology; they are offered only because they use the same letters. Note the related short range technology NFC, near field communication, which is the basis of tap to pay cards.

The correct answer is A. Entries on a blockchain are grouped into blocks, and every block carries the cryptographic hash, a short fixed length fingerprint, of the block immediately before it. Changing even one character inside an old block changes that block's hash, which no longer matches the value recorded in the next block, and so the mismatch cascades through every later block; since identical copies of the chain are held by many computers on the network, the tampered copy is rejected at once. This is why a blockchain is called tamper evident and append only. Option B is wrong because it states the opposite of the design: a blockchain is deliberately distributed across many nodes and has no single server to attack. Option C is wrong because a password controls who may write, not whether a written record can be silently changed. Option D is wrong because fingerprints are a means of authenticating a person and are not used to seal blocks. The idea was published in the 2008 Bitcoin paper under the name Satoshi Nakamoto.

The correct answer is C, a qubit. A classical computer stores information in bits, each of which must be either zero or one at a given moment. A quantum computer uses a quantum bit, shortened to qubit, which can be in a superposition of zero and one at the same time, and qubits can also be entangled so that the state of one is tied to the state of another. These two properties allow a quantum machine to explore many possibilities together, which is why certain problems in factorisation, search and molecular simulation could be solved far faster than on any classical machine. Option A is wrong because the bit is the unit of classical computing, the very thing the qubit replaces. Option B is wrong because a byte is simply a group of eight bits, the usual unit for measuring storage. Option D is wrong because a nibble is a group of four bits, that is half a byte. Remember the trio of terms that come with the qubit: superposition, entanglement and decoherence, the last being the loss of the quantum state through disturbance.

The correct answer is A. The three terms sit one inside the other like circles. Artificial intelligence is the whole field of making machines behave intelligently, and it includes approaches that use no learning at all, such as rule based expert systems and search algorithms. Machine learning is the part of it in which the program is shown examples and works out the pattern itself instead of being given the rules. Deep learning is a part of machine learning that uses artificial neural networks with many hidden layers, and it is what made image recognition, speech recognition and machine translation work well. Option B is wrong because it inverts the outermost relation; artificial intelligence is the widest of the three, not the narrowest. Option C is wrong because it inverts the inner relation: deep learning is inside machine learning, not the other way round. Option D is wrong because the three are nested and not identical, and examiners test exactly this nesting. The three families of machine learning are supervised, unsupervised and reinforcement learning.

The correct answer is A, the national cloud computing initiative. MeghRaj is the name given to the Government of India Cloud, usually shortened to GI Cloud, under which government departments obtain their computing and storage from a common set of government managed data centres rather than each building its own. The aim is to cut duplicated hardware, shorten the time taken to launch an e-governance application and let departments pay only for what they use, and the name itself joins the Hindi word for cloud to the idea of governance. Option B is wrong because India's weather satellites belong to the INSAT series and the observation work is done by the India Meteorological Department, not by a cloud programme. Option C is wrong because rural connectivity is the business of the BharatNet optical fibre programme. Option D is wrong because digital payments run on the Unified Payments Interface and related systems built by the National Payments Corporation of India. Learn MeghRaj together with the three service models, since a question often pairs them.