Editor’s Column

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Volume 6, Issue 1 May 2013 latest research going on in your

field. Visit the top conference pages and home pages of known researchers of your field.

• Jot down what you do each

month (or week based on your programme):..even the little stuff. This will really help when the semester is over and you wonder what you have managed to com-plete. It makes all the difference to know where you are spending your time. Maybe it’s an experi-ment you tried which didn’t give favorable results or that paper you started writing or a side project which now seems a bit unrelated to your research. Record it all.

• Take a break: it may be a few days at the end of the semester, a random day in the middle of the week or even an hour during high pressure deadlines. Each of us has different limits to handle pres-sure. The key is to refresh your-self just before you reach your limit.

• Just work: If however, it seems a while since you have got proper work done, think of the quote at the beginning of this article and just plod ahead. Spend time with your work and soon the pace will pick up.

• Celebrate each victory: Treas-ure kind and encouraging words whenever they come by.

• Start something new: Based on your available time, start some-thing new…join a community (what better than acm!) or a re-lated group project or even sit through for a course in your area of interest. It should offer a fruit-ful kind of diversion when things are slow.

• Peak in summers: Summers are a good time to peak so maximize your efforts then. There are no courses and hence no TA work, less hustle bustle and loads of time and space. Roam about in the department and ponder upon your ideas or code them up under the cooling effect of lab ACs.

Here’s hoping the rest of the Summer is refreshingly fruitful to all!

“Labor with what zeal we will,

Something still remains undone,

Something uncompleted still

Waits the rising of the sun.”

”~Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

A semester is completed but there’s lots of work yet to be done, more semesters to look forward to for many of us. But even the day gives in to the night, for rest and peace before the rising Sun brings about another day’s toil. So comes the summer break for all of us, to pause, refresh and restart. The newsletter provides fodder for break in terms of the fun section and a summary of the major departmental activities and achieve-ments. The last session has been a whirlpool of activities right from the ACM com-petitions like SAARC to the Institute events like Openhouse and Tryst. The department has produced quality re-search in terms of a number of award winning projects by students and fac-ulty alike. In this issue, we discuss two interesting ones in detail. The number of seminars this semester has also increased. These achievements can never be considered complete without mentioning about our ever increasing community of alumni. We start a new section for discussing some of our renowned alumni. Since education spreads by sharing, we discuss an interesting global educa-tional organization: Coursera, based on its popularity among the students here. Of course the regular section like an interesting personality profile and crossword to boggle your minds, continue. Hope you will like this edition of the newsletter as much as you have liked the previous ones. However, this will be my last edition as the Chief Editor. I would like to thank the entire team for their wholehearted support and wish to acknowledge that the newslet-ter has grown immensely in popular-ity and content due to the active par-ticipation of students and faculty alike. I would like welcome the new Editorial Team and wish them good luck.

Aditi Kapoor, Chief Editor

Research: the art of persistence

By Aditi Kapoor

“Use what talents you possess, the

woods would be very silent if no birds

sang except those that sang the best. Do

not wait; the time will never be ‘just

right’. Start where you are, work with

whatever is at your command, and bet-

ter tools will be found as you go along”

Combining the words of Henry Van Dyke and Napolean Hill, the above becomes an apt motto for researchers. Research is but a series of persistent efforts and starting afresh is something we need to do all the time. It could be at the start of a career, an academic ses-sion or simply to restart an existing piece of work. As rightly said ,

“Nobody can go back and make a new

beginning but anyone can start today

and make a new ending”

Many a times, that’s all that we as re-searchers and students need to do. It not only gives a new hope when one has failed or is stuck but also refreshes the mind and brings about a surge of new ideas.

A time comes when everyone in re-search has to face stagnation. You need new ideas as the existing ones are not working. Here are some points which may help in overcoming the same:

• Build your support system: These are people who believe you can do it and if they belong to your re-search community, all the better. They may even be able to nudge you in the right direction

• Attend as many workshops, con-

ferences and seminars as possible. They need not always coincide exactly with your area of research; sometimes a theory or principles of some other field could give you an entirely new direction. So always keep a pen and paper handy for jotting down all that seems inter-esting.

• Make a list of “ideas to be tried

out”. It will give you immense satisfaction when you actually complete a substantial portion of that list.

• Update your ideas: When you present your own work, spend some time afterwards to make a list of queries and suggestions. Keep updating and revising the ideas list by keeping track of the

Research: the art of Research: the art of Research: the art of Research: the art of persistencepersistencepersistencepersistence

1111

Project articleProject articleProject articleProject article 2,32,32,32,3

Assistive Technolo-Assistive Technolo-Assistive Technolo-Assistive Technolo-gies Group gies Group gies Group gies Group

4444

Personality Pro-Personality Pro-Personality Pro-Personality Pro-

file:Fibonaccifile:Fibonaccifile:Fibonaccifile:Fibonacci

5555

NewslashesNewslashesNewslashesNewslashes 6666

Open House 2013Open House 2013Open House 2013Open House 2013 7777

Alumni ArticleAlumni ArticleAlumni ArticleAlumni Article 8888

ACMACMACMACM–––– a plethora of a plethora of a plethora of a plethora of activitiesactivitiesactivitiesactivities

9, 109, 109, 109, 10

Fun SectionFun SectionFun SectionFun Section 11,1211,1211,1211,12

Inside this issue:

Student : Shivendra Tiwari

Supervisor : Prof. Saroj Kaushik

Publication Details : Shivendra Tiwari, Saroj Kaushik, “Fusion of Navigation Technology and E-Learning Systems for the On-the-Spot Learning ” In IET Inter-national Conference on Wireless Commu-nications and Applications- ICWCA 2012 held at Kuala Lumpur, Malay-sia during October 8th to 10th, 2012. (Best paper award )

Introduction: Huge informa-tion is inherently associated with certain places in the globe. The ancient cities have multiple locations with large historical, geographical, cultural and ar-chitectural specialties. E-Learning systems allow the learners to learn irrespective of their time and place. However, the On-the-Spot Learning (OTSL) allows the site seeing, and touching the building walls that are the means of real-time experience of the geographic locations. In this paper, we ex-tend the capabilities of conven-tional E-learning systems so that the information can be ac-cessed at the real-time based on the user’s location. The e-Learning system is used for the OTSL with the help of naviga-tion technologies without modi-fying the existing systems. The learning content search based on the geo-location & linguistic queries; real-time learning plan generation based on the user preferences & constraints have been pro-posed. The proposed system is a flexible and visually appealing OTSL platform with a possibility to get the real-time location specific information both from web-databases and locally stored content.

Challenges: The major challenges in OTSL systems are as below:

• Focus on Learning: The system shall provide the possibility to design courses focusing on special subjects and learning outcomes.

• Reusability of the Learning

Content: It is crucial to extend an e-Learning system towards location based capabilities. This procedure should guarantee that already available content can be reused in mobile scenarios.

• Location Based Learning Que-

ries: There must be a possibility to attach location information to learning resources where it is vital. The learning content

should be available for the spe-cific linguistic searches.

• Dynamic and Optimized Learn-

ing Plan: In the conventional e-learning systems the course path is decided offline which might not be suitable for the OTSL learners. The location based learning leads to some travel cost and time availability limita-tions to the learners also. There-fore, the learning plan for a user needs to consider the granular-ity of the details for each loca-tion depending on time avail-able and travel cost parameters.

• On-the-Way Learning: The on-the-way learning should consider the direction and speed of the travel while preparing a learning material on the fly.

• Compliance with the existing LBS

Architecture and e-Learning Sys-tems: The location based learning is much similar to the navigation operations. The geocoding is re-quired to associate the course con-tent with a location. The reverse-

g e o c o d i n g i s needed for fetching the content if the location is known. T h e d y n a m i c course plan genera-tion is similar to generating the tour plan with the time and monetary cost considerations. It should also com-pliant with the existing e-learning system in a way that it can easily use their available content.

Arch i t ec ture

and Compo-

nents : We have extended the exist-ing navigation platform to support the location based

learning as shown in Figure 1. The plat-form exposes a set of services that uses digitized geographical data such as roads, parks, rivers, buildings etc. The Location Engine uses LBS content to serve the service requests. The learning application layer is a set of web ser-vices that contain both of the Naviga-tion and Learning verticals of the appli-cations. The learning system uses the capabilities of the navigation infrastruc-ture in order to perform the primitive operations. The Location Engine pro-vides the core services of a navigation system. The location engine uses both dynamic and geographic static data. The Learning Services module includes

Page 2

An interesting project article: : Fusion of Navigation Technology and E-Learning Systems for the On-the-Spot Learning

• the information processing and dis-semination related to the surrounding region or the sites. The latest news, trends, culture, history & economy are the key topics of learning in mul-timedia formats.

• Searching Learning Management

Systems (LMS) Content with Lin-guistic Query: Since the conversional LMS do not support the spatial searches and hence there is no auto-matic association of the learning materials with the maps. Figure 2 shows the process of associating the learning content with the geo-location. Initially, the query formatters formulate a natural language query for the navigation system and LMS separately. The search is made in the LMS with the well formatted query to get the detailed content. On the other hand, to identify the geo-location of the site, the geocoding is done with the existing navi-gation infrastructure. Fi-nally, the content details are associ-ated with the latitude and longitude values which enable OTSL systems to point the content on the map.

• Searching the LMS

Content through the Geo-location: The input is the absolute coordinate (i.e. latitude, longitude) and the out-put is the relevant learning content from the LMS. The challenge is that the content in LMS is not associated with the location. Also, they are not organized using the spatial database techniques. Changing the LMS to support spatial queries has its own challenges, additional effort and cost. We use the reverse-geocoding capa-bility of converting the absolute coor-dinates to the linguistic labels which can in turn be used for the content search in LMS. The OpenStreetMap has been used for the reverse-geocoding implementation.

Dynamic Course Planning:

The location based learning plan generation is different than the conventional navigation planning. With the existing LMS, either the user has to decide the next site destination or the learning sequence is statically organized. It needs sufficient information about the architecture, nature, and taste related properties of the sites in

order to select it as a learning destination. These properties are considered having different importance based on the leaner’s interest. It is also not sufficient creating static learning plans offline. Hence, it is important to automate this process by considering the user preferences and the learning site properties for the learning plan generation. Another aspect is that the learner has some predefined objectives and constraints. For example, the learner might have special preference to some sites and might want to visit them on priority. The learner might also have some constraints on the availability of time, travel cost etc.

• Learning Content Databases:

There are variety of data sources in the OTSL systems such as the LMS, web-databases (i.e. discus-

sion forums, internet news, ency-clopaedias etc) and the locally populated database. The mobile client application retrieves the in-formation from the LMS and caches it in a local database via a web service interface, i.e. cores, learning paths, etc. This allows an efficient interaction between the two systems since only an API is

needed to interact with the e-Learning system. Interaction with other e-Learning systems will also be rela-tively easy to create because the system has not to be altered. We propose to use free web content to enrich the learning content, and store them locally for the future transactions.

Conclusion and

Future Work

We have proposed the fusion of the navigation technol-

ogy and the e-Learning systems in order to achieve the on-the-spot learning without modifying the existing systems. We have exploited the open source navigation tools and the freely available web-databases. The system is easily pluggable with the existing naviga-tion and LMS infrastructure that support site and region oriented on-demand information granularity of the interesting locations. The future work includes the extension in the storage structure of the learning content in the easily accessible and granularizable format. The informa-tion ganularization is still a chal-lenge in the location based learning systems. The group learning content dissemination, user of publish-subscribe system for the OTSL con-text are the important topics to be explored.

Page 3

An interesting project article: : Fusion of Navigation Technology and E-Learning Systems for the On-the-Spot Learning

Assistive Technologies Group con-

sists of students, faculty members, users

and user organizations at IIT Delhi work-

ing towards development of multiple as-

sistive devices for the visually impaired in

India. It collaborates with organizations

working for visually impaired. One of its

products titled Smart Cane, an electronic

travel aid, is in translation stage with

funding from Wellcome Trust, UK. Other

projects under Assistech include Indoor

Navigation System, Braille Tutor System

and Bus Identification System and

TacRead for the visually impaired.

TacRead

Students: Anshul Singhal and Pranay Jain

Advisors: Prof. P. V. Madhusudhan Rao

and Prof. M. Balakrishnan

Introduction: TacRead or Tactile Read-

out Device, is a novel and affordable re-

freshable braille display. People with

blindness perceive braille alphabets

formed by raised dots on TacRead as

those embossed on paper. Affordable dis-

play of digital text in braille gives them

access to diverse tex-

tual media and opens

doors for develop-

ment of various prod-

ucts that shall

strongly empower

them in fields of edu-

cation, employment

and quality-of-life.

Braille tutor systems,

deaf-blind communi-

cation devices and tactile math dis-

plays are some examples of products

thus derived that entail mainstream

integration in these fields. Free from

the demerits of both auditory devices

and paper-embossed braille and at a

price point below one-tenth of that of

commercially available displays,

TacRead has been developed to be

equally applicable and available to

users in both developed and develop-

ing countries. The underlying technol-

ogy has a pending patent and the de-

vice is in final stages of development

and of user demonstration and feed-

back.

Need

• Paper-embossed braille, being

bulky, expensive and short-

lived, has limitations which

are usually countered by use of

digital media like computers.

• People with blindness are un-

able to access digital media via

touch due to lack of affordable

braille displays.

• Educational and occupational practices are limited due to cur-rent dependency on audio and speech-based devices.

Solution

• TacRead is an affordable braille display device which can be used as displays in computers, and also in new electronic assistive devices.

• A novel actuation technology helps reduce TacRead’s price to below 1/10th of that of existing de-vices.

• TacRead is competent on user-defined specifications, and is thus equally applicable for users in de-veloped and developing countries.

Recent Developments

• Based on prior user testing and feedback, improved TacRead braille display modules have been devel-oped, prototyped and tested.

• Efforts for fabrication of displays for large-scale user trials are in progress.

• DAISY Consortium’s Transforming Braille Project has evaluated TacRead. It has been identified as a potential so-lution to the low-cost Braille display challenge. It is to be considered in the upcoming phase of the project.

User Interaction

User Interaction, with consistent help from

Mr. Dipendra Manocha from Saksham

Trust, New Delhi and staff and students at

National Assosiation for the Blind (NAB),

Delhi has been an integral part of the devel-

opment process. Direct user interaction at

every stage including problem identifica-

tion, design feedback and prototype valida-

tion, has not only motivated and driven the

process, but kept it pointed towards the

right direction as well.

Recognition

• Selected as participant at na-tional fair of India Innovation Ini-

tiative (i3), Delhi, 2012

• Awarded Young Indians (Yi)

Next Practices Award 2012

• Selected as semi-finalist in American

Society of Mechanical Engineering

(ASME) Innovation Showcase

(IShow), Montreal, 2012.

• Adjudged as finalist in Design Com-

petition in Rehabilitation and Assis-

tive Devices organised by ASME and National Science Foundation (NSF), ASME Bioengineering Conference, Puerto Rico, 2012

• Adjudged as winner of Class of ‘89

Innovation Award 2012, Indian In-stitute of Technology Delhi

Assistive Technologies Group : TACRead (Tactile Readout Device)

Page 4

Personality Profile : The life and numbers of Leonardo “Fibonacci”

L e o n a r d o P i s a n o Bigollo, also known as Leonardo Bonacci or simply Fibonacci, was an Italian mathemati-cian, considered by some "the most talented European mathemati-cian of the Middle Ages."

He is perhaps more correctly called Leonardo of Pisa or, using a latinisa-tion of his name, Leonardo Pisano since he was born in Pisa, Italy, the city with the famous Leaning Tower, about 1175 AD. Occasionally he called himself Leonardo Bigollo since, in Tuscany, bigollo means a t r a v e l e r . H e i s n o w k n o w n as Fibonacci short for the Latin word "filius Bonacci", used in the title of his book Libar

Abaci , which means "the son of Bonaccio".

He himself did not use the word "Fibonacci". This seems to have been a nickname probably originating in the works of Guillaume Libri in 1838, according to L E Sigler's in his Introduction to Leonardo Pisano's Book of Squares . Fibonacci himself used the name "Bonacci" which is con-sidered his family name but there is another school of thought which considers Bo-nacci to be a kind of nick-name meaning "lucky son" (literally, "son of good fortune").

His most important contribution is the intro-duction of the Western nations to the Hindu, Arab and Persian systems of Numbers and Counting. Fibonacci was capable of quite remarkable calculating feats. He was able to find the positive solution of the following cubic equation: What is even more remark-able is that he carried out all his working using the Babylonian system of mathemat-ics which uses base 60. He gave the result as 1;22,7,42,33,4,40 which is equivalent to:

It is not known how he obtained this, but it was 300 years before anybody else could find such accurate results. It is quite inter-esting that Fibonacci gave the result in this

way at the same time as telling everybody else to use the decimal number system!

Fibonacci is perhaps best known for a simple series of numbers, introduced in Liber abaci and later named the Fibo-nacci numbers in his honour. The series begins with 0 and 1. After that, use the simple rule: Add the last two numbers to get the next.

1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, 144, 233, 377, 610, 987,...

Liber abaci, published in 1202 after Fibo-nacci's return to Italy, was dedicated to Scotus. The book was based on the arith-metic and algebra that Fibonacci had ac-cumulated during his travels. The book, which went on to be widely copied and imitated, introduced the Hindu-Arabic place-valued decimal system and the use of Arabic numerals into Europe.

In Fibonacci's day, mathematical compe-titions and challenges were common. For example, in 1225 Fibonacci took part in a tournament at Pisa ordered by the em-peror himself, Frederick II. It was in just this type of competition that the following problem arose:

Beginning with a single pair of rabbits, if

every month each productive pair bears a

new pair, which becomes productive

when they are 1 month old, how many

rabbits will there be after n months?

The answer to this problem is the nth Fi-bonacci number.

A special value, closely related to the Fibonacci series, is called the golden sec-tion. This value is obtained by taking the ratio of successive terms in the Fibonacci series. The golden section is normally denoted by the Greek letter phi. In fact,

the Greek mathematicians of Plato's time (400BC) recognized it as a significant value and Greek architects used the ratio 1:phi as an integral part of their designs, the most famous of which is the Parthenon in Athens.

Nature loves Phi. Some plants branch in such a way that they always have a Fibo-nacci number of growing points. Flowers often have a Fibonacci number of petals, daisies can have 34, 55 or even as many as 89 petals! The arrangement of the seeds of a Sunflower appear to be spiralling out-wards both to the left and the right. There are a Fibonacci number of spirals!

It is only natural to ask “Why does nature like using Phi in so many plants?” The answer lies in Packing.

The arrangements of leaves is the same as for seeds and petals. All are placed at 1/Phi leaves, (seeds, petals) per turn. If there are Phi leaves per turn, then we have the best packing so that each leaf gets the maximum exposure to light, cast-ing the least shadow on the others. This also gives the best possible area exposed to falling rain so the rain is di-rected back along the

leaf and down the stem to the roots. For flowers or petals, it gives the best possible exposure to insects to attract them for pol-lination.

Fibonacci was a genius, and in recent times, he has come to be glamourised as one of the most prodigious and mystical figures in all of mathematics. His contribu-tion to mathematics is indeed invaluable.

Sources

1. http://plus.maths.org/content/os/

issue3/fibonacci/index

2. http://www.maths.surrey.ac.uk/hosted-

sites/R.Knott/Fibonacci/fibnat2.html

3. http://www.wikipedia.org

4. h t t p : / / w w w - h i s t o r y . m c s . s t -

and.ac.uk/Biographies/Fibonacci.html

Page 5

Compiled by : Aayush Goel

“When my father, who had been appointed by his country as public

notary in the customs at Bugia acting for the Pisan merchants going

there, was in charge, he summoned me to him while I was still a

child, and having an eye to usefulness and future convenience, de-

sired me to stay there and receive instruction in the school of ac-

counting. There, when I had been introduced to the art of the Indi-

ans' nine symbols through remarkable teaching, knowledge of the art

very soon pleased me above all else and I came to understand it, for

whatever was studied by the art in Egypt, Syria, Greece, Sicily and

Provence, in all its various forms.” (Fibonacci in Liber abaci (1202) )

Computing for Development (DEV 2013).Bangalore, India, January, 2013.

• Anirban Mukherjee, Sarbartha Sengupta, Dipanjan Chakraborty, Anirban Sen and Utpal Garain. Text-to-Diagram Conversion: A Method for Formal Representation of Natural Language Geometry Problems. IASTED International Conference on Artificial Intelli-gence and Applications (AIA 2013). Innsbruck, Austria, Febru-ary, 2013.

• Aditi Kapoor; K.K Biswas, .;M. Hanmandlu. Salient object detec-tion using a fuzzy theoretic ap-proach. In Proceedings of the Eighth Indian Conference on Computer Vision, Graphics and Image Processing, ICVGIP 2012, Article No. 9.

• Manu Agarwal, Ragesh Jaiswal and Arindam Pal. k-means++ un-der Approximation Stability 10th annual conference on Theory and Applications of Models of Computation (TAMC) 2013.

• Khaled Elbassioni, Naveen Garg, Amit Kumar and Arindam Pal. Approximation Algorithms for Unsplittable Flow Problems on Paths and Trees 32nd Foundations of Software Technology and Theo-r e t i c a l Co mp ut e r S c i en c e (FSTTCS) 2012.

• Venkatesan Chakaravarthy, Arin-dam Pal, Sambuddha Roy and Yogish Sabharwal. Scheduling resources for executing a partial set of jobs 32nd Foundations of Software Technology and Theo-r e t i c a l Co mp ut e r S c i en c e (FSTTCS) 2012.

• Shivendra Tiwari, Saroj Kaushik, “Fusion of Navigation Technology and E-Learning Systems for the On-the-Spot Learning ” In IET International Conference on Wire-less Communications and Applica-tions- ICWCA 2012 held at Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia during October 8th to 10th, 2012.

I. Visitors

• Dr. Vidit Jain , Yahoo, 10th October 2012

• Raman Grover, UC Irvine, 10th Octo-ber 2012

• Dr. Nitin Saxena, Hausdorff center, Bonn, 16th October 2012

• Prof. Uday Khedkar, IIT Bombay, 16th October 2012

• Prof. Anita Schoebel, Gottingen Uni-versity , 17th October 2012

• Dr. Anand Haridas, IBM, 29th October 2012

• Rijurekha Sen, IIT Bombay, 2nd No-vember 2012

• Dr. Ajit Rajwade, Dhirubhai Ambani Institute of Information and Occupa-tion Communication Technology (DA-IICT), Gandhinagar , 9th November 2012

• Prof Amitav Patra, Indian Association for the cultiva-tion of Science, 15th Novem-ber 2012

• Dr. Chetan Arora, Hebrew University Jerusalem, 21st

November 2012

• Dr. Parthasarathi Roop, Univ of Auckland, New Zealand, 1st Jan 2013

• Dr. Cristina M. Pinotti University of Perugia, Italy, 2nd Jan 2013

• Dr. Indrajit Roy, HP Labs, 3rd Jan 2013

• Dr. Sunil Simon, CWI Amsterdam, 7th Jan 2013

• Manish Gupta, University of Illinois , 8th Jan 2013

• Prof. Umesh Vazirani, U.C. Berkeley , 10th Jan 2013

• Prof Suyash Awate, Institute at the University of Utah, 11th Jan 2013

• Prof Mark Reynolds, University of Western Australia ,17th Jan 2013

• Prof Hema Sharda, University of Western Australia, 17th Jan 2013

• Prof. R. Ravi, Carnegie Mellon Uni-versity , 17th Jan 2013

• Dr. John Kampfner, Google, 28th Jan 2013

• Dr. Luiz DeRose , Cray Inc, 30th Jan 2013

• Prof. Tracy Camp of Colorado School

of Mines, 18th Feb 2013

• Dr. Rupesh Nasre, UT Austin, 21st Feb 2013

• Dr. Bruce Wile, IBM System & Tech-nology Group, 26th Feb 2013

• Dr. Partha Pratim Talukdar,Carnegie Mellon University 4th March 2013

• Dr. Sayan Ranu ,IBM Research, 8th March 2013

• Dr. Anand Kashyap, Symantec Labs ,13sh March 2013

• Dr. Hugh Durrant , NICTA, 21st March 2013

• Prof. Magda El Zarki,University of Cali-fornia, Irvine, 1st April 2013

• Dr. Rajat Mittal, Univ. of Waterloo, 1st April 2013

• Dr. Shashi Mittal, Amazon Research, 9th April 2013

• Dr. Vivek Singh, MIT Media Lab, 15th April 2013

II. Publications

• Arun Kumar Parakh, M. Balakrishnan, Kolin Paul. Per-formance estimation and ap-

plication mapping on different GPUs. 18th IEEE International Conference on High Performance Computing,Student Research Symposium (HiPC2012SRS), Pune, India, Dec, 2012.

• Arun Kumar Parakh, M. Balakrishnan, K o l i n P a u l . P e r f o r m a n c e enhancement of Map-Reduce framework on GPU. The 11th IASTED International Conference on Parallel and Distributed Computing and Networks (PDCN 2013), Innsbruck, Austria, Feb, 2013.

• Dipanjan Chakraborty, Indrani Medhi, Edward Cutrell and William Thies. Man versus Machine: Evaluating IVR versus a Live Operator for Phone Surveys in India. ACM Symposium on Computing for Development (DEV 2013). Banga-lore, India, January, 2013.

• Dipanjan Chakraborty and Aaditeshwar Seth. A Participatory Video and Audio Platform for Community Interaction Using DVDs and IVR Systems. Poster Session, ACM Symposium on

Page 6

Department News Flash

• Dhruv Jain, M. Balakrishnan et. al. Design and user study of an afford-able cellphone based indoor naviga-tion system for visually impaired”, by at the 13th International Confer-ence on “Mobility and Transport for Elderly and Disabled Peo-ple” (TRANSED 2012) held in New Delhi, India during 17 September 17th to 20th, 2012.

III. Department Updates

• Chetan Arora defended his PhD the-sis on 29th November 2012.

• Rudra Mohan Tripathy defended his PhD thesis on 8th May 2013.

IV. Awards

Dr. Amitabha Bagchi and Dr. Maya Ramanath received an Unrestricted Gift from the Faculty Research and En-

gagement program of Yahoo! for their proposal on Trend Detection on Twitter.

Page 7

I2 Tech 2013, the 9th Open house was or-ganized on 20th April 2013 in

the IIT Delhi premises. Over 500 pro-jects showcasing excellence in engi-neering & technology, science & hu-manities, design and management were put on display. The aim of the Open house is to provide an insight into path-breaking research work, student pro-jects and the numerous advanced facili-ties and laboratories available in IIT Delhi. The event acted as a platform for technology enthusiasts, students from other technical Institutes, school chil-dren, industries and general public to meet and discuss some latest advances in technology and engineering at IIT Delhi.

The event started with the welcome ad-dress by Prof. R. K. Shevgaonkar, Direc-tor, IIT Delhi followed by an invited talk on “Hard Disk: A wonder of the World” by Prof. Shouribrata Chatterjee,

from the Department of Electrical Engineer-ing, IIT Delhi. Prof. K Thyagarajan, Depart-ment of Physics, IIT Delhi delivered the invited talk on “Quantum entertainment with

photons”. There were demos and exhibits on display which included innovative projects like sensor-chips to detect pesticide residue in milk, earthquake safety of precious and delicate household items, drainage master plan of NCT in Geographic Information System (GIS), a multi-functional wheelchair, green power generation using bio-diesel, among others. These projects showcased some directed research towards enhancing human lives. Demo and live show were or-

ganized by the Robotics club.

Some other projects that caught visitors fancy were Portable foosball station for the purpose of entertainment, continuous mo-tion trolleys which was aimed for small-scale industries to facilitate delivery of articles from one point to another continu-ously with minimum electricity in a cost-effective way, window cleaners to facili-tate cleaning of windows from outside and inside.

The event concluded with award ceremony where the winners were adjudged by the alumni association. Instead of the usual three, this time six awards were given: 3 awards to UG and 3 awards to PG stu-dents.

More than 4000 visitors including a large number of school and college students visited the campus making the event a huge success enabling young innovators to showcase ideas and exchange knowledge.

Open house: I2Tech 2013

Contributed by : Parul Shukla

Department News Flash (continued)

• Dr. S Arun-Kumar, Dr. Sorav Bansal and Dr. Amitabha Bagchi were awarded IIT Delhi's Excellence in Teaching for the year 2012 .

• Rejoy V.M., Chinmay Narayan and Shibashis Guha were presented Out-standing Teaching Assistants award from the department for the semester (Semester-I, 2012-13) .

• Amit Ruhela, PhD student of Dr Aaditeshwar Seth, has been awarded t h e b e s t p r e s e n t a t i o n i n the COMSNETS 2012 PhD forum for his work on online social networks and Internet content distribution.

• The team of Rudradev Basak, Nikhil Garg and Pradeep George Mathis, under the guidance of Prof. Naveen Garg, have secured 18th place in the ACM ICPC 2012 contest .

• Best poster award for the poster "Roshni:Indoor Navigation System for visually impaired" by Dhruv

Jain, Prof. M. Balakrishnan et. al. presented at the 4th IBM Collabo-rative Academia Research Ex-change (I-CARE 2012) held in Bangalore, India during October 2012.

• Best paper award for the paper entitled "Design and user study of an affordable cellphone based indoor navigation sys-tem for visually impaired”, by Dhruv Jain, Prof. M. Balakrishnan et. al. at the 13th International Conference on “Mobility and Transport for Elderly and Disabled People” (TRANSED 2012 )held in New Delhi, September, 2012.

• Best paper award to Shivendra Tiwari, Saroj Kaushik, “Fusion of Navigation Technology and E-Learning Systems for the On-the-Spot Learning ” In IET International Conference on Wireless Communications and Applications- (ICWCA)2012 held at Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia during October 2012.

Page 8

take birth and eventually take flight.

In 1986, Khosla joined the venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers as a general partner. At Kleiner, Khosla became a recognized venture capitalist, with several successful early stage investments.

Khosla formed his own venture capi-tal firm, Khosla Ventures in 2004. The firm is based in Menlo Park, Califor-niaand manages approximately $1 bil-lion of investor capital as well as in-vestments funded by Khosla himself .

In 2006, Khosla's wife Neeru co-founded the CK-12 Foundation, which aims to develop open source text-books and lower the cost of education in America and the rest of the world.

Khosla and his wife are also donors to the Wikimedia Foundation.

In September 2009, Khosla completed fundraising for two new funds, to invest in cleantech and information technol-ogy start-ups. Khosla Ventures III se-cured $750 million of investor commit-ments to invest in traditional early stage and growth stage companies. Khosla also raised $250 million for Khosla Seed, which will invest in higher-risk opportunities.

Clean energy is another passion for Khosla, who received the support of former British Prime Minister Tony Blair in pushing technologies focused

Yes, the name is familiar because he is the man who provided the endowment for foundation of School of IT, formally known as Amarnath and Shashi Khosla

School of Information Technology (named after his parents), IIT Delhi , in 2004. Vinod Khosla (born 28 January 1955) is an Indian born American businessman and venture capitalist. Khosla's father was an officer in the Indian Army and it was while he was posted at New Delhi that Khosla read about the found-ing of Intel in Electronic Engi-neering Times at the age of four-teen. This inspired him to pursue technology as a career. He went on to complete multiple degrees in diverse fields from the worlds’ most reputed institutes: Bachelor of Technology in Electrical Engi-neering from the IIT Delhi, In-dia , Masters in Biomedical Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University , and finally MBA from Stanford Graduate School of Business. After graduating from Stanford Univer-sity in 1980, Khosla worked for electronic design automation company Daisy Sys-tems. But it was with Sun Microsystems, which he co-founded and headed from 1982 to 1984, that Khosla first became truly known. The firm Sun Micorsys-tems, an acronym for Stanford University Network, was started with Stanford class-mates. He left the firm to become a ven-ture capitalist, helping numerous start-ups

on the environment. In May 2010 it was announced that former British Prime Min-ister Tony Blair was to join Khosla Ven-tures to provide strategic advice regarding investments in technologies focused on the environment.

There is a lot to be learnt from the success and even the failures of Vinod Khosla. As in his own words:

“You sort of die the minute you stop trying

new things and doing new things, mentally

die, and if you try new things there is a

chance you will fail. So, I like to say my

willingness to fail gives me the ability to

succeed. I think what most people don’t

realize, I’ve failed more times than I have

succeeded in all of the things I’ve tried. It’s

just that every time I failed, I didn’t give up

trying new things is what made me suc-

cessful. I took plenty of shots at goal. If I

didn’t take those shots on goal,

I’d never scored. It’s sort of like

somebody said, “Try and fail,

but don’t fail to try.” Once you

fail to try, you think you haven’t

failed, but in fact you failed be-

fore you started because you

didn’t try it.”

Sources

1. http://www.indianexpress.com/news/

alumni-open-purse-to-help-iitd-build-

r e s e a r c h - s c h o o l s / 1 0 0 6 5 3 7 /

#sthash.TGESijSB.dpuf

2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vinod_Khosla

3. http://www.forbes.com/profile/vinod-

khosla/

4. http:///ww.abhayshukla.com/2012/03/08/

why-vinod-khosla-inspires-me-ventures-

failure/

5. http://www.hindustantimes.com/News-

Feed/India/Five-point-someone/Article1-

703123.aspx

An Alumnus with a difference: Vinod Khosla

Compiled by : Aditi Kapoor

“ ““Innovative, bottom-up methods will solve prob-

lems that now seem intractable—from energy to

poverty to disease. Science and technology, powered

by the fuel of entrepreneurial energy, are the largest

multipliers of resources we have to solve our many

social problems.”

“An entrepreneur is someone who dares to dream the dreams and is foolish enough to try to make those dreams

come true .” Vinod Khosla

I joined ACM CSE Student Chapter, IIT Delhi in 2011 as Web and Creativity Head, a newly formed group of the Chapter at that time. From my joining to the time of becoming the chairman of the chapter, when I look back, I see not only change in the Chapter, but a lot in myself as well which would have been impossible without my association with ACM. Now, while leaving ACM into the hands of a very capable and motivated new team, I would like to use this oppor-tunity to share my experiences, triumphs as well as lessons learnt with you all through this article. ACM IIT Delhi got established in 2002 with the aim of creating interest among the students for computer science apart from what they learn during the course work. The chapter, over years, has or-ganized talks and workshops on differ-ent subjects by speakers who are well known in their area, something which is known as the Distinguished Speaker

Program (DSP). These talks give stu-dents opportunities to learn about ad-vanced research subjects. Apart from this, events focusing application devel-opment, coding competitions, etc have also remained a focus area for us. These competitions, not only installs competi-tive culture among students, but also

gives a much needed industrial interaction to the students as most of these competitions are organized in association with big companies like Yahoo!, Google, IBM and Microsoft. Chapter’s internal events like Technical Ori-entation, known as Frosh Welcome, for first year students, Exam Archive and Newsletter has continued to be appreciated by both the students as well as the professors. Talking more specifically about the last year, we started with three things on our mind –

• Increasing the overall reach of the ACM Chapter as well as of the chapter activities

• Increasing the overall impact of our events on students by introducing more creative events and ways to increase awareness and participa-tion of students in them

• Increasing awareness about ACM in general and helping others universi-ties in opening local student chap-ters while providing mentorship

It is very satisfying to see that through the hard work of the all the team members and their commitment towards our vision, we have been able to achieve the goals we had set for ourselves. ACM IIT Delhi went inter-national in the past year through our unique SAARC Coding Competition with aim of bringing together all students of South Asia. In its second edition, we collaborated with 32

universities across India, Pakistan, Bangla-desh and Sri Lanka. The event was a huge success with large number of participation and appreciation from student fraternity of all four nations. This also helped increase awareness about ACM with universities asking for mentorship support to open stu-dent chapters at their respective universities. We are currently helping in activities of newly formed ACM Student Chapter JNU. Apart from this, last year was again full of lots of events, but one event is worth men-tioning here. We started a new tradition of a coding competition only for first year stu-dents by the name of frosh. I feel that events like this help in channelizing new students in right direction from the beginning only. On a personal level, I would say, heading an organization like this was definitely a very challenging task. There were numerous occasions where you have to hold your nerves, take difficult decisions and take last minute calls while being calm, unbiased and highly professional. But at the end of the day, you come out as being more confident, mature and experienced. I am glad that I was given this opportunity and wish the new team will scale even greater heights in ACM IIT Delhi’s commitment of serving the com-puter science student fraternity of IIT Delhi.

Page 9

Contributed by : Sudhanshu Shekher

“Education is the most powerful weapon

which you can use to change the world”, words said by Nelson Mandela highlight the importance of education in today’s world. Easy accessibility to quality edu-cation is the dream of a number of stu-dents particularly in the developing na-tions. Coursera, an educational technol-ogy company, brainchild of computer science professors Andrew Ng and Daphne Koller from Stanford Univer-sity, aims at a future where everyone has access to world-class education. It part-ners with the top universities and organi-zations in the world to offer free of cost courses online. Anyone with just an internet connection can avail this facility hence enabling thousands to enroll for a course. Initiated in 2012, at present it offers over 300 courses in over 20 cate-

gories such as engineering, humanities, medicine, biology, social sciences, mathe-matics, business, computer science etc, cre-ated by 62 universities including Brown university, Duke, Georgia Institute of Tech-nology, Stanford and Princeton amongst others, from 16 countries. The courses range from Introduction to public speaking, Song-writing, Introduction to classical music to specialized ones like Medical neuroscience.

The students can enroll for a course which offers short video lectures by eminent educa-tors. They can take interactive quizzes and complete peer-graded assignments and inter-act online with the new classmates and teachers, . There are discussion forum avail-able to enable students to discuss the course content and solve common problems. Upon

completion of the course a statement of ac-

complishment is sent to the student.

Coursera recently won the 2012 Crunchies

“Best new startup” award for its path-

breaking initiative. According to New York

times, Coursera has indeed impacted people

in positive way. The article tells the story of

a 17 year old autistic student who was able

to study online, enabling him to manage his

autisim better by using the online learning

system and communicating through the com-

puter. Over 2 million students have availed

this facility and the count keeps on increas-

ing suggesting its far-reaching impact on the

education community.

Education beyond boundaries: Coursera

ACM, activities with a difference

Contributed by : Parul Shukla

Page 10

ACM, a plethora of activities : Tryst 2013

This year at IIT Delhi’s flagship technical festival, Tryst, the focus was on ‘cool science’. To reflect this theme, we at ACM came up with a fresh crop of fun events to entice the novices and enthrall the experts - alongside the ‘oldies’ which we all have come to love. BugSmash

simulated the frustration and channeled the inner detective to find those elusive bugs; Algorythm, a classic; Game of

Thrones - a cat and mouse chase for AIs; Juggle Your Balls, a Rube - Goldberg

competition; and Intelligentia for the hard-core ML enthusiasts; were some the events conducted. Game of Thrones was a completely out of the box event where each team had to code to play cat and mouse chase where each agent had to catch the opposite’s ‘villain’ while ensuring your ‘knight’ is safe. Submissions were in python or with a python wrapper. Juggle Your Balls was a Rube-Goldberg inspired event based on Google’s Goldberg platform. The aim of

this event was to build a virtual contrap-tion of pulleys, springs and grooves which can juggle a ball for as long as possible without hitting the sides or run-ning into an infinite loop. Brownie points were awarded for ‘coolness’! In-

tellengtia was a more real-world applica-tion of computer skills. The problem put before the participants was deceivingly simple – build the most impressive clas-sifier which matches people to jobs. An additional complication was to ensure equal job opportunities i.e. help the indi-viduals find the job best for them at the same time making sure companies get

the best talent they can. The ML enthusi-asts had a field day testing their skills on such a close to real-world event. BugSmash had a series of nine C codes with bugs of varying difficulties. You had to let your inner sleuth out and identify the overflow, type mismatch, algorithmic and various other hidden bugs and correct them for points. There sure were some 'aha' mo-ments! The paper even featured a specially designed C code in the shape of the symbol pi which printed out the value of pi. Al-

gorythm had two rounds – a preliminary ‘easy’ round followed by a more intensive brainstorming session. This year saw more participation from the sophomores than any other in this event. Thus, the ACM and ACES together man-aged to pull off an enjoyable set of events with core computer-science concepts at their heart.

The SAARC coding competition is a live programming contest that brings together coding enthusiasts from the South Asian countries and strings together these neighboring nations in a unique way. It celebrates the vast potential that students from South Asia have always had in the field of coding and also fosters a spirit of brotherhood through a common link – the love for programming. It brings students from various disciplines and various dif-ferent educational institutions to a com-mon platform.

Last year, ACM CSE Student Chapter IITD went global with the organization of an Indo-pak coding event called the Asia

Cup or the Indo-Pak Coding Competition. With an overwhelming response from the students, it turned out to be one of the biggest coding events of the country man-aged entirely by students. With sponsors like Google, Microsoft and associations with organizations like TOI and Aman ki

Asha, the event turned out to be a huge success. Inspired by the positive feedback to Asia Cup, this year, ACM IITD went one step further with the inclusion of two

more countries and thus, SAARC Coding

Competition was born. It was amazing to see that everyone from freshers to final year students participating in the event. The broad spectrum to which the partici-pants belonged was overwhelming. It was wonderful to see how the love for program-ming can unite people with diverse back-grounds.

The rules of the event followed the ACM-ICPC pattern. Teams of maximum three students were allowed to participate in the event. Students were not allowed to bring in any written material and only one termi-nal per team was permitted. The questions adhered to the ACM ICPC standards and had been contributed by students in India and Pakistan. The teams were all too eager to start with the competition and started tackling the problem heads on from the first minute itself. There were a few prob-

ACM, a plethora of activities : SAARC

lems which had the participants in kind of a fix while at the same time there were other ones that brought a victorious smile over the tense faces. The five hour event went on without any major technical glitches. A team from the University of Moratuwa, Sri Lanka secured the first position, with the second and third position going to a team from BUET, Bangladesh and a team from NSIT Delhi, India respectively. A team from IIT Delhi secured the fourth position. The winners received a cash prize and a certificate and all the participants were given certificates of participation by ACM Student Chapter IIT Delhi.

The SAARC coding competition 2013 was indeed a memorable event which not only tested the programming abilities of the participants but also their ability to work in a team and to tackle advanced coding chal-lenges. The event served as a great learning experience for all the teams, especially the freshers, who got a flavor of competitive coding. We look forward to the next in-stallment of this unique and exciting event.

Contributed by : Sai Praneeth

Contributed by : Shivani Sen

Page 11

Contributed by : Aditi Kapoor

Fun Section: Recipe to a happy life

The ACM CSE Newsletter was started as a vehicle for displaying the departmental achievements and activi-ties at a common forum for all to visit and revisit. Being a part this team from the first year of its inception almost 6 years ago, it’s been a pleasure for me to see it grow. The acm team which itself started off as 4 members, has now expanded to almost 20. The newsletter has seen several productive changes with the infusion of new ideas as new eager members joined and contributed. Since change is the order of the life, I

tions are invited from the faculty and stu-dents of the department. Contributions can be from any of the whole gamut of activities in the depart-ment like any special achievement, an admirable project, a publication or even the fun section material like jokes, car-toons, interesting facts or poems. You can also report any interesting workshops or talks being held in the department. Contributory material can be given to any member of the Editorial Board or mailed at pulkityadav1@gmail.com.

Acknowledgement Section and Call for Articles

am leaving this newsletter in the able hands of the present team. The team is set to take over charge of ACM chapter and this newsletter. I trust their ability and competence. I sincerely wish that they will get the same support and encouragement as you have showered upon me all these years. Of course, more students are invited to get involved in the ACM Chapter activi-ties by providing articles as well as for participating in the various upcoming events of the Chapter. Suggestions and inputs for the improvement of the news-letter are most welcome and contribu- Aditi Kapoor, Chief Editor

Dollops of love from people we care about, Mixed with smiles, Stir it in a bowl of success Pour optimism into it

Acquire a medium level of living Neither so high that it gets burnt out

Nor so cautiously low that it’s left half-cooked

Add a pinch of salty tears and disappointment to know the taste of sweet success Preserve in an environment of peace

But don’t leave it static for long or it will become stale

And yes, don’t forget to clean up your mess before you leave

Contributed by :Aditi Kapoor

“Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing

that it is stupid.” ~Albert Einstein

Some tit “bits”

ACM Student Chapter SponsorACM Student Chapter SponsorACM Student Chapter SponsorACM Student Chapter Sponsor————Dr. S. SarangiDr. S. SarangiDr. S. SarangiDr. S. Sarangi

BROUGHT OUT BY ACM STUDENT CHAPTER

Newsletter TeamNewsletter TeamNewsletter TeamNewsletter Team

Magazine inMagazine inMagazine inMagazine in----charge: Aditi Kapoor charge: Aditi Kapoor charge: Aditi Kapoor charge: Aditi Kapoor (aditi@cse.iitd.ernet.in)(aditi@cse.iitd.ernet.in)(aditi@cse.iitd.ernet.in)(aditi@cse.iitd.ernet.in)

Assisted by ACM chapter membersAssisted by ACM chapter membersAssisted by ACM chapter membersAssisted by ACM chapter members

Parul ShuklaParul ShuklaParul ShuklaParul Shukla Aayush Goel Aayush Goel Aayush Goel Aayush Goel Pulkit Yadav.Pulkit Yadav.Pulkit Yadav.Pulkit Yadav.

Sudhanshu ShekherSudhanshu ShekherSudhanshu ShekherSudhanshu Shekher (Photos in above order left to right)(Photos in above order left to right)(Photos in above order left to right)(Photos in above order left to right)

Page 12

ACROSS :

1. The longest word that can be made using the letters only on one row of the keyboard. (10) 4. The first person of Indian origin to receive the ACM Turing Award. (8) 6. Digital currency used for online payments. (7)

8. An encryption algorithm. (3)

10. Apple’s personal assistant application.(4)

11. The freeware web browser developed by Google.(6)

14. Wrongfully trying to ac-quire sensitive information by pretending to be genuine en-tity is called _____. (8)

15. Name of algorithm used by Google to rank webpages. (8)

DOWN :

2. Name of Intel’s micro-architecture used in modern CPUs based on 22 nm process.(9)

3. A computer programming jargon term for a software bug that seems to disappear or alter its behavior when one attempts to study its state. (9)

4. Answer of this question is the an-swer of this question. (9)

5. A popular cross-platform instant messaging application for smart-phones. (8)

7. An interpreted programming lan-guage in which indenting your code is actually important! (6)

9. Name of the first industrial robot, which was used at General Motors. (7)

12. Key-value based data structure. (4)

13. Which company was earlier known as “Moore Noyce Electron-

ics”? (5)

Contributed by : Pulkit Yadav See the website in second week of June for answers!