Monthly Archives: July 2012

Lecture on Turing Award Winner Ted Codd (Databases) by Sham Navathe – 4 Aug

Ted Codd was awarded the Turing Award in 1981 for “his fundamental and continuing contributions to the theory and practice of database management systems.” A simpler way to put it would be that Codd was given the award for inventing relational databases (RDBMS).

On 4th August, Prof. Sham Navathe, of Georgia Tech University, who is visiting Pune, will talk about Ted Codd’s work. This talk is a part of the Turing Awards lecture series that happens at Persistent’s Dewang Mehta Auditorium at 2pm on the first Saturday of every month this year.

About the Turing Awards

The Turing awards, named after Alan Turing, given every year, are the highest achievement that a computer scientist can earn. And the contributions of each Turing award winner are then, arguably, the most important topics in computer science.

About Turing 100 @ Persistent Lecture Series

This year, the Turing 100 @ Persistent lecture series will celebrate the 100th anniversary of Alan Turing’s birth by having a monthly lecture series. Each lecture will be presented by an eminent personality from the computer science / technology community in India, and will cover the work done by one Turing award winner.

The lecture series will feature talks on Ted Codd (Relational Databases), Vint Cerf and Robert Kahn (Internet), Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie (Unix), Jim Gray, Barbara Liskov, and others. Full schedule is here

This is a lecture series that any one in the field of computer science must attend. These lectures will cover the fundamentals of computer science, and all of them are very relevant today.

Fees and Registration

This is a free event. Anyone can attend.

The event will be at Dewang Mehta Auditorium, Persistent Systems, SB Road, at from 2pm to 5pm on Saturday 4th August. This event is free and open for anybody to attend. Register here

Activities of SEAP – the Software Exporters Association of Pune

SEAP (the Software Exporters Association of Pune), the organization consisting of top software companies of Pune has been very active last year. On 27th July SEAP had its AGM, and at this, Gaurav Mehra, president of SEAP gave a report of his activities. This is a quick capture of his report – and should give an idea of the various SEAP activities in Pune.

These are the major activities of SEAP last year:

  • Advocacy. Represent Pune’s software companies at:
    • RAC Customs,
    • STPI, Hinjewadi
    • ESI Inspector
    • PF Office
  • Ideas Exchange and Education
    • SEAP Book Club meets on the first Saturday of every month – 10am at Sungard Aundh. 13 books have been presented so far, and this will continue
    • Breakfast series – 3rd Wednesday of every month -at Sumant Moolgaokar Auditorium, ICC, SB Road. Cover topics of interest to middle management and higher. Topics covered in the 4 sessions so far – Innovation, Security, etc.
    • Leadership Forum. 15 member companies trained on Crucial Conversations. Atyaasaa did a session on managing human resources in turbulent times.
    • SEAP Education.
  • Collaboration and Connection
    • Working with and expanding the eco-system
    • Working closely with NASSCOM to bring their events to Pune in a much more aggressive manner
    • PuneConnect (done with PuneTech, Pune Open Coffee Club, TiE Pune, and ET Now) put small startups Pune in touch with the established companies.
    • SEAP-Zinnov event.
    • SEAP’s Other collaborations with the ecosystem
      • TiE – exchange invitations and merge calendars
      • IPMA Pune hosted along with the SEAP Book Club
      • PuneTech – exchange of calendars and invitations
      • CSI Pune – exchange of invitations
  • Networking
    • SEAP Golf: Golf tournament and clinic. 50 players. (Thanks Dell computers)
  • Value Added Services
    • Research, communication and partner networks
    • Create SEAP Associate Members – a bunch of companies, who are “recommended” providers of products and services that are of interest to SEAP member companies.
    • Research and Publications: Compensation and Benefits study for Pune by Hexagon
    • Pune Advantage Study by Zinnov
  • Communication
    • Brand new SEAP website – with the help of Aadi Ventures
      • Member areas
      • Features for Colleges
      • Creation of Companies Directories by area
    • Facebook page
    • LinkedIn Group
    • YouTube Page
  • Corporate Social Responsibility
    • Hosted Bhimthadi Jatra in SEAP member companies
    • Supported Students FUEL
  • SEAP Advisory Council:
    • Creation of a SEAP Advisory Council consisting of past SEAP Presidents – Anand Desphande, Nitin Deshpande, Abhijit Atre, Chetan Shah who will advice SEAP on a formal biannual basis.
  • SEAP Ambassador in Silicon Valley Area:
    • Parag Mehta, of QLogic, past president of SEAP, is formally named as the “ambassador” of SEAP in the Silicon Valley. He will be the evangelist for Pune and SEAP there.

PuneTech Event: Storage Technology Trends talk by Ken Boyd, IBM: 28 July

Ken Boyd, a Distinguished Engineer at IBM, who has been building high end storage products at IBM for over 25 years, is visiting Pune and will talk about his thoughts on the trends in storage technology.

On Saturday July 28, 5pm, at MCCIA, SB Road, Ken will present some of the technology trends that are shaping the design of future storage systems in IBM. Ken will also discuss the opportunities these technology trends are creating for increasing the value of future storage systems. This talk is free and open to all those who’re interested in attending.

Ken is current Chief NAS (Network Attached Storage) Architect at IBM, and leads IBM’s NAS division. He is a Distinguished Engineer at IBM and has been awarded the Master Inventor award, and holds over 40 patents.

Ken recently completed a two year IBM international assignment in Israel where he served as XIV Chief Architect. After IBM acquired XIV, an Israeli start up company, Ken led the XIV team in defining the future architecture and system design of IBM-XIV. Ken also led the technical integration of XIV into IBM.

Ken started his IBM career after graduating from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign in with a B.S. degree in Computer Engineering. After beginning as an IBM logic designer, Ken held a variety of engineering and management positions in Poughkeepsie, NY before transferring to Tucson, AZ in 1987. Advancing in IBM’s storage development team in Tucson, Ken led several organizations, including hardware development, microcode development, technical support marketing, and product management. Ken made significant contributions to IBM high end storage products, including the IBM 3990 Storage Controller, the IBM Enterprise Storage Controller (now known as the DS8000 family), and the XIV Storage System. He was promoted to IBM Director in 1993 and was named an IBM Distinguished Engineer in 2003. In July 2005 Ken received an IBM Outstanding Innovation Award for significant contributions to developing and protecting IBM Intellectual Property. Ken, named an IBM Master Inventor, holds over 40 patents and has achieved an IBM 12th Plateau Invention Achievement Award. Ken earned a M.B.A. degree from the University of Arizona and he is a Senior Member of the IEEE.

This is a free event, and anybody interested in technology is free to attend.

Registration and Fees

This event is free and open for anybody to attend. Please register here

Event Report: Turing 100 @ Persistent – The Theory of Computation

This is a liveblog of the Turing 100 @ Persistent Event.

The Turing Awards celebrate the achievements of some of the most influential computer scientists. Unfortunately, a lot of the professionals and students in computer science are not well versed with the work of Turing Award winners, and since this year is the 100th birth anniversary of Alan Turing, the Turing 100 @ Persistent Lecture series has been started with the hope of sparking an interest amongst the computer science and software community in looking at computer science in some depth.

For each lecture, one Turing Award recipient will be picked and a 90-minute talk will be given on the work of that person. One such lecture will happen on every 1st Saturday of every month until June 2013. The schedule can be see here

Today’s event features a talk about Alan Turing himself by Mathai Joseph, Advisor TCS, followed by a talk on Turing’s Theory of Computation by Vivek Kulkarni, a Principal Architect at Persistent Systems.

Alan Turing – by Mathai Joseph

These are some rough notes taken during the talk.

  • Turing was the first person to provide a mathematical model for the concept of “computation” which could be used for mathematically proving things related to computation. This led to the concept of:
    • computability – whether something can be computed by computers
    • decidability – whether it is possible to
    • He did all of this before getting a PhD
  • Church – Turing Thesis
    • Turing went to Princeton to Work with Alonzo Church
    • Church had proved computability result using lambda calculus
    • Church, Kleene, and Rosser had used recursive functions
    • Turing showed that this could be shown much more simply using the Turing machine
  • Did his PhD from Princeton in 1938
    • Mathematical basis for computing
    • intuitively understandable solution
  • After his PhD, Turing went to Bletchley Park, which had the UK government’s main “decryption” center
    • Bletchley Park was involved in cryptanalysis – breaking of codes
    • Huge teams human analysts worked in shifts to break codes
    • Turing joined and became a leader in cryptanalysis
    • Bletchley Park relied on Turing to invent new, better methods for breaking codes
    • He played a key part in deciphering the Enigma code that the Germans used during World War 2.
  • After the war, Turing moved to Manchester to work on:
    • Computer Design
    • AI
    • Program Verification
    • Morphogenesis
  • One of Turing’s lasting legacies is the study of complexity of algorithms
    • There is a long history of interest in this area
    • Ancient Greeks did it. Mathematicians in Kerala did it.
    • Mathematicians did it too: Cantor, Hilbert, Pocklinton, Post, Church, Turing
    • Given a strong base in 1960s – Hartmanis and Stearns formally quantified time & space of a computation in terms of number of steps taken by a Turing machine to complete the computation, and the total number of cells used on the tape. Obviously, Turing machines were key to this analysis. Without it, characterising the problem would have been much more difficult.
  • Computer Science without Turing Machine?
    • Difficult to imagine
    • Something else would have evolved but:
      • Would have taken longer to find
      • Would have been harder to understand
      • Would have been of less practical use
  • Finally
    • Turing was 42 when he died (by cyanide poisoning – unclear whether it was a suicide or an accident)
    • We can only guess what he might have done if he had lived longer
    • A remarkable mind: mathematician, scientist, engineers and 100% genius

Turing’s Theory of Computation – by Vivek Kulkarni

This talk was an in-depth look at the theory of computation, covering:

  • The concept of a state machine
  • Determinism and non-determinism
  • The concept of a Turing Machine
  • Solvable and semi-solvable problems
  • Godel numbering and Turing machine encoding
  • The Universal Turing Machine
  • The Halting Problem
  • Multi-tape Turing Machines

Unfortunately, the talk was quite technical, and it is not easy to blog about it, especially without diagrams (which are quite important when you need to understand state machines and Turing machines, hence unfortunately, this live blog ends here.)


The next talk in this series will be on 4th August where Prof. Sham Navathe, from Georgia Tech University, USA, who is visiting Pune, will talk about the work of Ted Codd, the inventor of relational databases.

SEAP Book Club Report: “Good to Great”

This is a liveblog of the SEAP Book Club Meeting on 7th July, where Gaurav Mehra, co-founder and MD of Saba Software, talked about the book Good to Great by Jim Collins. The SEAP Book Club meets on the first Saturday of every month at 10:30am in Sungard, Aundh.

This book is the second in a series of books. The first was Built to Last which talked about why some companies survive for more than 100 years – while others die. Good to Great talks about what makes some companies special enough to jump far higher over other successful companies. The 3rd book was How the Mighty Fall – This talked about why some companies, which seem to be doing great, fail. And finally, Great by Choice, their latest book, pulls all these threads together.

Interesting points made during the talk:

  • Good is the enemy of the great. If you’re good enough you will not strive for greatness. Need to be constantly wary of falling into this trap.
  • What you need is disciplined people, followed by disciplined thought, and finally disciplined action which will result in breakthrough greatness
  • This book is based on a study over 30 years of some great companies, deliberately compared against very similar companies which were successful but fell short of greatness. The suggestions on the book are based on what they found empirically.
  • Level 5 Leadership:
    • Personal Humility combined with Professional Will
    • Darwin Smith of Kimberly Clark: “I never stopped trying to become qualified for the job”
    • It’s always we not _I_
    • Usually not media heroes – not many articles will be written about them
    • Have ambition for company, not for self
    • 90% of such leaders come from within the company
  • Larger than Life leaders (Jack Welch, Lee Iacocca) are not good for a company at this stage. Characteristics of such leaders:
    • Took existing large/great companies – did not create the greatness
    • Set up successors for failure
    • Personal ambition trumps what’s best for companies
    • Large acquisitions, which might not make sense for the company
    • Note: the names mentioned above are not bad leaders. But they’re not the leaders who can take a good company to greatness.
    • Data shows that bringing a larger than life outsider into a company is negatively correlated with performance
  • Set up successors for success
    • Humble leaders with ambition for company, not self, do this very well
    • Larger than life leaders usually fail at this
    • Henry Singleton, co-founder of Teledyne was a good leader, built and ran Teledyne for a very long time, but the company did not do well after his retirement because he wasn’t able to groom a good successor
  • Get the right people on the bus and the wrong people off the bus
    • The great leaders did not focus on what to do. They focused on who should be in charge, and great things happened automatically
    • Having a genius at the top, with a thousand helpers (e.g. Singleton at Teledyne) is a bad idea. When the genius leaves, the helpers don’t know what to do.
    • It’s about whom you pay, not how or how much. The people should be there because they are passionate about what you’re doing, not focused on the salary. “Hire five, work them like ten, and pay them like eight.” This will lead to a lot of turn over, especially in the early stages, but in the long term, this will work best.
  • When in doubt, dont hire
    • Hire only A+ people. As Steve Jobs pointed out, if you hire B people, they will in turn hire C people and your company will go to the dogs.
  • Give your best people where the opportunities are – not where the problems are
    • The CEO of RJR Nabisco put his best person in charge of the international business, which accounted for 1% of the business – because that’s where the growth was. He went from controlling 99% of the company to 1% of the company. The result – RJR Nabisco became a world leader before becoming the leader in USA.
  • Confront the brutal facts

The Hedgehog Concept

The Hedgehog Concept idea is one of the most interesting parts of the book.

The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows only one thing. Focus on just that one big thing.

What you do, should be an intersection of these:

  • What you are deeply passionate about
  • What you are the best in the world about
  • What drives your economic engine

In other words, something is worth doing only if you can do it, you will enjoy doing it, and someone is willing to pay for it. If one of these is missing, dont do it.

Learn to say “No.” Stay with your Hedgehog principle and do not run after the new hotness. Like you have a ToDo list, you should also have a “Stop Doing” list. Your best returns come from having an undiversified portfolio (when you’re right).

Summary

  • Disciplined People
    • Level 5 Leadership
    • First Who then What
  • Disciplined Thought
    • Confront the Brutal Facts
    • Hedgehog Concept
  • Disciplined Action
    • Culture of Discipline
    • Technology Accelerations

Call for Speakers: ClubHack Security Conference 2012

ClubHack is one of India’s foremost conferences on Security and is now in its 6th year. As usual, it will be on the first weekend of December (1st to 3rd) in Pune.

However, rather than focusing on just plain security and awareness of security, ClubHack is now changing its focus. Here is the motivation:

ClubHack when started in 2007, dreamt that people in India will wake up and start thinking information security seriously. We even decided our motto as “Making Security a Common Sense”. After 5 long years, today we witness a lot of action around the country in this field, media as well as working professionals are actually looking towards security seriously.

Waking up to an extent that today we see 5-6 similar events in India on the same line. Hence we have now decided to confer the task of rest of the awakening to them and start a new journey.

ClubHack2012 onwards, we will concentrate our energies in empowering innovation & leadership development. Having loved our domain so much, we’d continue to do this in the domain of information security only. And that coins our new motto line “Empowering Innovation & Leadership in Information Security”

With this in mind, this year’s ClubHack is looking for speakers who can emphasize entrepreneurship in this space. So, here is a partial list of suggested topics:

  • Entrepreneurship in infosec product development
  • Research work in infosec
  • Innovation in attack vectors
  • Attacks on Cloud
  • Mobile computing
  • Malware & Botnets
  • Privacy with social networks
  • Telecom Security (3G/4G, SS7, GSM/CDMA, VoIP) and Phone Phreaking
  • Hardware, Embedded Systems and other Electronic Devices Hacking
  • War of handhelds & BYOD
  • Cyber warfare & your role
  • Open Source Intelligence (OSINT)
  • Signal Intelligence (SIGINT) – COMINT, ELINT, etc
  • Critical Infrastructure Protection
  • Security aspects in SCADA and industrial environments and “obscure” networks
  • & the general other infosec domains like web, network, tools & exploits etc.

Those who would like to deliver a workshop at ClubHack2012, please write to cfp@clubhack.com to discuss the details.

Why become a speaker? In addition to helping the community, becoming well known and famous, meeting interesting people in this area, you also get:

  • Travel reimbursement or arrangement of economy return tickets for speakers
  • Accommodation for 2
  • Complementary passes for event & party for 2
  • Gift hampers & freebies

See the CFP link for more details of how to submit a proposal.

Event: Turing’s Theory of Computing – Turing 100 @ Persistent – July 7

The Turing awards, named after Alan Turing, given every year, are the highest achievement that a computer scientist can earn. And the contributions of each Turing award winner are then, arguably, the most important topics in computer science. This year, the Turing 100 @ Persistent lecture series will celebrate the 100th anniversary of Alan Turing’s birth by having a monthly lecture series. Each lecture will be presented by an eminent personality from the computer science / technology community in India, and will cover the work done by one Turing award winner.

The lecture series will feature talks on Ted Codd (Relational Databases), Vint Cerf and Robert Kahn (Internet), Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie (Unix), Jim Gray, Barbara Liskov, and others. Full schedule is here

This is a lecture series that any one in the field of computer science must attend. These lectures will cover the fundamentals of computer science, and all of them are very relevant today.

This lecture series kicks off this Saturday with a talk on the work of Turing himself – Turing’s Theory of Computing, by Vivek Kulkarni, Principal Architect at Persistent Systems. The full schedule of the event is:

  • Welcome Address: Dr. Anand Deshpande, CEO Persistent Systems
  • Keynote: Dr. Mathai Joseph, Advisor TCS
  • Media Presentation: Life of Alan Turing
  • Turing’s Theory of Computation: Vivek Kulkarni, Principal Architect Persistent Systems

The event will be at Dewang Mehta Auditorium, Persistent Systems, SB Road, at from 2pm to 5pm on Saturday 7th July. This event is free and open for anybody to attend. Register here