I was invited to visit the Nvidia Tech Week this past weekend (February 25-26, 2012) at their facilities in Pune. This is a great concept – getting employees to invite friends and relatives to actually see what their company is all about is very good social outreach and a fantastic marketing initiative. If more tech companies in the area do similar events once or twice a year, it will help lift the shroud of technical opaqueness around them. I think hosting similar events in area colleges will also help students realize that even VLSI/Embedded Systems Design is cool.

I was given a personal tour by Sandeep Sathe, a Sr. Development manager at Nvidia and also met with Jaya Panvalkar, Sr. Director and head of Pune facilities. There was enough to see and do at this event and unfortunately I was a bit short on time. It would have taken a good two hours for a complete walk-through, so I decided to spend more time on the GPU/HPC section though the Tegra based mobile device section was also quite impressive. It’s been a while since I actually installed a new graphics card in a desktop (actually, it’s been a while since I used a desktop), but graphics cards have come a long way! Nvidia is using standard PCI Express form factor cards for the GPU modules with on-board fans and DVI connectors.

The following are key takeaways from the demo stations I visited

GeForce Surround 2-D

Here, Nvidia basically stretches the game graphics from a single monitor to three monitors. Great for gamers as it gives a fantastic feel for peripheral vision. The game actually doesn’t have to support this. The graphics card takes care of it. The setup here is that while the gamer sits in front of the main monitor, he also sees parts of the game in his peripheral vision in two other monitors that are placed at an angle to the main monitor. I played a car rally game and the way roadside trees, objects moved from the main monitor to the peripheral vision monitors was quite fascinating.

GeForce 3-D Vision Surround

This is similar to the above, but with 3D. You can completely immerse yourself in the game. This sort of gaming setup is now forcing monitor manufacturers to develop monitors with ultra small bezel widths. I suppose at some point in the next few years, we will be able to seamlessly merge graphics from different monitors into one continuous collage without gaps.

Powerwall Premium Mosaic

Powerwall is a eight monitor setup driven by the Quadro professional graphics engine. Two Quadro modules fit into one Quadroplex industrial PC to drive four monitors. Projectors can also be used in place of monitors to create a seamless view. The display was absolutely clear and highly detailed. The Powerwall is application transparent. Additional coolness factor – persistence data is saved so you don’t lose the image during video refresh and buffer swaps. This is most certainly a tool intended for professionals who need high quality visuals and computing in their regular work. Examples are automotive, oil and gas, stock trading.

PhysX Engine

PhysX is a graphics engine that infuses real time physics into games or applications. It is intended to make objects in games or simulations move as they would in real life. To me this was very disruptive, and highlight of the show. You can read more about PhysX here. It is very clear how PhysX would change gaming. The game demo I watched had several outstanding effects: dried leaves moving away from the character as he walks through a corridor, glass breaking into millions of shards as it would in real life. Also running was a PhysX simulation demo that would allow researchers to actually calculate how objects would move in case of a flood. What was stunning was that the objects moved differently every time as they would in real life. PhysX runs on Quadro and Tesla GPUs. It is interesting to note that Ra.One special effects were done using PhysX.

3D photos and movies

Next couple of demos demonstrated 3D TV and photo technology using Sony TVs and a set of desktops/laptops. Notably, the Sony 3D glasses were much more comfortable compared to others. Nvidia is working with manufacturers to create more comfortable glasses. There was also a Toshiba laptop that uses a tracking eye camera to display a 3D image to the viewer regardless of seating position without glasses. It was interesting. However, the whole 3D landscape need a lot of work from the industry before it can become mainstream.

Optimus

What was explained to me was that Optimus allows laptops to shut off GPUs when they are not needed. They can be woken up when high performance work is required. This would be automatic and seamless, similar to how power delivery is in on a Toyota Prius. This sort of a technology is not new to computing – a laptop typically puts a lot of components to sleep/hibernate when not being used, but the GPU is not included.

Quadro Visualizations

This allows 2D/3D visualizations for automotive, architectural and similarly complex systems for up to one thousand users at a time. You can easily change colors, textures, views so everyone can comment and give constructive feedback. I was not sure if the design can be changed on the fly as well. Nvidia is working with ISVs like Maya and Autodesk on this.

Tesla

Tesla GPUs use chips that are used for high performance computing and not rendering, which is different from what Nvidia typically does. The Tesla modules do not have any video ports! It has a heterogeneous GPU/CPU architecture that saves power. In fact, the SAGA-220 supercomputer, dubbed India’s fastest, at ISRO’s Vikram Sarabhai Space Center facility uses 2070 Tesla GPUs along with 400 Intel Xeon processors. In addition to supercomputing, Tesla is very useful in 3D robotic surgery, 3D ultrasound, molecular dynamics, oil and gas, weather forecasting and many more applications.

Tegra Mobile Processor

Next few demos showcased the Tegra mobile applications processor based on ARM Cortex A9 cores. The HD quality graphics and imaging were impressive. It is clear that smartphones and tablets of the day are clearly far more powerful compared to desktops of yesteryear and can support highly impressive video and audio in a very handy form factor.

In all, I had a great time. As I mentioned earlier, Nvidia along with other tech companies in Pune should hold more of these kinds of events to give technology exposure to the larger population in general. I think it is important for people to know that the stuff that makes Facebook run is the real key and that is where the coolness is.

Background

• Suhas joined BMC Pune and was given the job of creating an innovation incubator within the company.
• This was the second attempt at creating an incubator in BMC. A previous attempt had failed spectacularly. The previous one had been started with great fanfare, with a 100 people team, and over time, it went down to 80, to 60 to nothing. With this history Suhas started his incubator with zero employees, and minimal fanfare.

On Innovation

• Suhas defines innovation as “Ideas to Cash.” This is important. The focus on cash, i.e. revenues, was an important difference between this incubator and the previous incubator, and also other research labs in companies around the world. Invention for the sake of invention, research for the sake of research is something that they definitely did not want to do. The wanted to ensure that everything they do has a direct or indirect revenue impact upside for BMC.
• There actually exists a document called “The Oslo Manual” which is a set of guidelines for how to do innovation. It is a free PDF that anyone can download, and Suhas recommends that to anyone interested in innovation.
• The Oslo Manual points out that innovation can happen in 4 different areas Product, Process, Marketing and Organization. Suhas adds a 5th category of innovation: “User Experience”

The BMC Incubator

• Why does a product company need an incubator? Product teams get bogged down by tactical improvements for existing customers, and the larger vision (beyond 12-24 months) does not get attention. Startups innovate all the time, and BMC does buy innovative companies, but then integrating them into the company is a huge overhead, and fraught with risks. It would be much more efficient to do innovation in-house if it could be made to work
• The incubator is a separate team who can focus on these issues. It is a small team (about 25 people) compared to the 200 people in just one of the product groups that BMC has. And these 25 people try various different innovative ideas, 9 of 10 of which are bound to fail. But even that failure adds value because that means there are 9 things that the 200 people product team does not have to try out – hence they’re shielded from dead ends and unproductive explorations.
• The mandate for the new incubator (partially based on lessons learnt from the failure of the previous incubator was):
  • Don’t alienate the product teams – you’ll never succeed without their help and blessings
  • Understand the base products thoroughly. Superficial understanding of the issues, toy applications, will not earn the respect of the product team
  • Frequent communication with the business teams
  • File many patents

• The Process

  • The incubator takes inputs from:
    • The office of the CTO, which strategizes and puts together a vision. Before the incubator team, the office of the CTO would hand over the long term vision and strategy to the product team, which was ill equipped to handle it. Now, the incubator fits this gap
    • Product Business Units
    • Customers and Partners
    • Academia (what is the latest in research)
  • The idea backlog is looked at by these three teams:
    • The governance team which meets once in 6 months
    • The alignment team which meets once a quarter
    • The execution team which meets once a month
  • The output of the incubator are:
    • White Papers
    • Prototypes
    • Delivery
    • Patents
    • Innovation Culture
• Challenges for an Incubator
  • How to measure innovation? Number of patents is not a good enough metric.
  • Motivation: the motivation for the incubator and the people on the team must come from within. Creating the motivation, and staying motivated, in the face of 9 failures out of every 10 ideas tried, is difficult.
  • Difficult skill set: the team needs people who are smart, intelligent architects, but also hands on developers, with ability to switch context frequently, understanding the overall BMC vision, ability to sell/market ideas internally, and most importantly they need to be technology as well as business savvy. Finding people like this is a tall order.
• The incubator only does small projects. There are two kinds of projects: “research” and “prototype”.
  • Research projects which are just 1 person 1 week, where that person is supposed to study something for a week and come back with a report.
  • Prototype projects are just 2 or 3 people working for a maximum of 2 months to build a prototype – not necessarily a shipping product. The prototype should prove or disprove some specific hypothesis, and there is a tricky balance to be made in deciding which parts of the prototype will be “real” and which parts will be simple mocked up.

Future Directions

• From technology incubation, they want to move to co-innovation, where they work in conjunction with product teams, and customers to innovate.
• After that they would even like to do business incubation – where the product team is not interested in looking at an adjacent business, in which case the incubator would like to have the ability to go after that market themselves.
• The Indian IT industry, from humble beginnings, is moving up the value chain.
  • First we were doing cost arbitrage (1990s)
  • Now we have process maturity (2000s)
  • The next step would be to get product ownership, and product management here (2010s)
  • Finally, in the 2020s we’ll be able to do innovation, incubation, entrepreneurship
  • The bottomline is that Indian IT industry should be focusing on taking on more and more Product Management responsibilities

Questions from Audience

• Q: The incubator needs people who understand the current products thoroughly. Which means that you need to steal the stars from each product team, because you cannot really hire from outside. And obviously the product team is not willing to give up their stars. How do you solve this problem?
  • A: In general, trying to get stars from the product teams is not possible. You wont get them, and you sour the relationship with the product teams. Instead, what works is to hire the smartest outside people you can hire and then make them learn the product. These people are then teamed up with the right people in the product team during the ‘learning’ process. The learning process is still a bit ad hoc and we haven’t yet formalized it, but at the very least it involves doing some work hands-on.
• Q: What do you answer when a product team asks what is the value you are adding?
  • A: We constantly worry about the value we are adding, and we keep pro-actively stay in touch with the product teams and constantly keep reminding them of the value we add. If it ever happens that a product team asks what value you are bringing, you are already too late
• Q: How are you engaging in academia, and what else would you like to do?
  • A: Currently, we get interns from academia. This allows them to do look at projects that would not get “approved” as regular projects, because “it’s just an intern project.”
• Q: Customers are in the US. Product Managers are in the US. And you cannot innovate unless you understand customers and have close ties with the Product Managers. How do you do that sitting in India?
  • The head of the incubator must be the ultimate product manager, and more. First, s/he must have almost as much understanding of the market and the customers as the product manager of the actual product. In addition s/he must have a vision beyond just what customers want, so that they are able to generate innovative ideas. Successful engagement and understanding of Product Management is key to success of an incubator.
• Q: How do you ensure that the output of an incubator prototype is actually accepted by a product team, and how does the process work
  • All prototype projects require buy-in from the product team and other stakeholders, agreeing tentatively that if the prototype is successful, the product team will actually put that project onto the release schedule. Once the prototype is completed, it is incorporated into the release schedule, and the 2/3 people who worked on the prototype transition into the product team temporarily.

There are two different mindsets for humans: Fixed Mindset and Growth Mindset. People with a fixed mindset use events as opportunities for assessment and validation of what they’re already doing. Those with a growth mindset use events as an opportunity to learn. Thus, the potential of a person with a fixed mindset is known, whereas the potential of a person with growth mindset is not only unknown, but also unknowable.

The key difference between the fixed mindset and growth mindset is how they think about natural talent vs effort. In general, as a society, we tend to value natural talent, and effortless accomplishment. But what’s so heroic about having a gift? Effort ignites ability and turns it into accomplishment. Note: just because someone is talented and can accomplish things effortlessly, it does not mean that we should think less of them. But we shouldn’t give them more credit just because they did it effortlessly.

A person with a fixed mindset thinks that if you need to put in effort then you’re not talented. And they are terrified of putting in an effort, because what if you fail even after put in effort? Thus, failure is a setback, and they tend to blame it on someone else. On the other hand success is about being gifted and is validation of being smart. They have a sense of entitlement. They get a thrill from doing things that are easy for them, and their self-esteem comes from being better than others.

By contrast, a person with a growth mindset thinks of effort as the main driver of success. They are terrified by the idea of not capitalizing on opportunities. Failure does hurt them, but it does not define them. It is taken as an opportunity to learn and improve. So success is about putting effort and stretching yourself, thrills come from doing hard things, and self-esteem come from being better than yesterday.

So, in the long term, growth mindset brings more success, and also helps you stay at the top.

Benjamin Bloom studied 120 outstanding achievers over 40 years. After 40 years of research, they concluded that it is not possible to predict future achievement of a person from current abilities. Basically, that their research showed is that if one person can learn something then any other person can learn the same thing given appropriate prior and current conditions of learning (except for 2% of extremely gifted or extremely impaired people.)

Not performing up to standards should be seen as an indicator for further learning.

Psychological research shows that people who are told they were brilliant become more conservative (because they want to conserve their “brilliant” image) whereas people who are praised for their effort put in more effort the next time.

Bottomline: negotiators, managers, leaders are made not born. Any ability, including artistic ability can be learnt. And does not really take very long to learn.

Failure is the key to learning, and achievement, and ultimate success. J.K. Rowling, author of the Harry Potter books, gave a great commencement speech at Harvard talking about The Fringe Benefits of Failure, and the Importance of Imagination. The basic claim is that success in school/college, resulting in a well paying job, is actually a deterrent to success – because you will no longer be willing to leave your comfort zone and take risks. Nitin Deshpande of Allscripts talks about an incident from the early part of his career: a person who was considering offering a partnership to Nitin asked Nitin whether he had ever failed at anything in life, and when Nitin said that he hadn’t really failed at anything, he was told that he was not qualified to be a partner.

Final thoughts:

• If you think: “This is hard. This is fun,” then you have a growth mindset, and you’ll do well
• Categorize people as learners and non-learners (instead of successes and failures.)
• A fixed mindset will limit what you can achieve with your ability, whereas a growth mindset will help you realize the full potential.
• You can and should train yourself to get into a growth mindset

This month, Gireendra Kasmalkar, Managing Director and CEO, SQS India, will talk about “Mindset – The New Psychology of Success”, at 10am on 4th Feb, at Sungard, Aundh.

If you are a professional in the IT industry, the SEAP Book Club is a good way to not only get a feel for the kinds of topics you need to worry about as you progress in your career, but also a place to meet some of the leaders of software companies in Pune.

More details about the book:

Mindset is one of those rare books that can help you make positive changes in your life and at the same time see the world in a new way.

A leading expert in motivation and personality psychology, Carol Dweck has discovered in more than twenty years of research that our mindset is not a minor personality quirk: it creates our whole mental world. It explains how we become optimistic or pessimistic. It shapes our goals, our attitude toward work and relationships, and how we raise our kids, ultimately predicting whether or not we will fulfill our potential. Dweck has found that everyone has one of two basic mindsets.

If you have the fixed mindset, you believe that your talents and abilities are set in stone-either you have them or you don’t. You must prove yourself over and over, trying to look smart and talented at all costs. This is the path of stagnation. If you have a growth mindset, however, you know that talents can be developed and that great abilities are built over time. This is the path of opportunity-and success.

Fees and Registration

This event is free and open for anybody to attend. It’s on Saturday, 4th February, from 10am to 11:30am, at Sungard, Westend Center, Aundh. Register by sending a mail to rsvp@softexpune.org.

GNUnify, organized by Pune Linux Users Group (PLUG) and SICSR is one of the biggest free and open source conferences in India. It will be held on 10th and 11th Feb in Pune and will feature speakers and attendees from all over the world (yes, it regularly gets international visitors).

This year, the theme is “Emerging and Next Generation Technologies in the World of FOSS,” and they are looking for speakers in these tracks/categories:

• Mobile Computing
• Cloud Computing
• System Programming
• Emerging Languages
• Sys Admin
• Security
• Web Technologies

To register as a speaker, go to the Speaker Registration Page and follow the directions there. All you need to do is provide a short abstract of what you would like to speak about. This, you should be able to do, in spite of the fact that PuneTech has provided you with just 1 day notice

Benefits of being a speaker at GNUnify:

• Accomodation and reimbursement of travel expenses for speakers from out of Pune
• Get established as an expert in your area of work
• Interact with some of the most passionate students and professionals in open source
• Give back to the community that has given you so much.

Register Now. See the GNUnify Website for more details.

The next edition of i5 Talks is tomorrow (31 January, 2pm-5pm). The theme of this edition is social networking and collaboration. This event is free for anyone to attend. Please contact i5TalksHelpdesk@techmahindra.com to register. The event is at Tech Mahindra’s Hinjewadi corporate office: Plot no 1, Phase III, Hinjewadi.

Here is the description of the event from the website:

i5 Talks is a platform for the innovators and organizations dealing with technology to participate and share ideas. The Talks will draw in the best speakers and demonstrations from customers, partners, employees, scholars and other industry leaders. Theme will revolve around different topics each quarter and will be conducted at various centers of Mahindra Satyam and Tech Mahindra, across the country. Each talk, of around 15 minutes, will also be recorded and made available on the i5 Talks website.

We have 8 speakers from diverse backgrounds who shall each talk to us about their experiences in this area and of that one compelling idea or inspiration that motivated them in this field.

The speakers are:

• Anirban Pal: SME, Emerging Trends & Technologies, MahindraSatyam
• Atul Shah: Founder, Consumyze
• Kiruba Shankar: CEO, Business Blogging Pvt Ltd
• Mandar Tengse: Principal Architect, Oracle
• Rohit Pandarkar: Deputy CTO, CanvasM
• Shashank Srivastava: Manager, WW Industry Marketing, TIBCO
• Suresh Babu: Founder, Web Marketing Academy
• Vineet Jawa: CEO, Gaboli

For more details about the speakers see the speakers page. For more details about the event see the i5 Talks website.

As indicated earlier, the event is free, it is on Tuesday, 31 Jan, 2pm-5pm, Tech Mahindra, Hinjewadi. Please contact i5TalksHelpdesk@techmahindra.com to register.

Note: this event is different from the ACM Compute 2012 Conference, which is also being organised by ACM Pune, in Pune, on 23/24 Jan.

Agenda for the Event

• 0930 Welcome Alain Chesnais, John White, Anand Deshpande
• 1000 Keynote by N R Narayana Murthy, Infosys
• 1100 Tea break
• 1130 Talk by Frans Kaashoek, MIT
• 1220 Ramesh Mengawade, Opus Software
• 1300 Lunch
• 1400 Talk by Ravi Kannan, Microsoft Research
• 1450 Talk by Wendy Hall, University of Southampton
• 1540 Tea break
• 1600 Capstone talk by Narendra Jadhav, Planning Commision
• 1700 Concluding session, Vote of Thanks, Anand Deshpande, P J Narayanan
• 1730 Closing

About ACM Pune

The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) is the world’s largest educational and scientific computing society for the Computer Science/IT community, delivering resources that advance computing as a science and a profession for the past 70 years. The ACM India council was formed 2 years ago with a mandate of playing an active role in the science and profession of computing, with a special emphasis on India.

ACM Pune is the Pune chapter of ACM.

Fees and Registration

This event open for anybody to attend – the fees are Rs. 300 for ACM members and Rs. 800 for non-members. Please register here

Agenda

Keynote speakers:

• Dr. Ajay Bhushan Pandey, Deputy Director General of Unique Identity Authority of India (UIDAI)
• Dr. Pushpak Bhattacharyya, Professor, Dept. of Computer Science & Engineering, IIT-Bombay

Other speakers include Dr Aditya Abhyankar, HoD, Department of Technology, Pune University, IITB, Dr Deepak Khemani, Professor IIT Mandi, Dr Abhay Jere, Persistent Systems Ltd, and Dr Girish Palshikar, Tata Research Design and Development Centre.

These are the papers that have been selected for presentation at Compute 2012:

• Scalable Lock-Free FIFO Queues using Efficient Elimination Techniques
• A Robust Neural Network Classifier to Model the Compressive Strength of High Performance Concrete Using Feature Selection
• Mining Research Abstracts for Exploration of Research Communities
• A Generic Topology Discovery Approach for Huge Social Networks
• Multimodal Biometric System Based on Hand geometry, Palmprint and Signature
• A Review of Path Planning and Mapping Technologies for Autonomous Mobile Robot Systems
• A Knowledge-based Formalization of UBL Processes using Hybrid programs
• GPU implementation of a novel hybrid lattice Boltzmann method for non-isothermal flows
• Texture Edge Statistics for Efficient Retrieval of Biomedical Images Recognition and Classifier
• Enabling High Performance Computing using Microsoft HPC Server
• RobExT: A tool to customize microarray data for Cell Designer and Cytoscape
• FIRA – A novel method for benchmarking the cache hierarchy.
• Insertion and Querying Mechanism For A Distributed XML Database System
• Parallel Algorithm to Evaluate Contextual Features for Term Weighting
• Reconstructing the Software Environment of an Experiment with Kameleon

For selected posters, the program committee, and other details of the conference, see the conference website

Registration and Fees

The conference is open to anybody. Fees are Rs. 3500(2500) for professionals, Rs. 2500(2000) for academics, and Rs. 2000(1500) for students. (Numbers in parenthesis indicate rates for ACM Members). Register here.

The conference will be at YASHADA, on Baner Road, near University Circle.

Demo Space for Pune Startups

ACM Pune also invites technology startups in Pune to exhibit their products to the ACM audience for a fee of Rs. 5000 for one day. Selected startups will be provided with one table and a standee for the exhibition. This is a chance for a startup to reach out to a very select audience of computer science professionals from all over the country. For more details, watch for an announcement on the Pune Startups mailing list.

About ACM Pune

The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) is the world’s largest educational and scientific computing society for the Computer Science/IT community, delivering resources that advance computing as a science and a profession for the past 70 years. The ACM India council was formed 2 years ago with a mandate of playing an active role in the science and profession of computing, with a special emphasis on India.

ACM Pune is the Pune chapter of ACM.

More details below.

About JSFoo

JSFoo is a one day conference on building full size apps in JavaScript. Come over for a full day with the smartest geeks from across India who have figured it out and will show you how. We have sessions covering the range from pure JavaScript apps in Node.js to real-time streaming of data to building entirely in the client side with Backbone.js.

This is an event for serious JavaScript programmers who want to learn from their peers.

The JSFoo conference series began with a Bangalore edition on October 1, 2011, followed by [Pune][http://jsfoo.in/pune2012/] and Chennai (upcoming).

Call for Speakers

Why be a speaker at a conference. First, you get a free ticket. Second, you instantly establish yourself as a expert in your area. Finally, this is a great way to meet the most interesting people working in this area. All you need to do is talk about some experience you’ve had with building JavaScript apps, or a tool, or a platform. The talk is expected to be 30 minutes, with additional 10 minutes for Q&A. At this point, all you need to do is submit the title of your talk at the JSFoo Speaker Submission Page

Schedule and Tickets

JSFoo is a paid conference. Regular tickets cost Rs. 800 and you can register here.

To get an idea of the talks and speakers lined up see this page. Note, this is still a partial list and more will get added based on further speaker submissions.

Other Details

The event is on 21st January, all day, at 7th floor, SICSR, (Symbiosis Institute of Computer Studies and Research, near Om Market, Model Colony). Register here

There is also a JavaScript Hacknight on 14th January (one week before the actual conference) which gives 30 of the attendees a chance to spend an entire night hacking on interesting JavaScript projects. See hacknight videos from JSFoo Bangalore to get an idea of what a hacknight is. Hacknight is open to all registered participants of JSFoo Pune, but requires separate registration because the venue (Office of http://amiworks.co.in) has limited space.

JSFoo: http://jsfoo.in/

A JavaScript hack night – i.e. a night of hacking on JavaScript with 30 others from Pune and elsewhere in India has been organized on Saturday, 14th January, at AmiWorks office (SB Road, Pune), in conjunction with the [JSFoo] JavaScript in conference which will also be held in Pune a week later. (To clarify, the JavaScript Hacknight is on 14th Jan, night, and the [JSFoo] conference is on 21st January, daytime.)

The hacknight is open for any registered participant of the [JSFoo] conference, but since space is limited at the venue, you will need to register separately for it. All you need to do is get your laptop, and get ready for lots of JavaScript programming, learning, and discussions. To get an idea of what a JSFoo hacknight is like, check out these videos from JSFoo Hacknight Bangalore.