Tag Archives: conference

Pune Product Leaders Forum: 1-day conference on creating Software Products 21 Aug

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Product Leaders Forum (PLF), a volunteer-driven non-profit initiative to build stronger product mindsets and skill sets in India, is hosting PLF – Pune 2015, a 1-day conference on creating software products in the Indian software industry; either in startups, or established product organizations, or in services organizations as platforms and productized services.

This is a paid event; and normally we don’t promote paid events on PuneTech, but in this case we’re making an exception because the line-up of speakers is really quite good. The (Pune) heads of Persistent, BMC, Symantec, Amdocs, Allscripts, Sungard, NVIDIA are expected to be there, as are senior leaders from companies like Intuit, Cisco, TCS, Accenture, and so are a few VCs (disclaimer: I’m also a panelist for one of the sessions.) And they’re giving a 50% discount to PuneTech readers (use discount code PUNETECHDISC when you register.)

Agenda

There are 3 tracks. One track has workshops on “Productizing Services,” “Growth Hacking,” and “Gamification.” The other two tracks mostly feature panel discussions on topics like “Building Products & Platforms in the Services Industry,” “CTO as a Career Path,” “Art of the Start after 30,” “Product Management as a Career Track,” and “Product Management in MNCs and Indian Companies.”

See the website for the detailed agenda.

Intended Audience

For Product Managers, Business Leaders, and Technology Marketeers, this event hopes to provide you with active study sessions, and relevant networking: to help you get into a techno-business role, or accelerating your product management career.

For Engineering Leads, Architects, and Project/Program Managers, the event hopes to help you understand practical design thinking, to go from code centric to customer centric, and how the CTO career paths are different than people management, and how to leverage tech knowledge for better product roadmap decision making.

For Entrepreneurs and Intrepreneurs, this should give them examples of how they can start products and mini-startups “inside” the organization, with the help of fellow senior execs and BU Heads on how they are engaged in corporate innovation and inspiring intrapreneurs.

There are several ways in which this event promises to be different from other events. First, most of the sessions are panel discussions, so you get to hear from a lot of the leaders of Pune’s software industry. And second, it is focused on intrapreneurs & corporate innovation – so it is not a typical startup event.

Fees and Registration

Anyone can attend this event. The price of a ticket is Rs. 2999. Use discount code PUNETECHDISC to get a 50% discount. Register here

LiveBlog: Maharashtra CM Prithviraj Chavan’s address at VLSI Conf Pune

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(This is a live-blog of the keynote address of Prithviraj Chavan, CM of Maharashtra, at the 26th International Conference on VLSI Design that is currently going on at the Hyatt, in Pune. For those who didn’t know, Prithviraj Chavan is an electrical engineer from BITS Pilani and Univ of California, Berkeley.)

The semiconductor industry in India started first in Bangalore, and then in Delhi/NCR. Pune is late to this game. But we have the potential to better than Delhi/NCR, and even Bangalore.

These are the things that need to happen for Pune to become a semiconductor hub:

  • Government should create facilities where the expensive EDA tools are setup, and various companies from industry can sign up for use of the tools.
  • Work on increasing the quality of manpower in and around Pune. We have to potential of having one of the highest ratios of high quality – low cost manpower. We need to work with universities and other educational institutions in this area.
  • We should continue trying to attract fabs to come and setup in Pune

We are a large customer of mobiles and other electronic devices. As we continue to grow at 8-9%, we will become an increasingly attractive market. And there will also be many opportunities to create specialized devices for local markets. This can drive innovation and incubation.

The CM said that he is completely committed to working with us (i.e. the tech community in Pune) to ensure that Pune gets put on the semiconductor map. He announced that any company investing in semiconductors in Maharashtra will get a rebate on their VAT until they recoup their investment. In addition, he hopes that the government will be able to help jumpstart this industry by these means:

  • Government will set up the physical infrastructure
  • Government will put up the initial funding for the expensive tools
  • Government will set up training facilities to get people started on this
  • We should together set up server farms, and other infrastructure needed to get started

Maharashtra is larger than most countries in the world, as large as Mexico, and larger than any European country. It attracts 33% of the FDI that came into the country. Maharashtra is well positioned to become the chip destination of India.

My Experience at the IndicThreads Conference on Software Quality

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(This post by Abhay Bakshi, a techie who has recently moved to Pune, is about the IndicThreads Conference on Software Quality that was held in Pune recently. This post first appeared on DZone, and is reproduced here with permission.)

Typically, it was about a week’s planning before I got to attend the IndicThreads conference.  I didn’t know that the conference was taking place on Friday until I got an invite by Harshad Oak through LinkedIn.  I took permission from my authorities at my work place, took Friday off and was looking forward to this 2-day conference in the city of Pune, India.

I had attended (TSSS 2003, USA), presented at (FIE 97, USA), and written about (NFJS 2005, USA) conferences in the USA — but had never attended one in India, specifically in Pune.  Honestly, I was eager to.

Expectations

From my background in attending conferences in the USA, the expectations were high in my mind — the glamour, the large-size attendance, the goodies and the prizes to receive, the signed copies of books from authors, the networking and food (!) for two consecutive days.

On many of these fronts, Q11 by IndicThreads delivered and delivered well!  Yes, they did a pretty good job indeed.

Benefits

Benefits to receive are up to the individual, I believe — how much you want to take away.  That includes the speakers too.  In USA, I had paid $675 USD from my pocket to attend an NFJS weekend show and my employer was also surprised (pleasantly) then. But even today, I benefit (because I choose to) from that attendance.  It becomes easier to get in touch with authors / speakers / fellow attendees.  That is just one benefit.  The other benefit is — from your regular everyday schedule, you get out and see in reality what other developers / IT engineers are doing.  That opens a whole new perspective and regains energies for you in multitude.

Who Hosted the Conference?

The Q11 conference was hosted by Harshad Oak (Rightrix Solutions).  Harshad is the first Java champion in India and has served and continues to serve the overall IT community in several ways.  For his achievements, he is not that old – in fact quite young. 🙂

The thought process, as put in by Harshad, could be felt all throughout the conference

The Actual Sessions!

Every session was little over an hour.  That was good so that an otherwise information overload could be avoided.  Timings of the speakers were awesome — plus it didn’t feel that the speakers were running a race against time at any point.

The conference covered the following topics (all slides available on Slideshare):

  • Image Based Testing – Application Technology Independent Automation (Girish Kolapkar)
  • Proving correctness of a multiplayer game server (Nirmalya Sengupta)
  • Continuous Integration: A Case Study (Vaibhav Kothari)
  • Cloud based Testing for Mobile Applications (Dada Mote)
  • Test Automation for Mobile Applications (Dipesh Bhatewara)
  • Test Automation on Android Using Robotium (Amit Dixit)
  • Testing Flash and Flex for Accessibility (Rashmi Aghor)
  • PerformFuzz the Web Interface (Aniket Kulkarni)
  • Keyword Driven Automation using Selenesse (Ameya Naik)
  • Platform Independent Migration Testing Framework (Vishal Harane)

All speakers and sessions were accommodated fine by Harshad and Sangeeta (his wife).

It would be unjust to pick only one speaker that stood outstanding — everyone did a great job (offered their 100% for the attendees).  The professionalism was at its best.  This was probably the first time in the last 15 years that I interacted so closely with professionals in the IT industry in India.  All this was a superb learning experience for me.

Particularly speaking, Dada Mote, just for his zeal to learn more and offer more, had done a fantastic job.  I was amazed to see that he was accompanied by his boss who arrived just to give Dada moral support.  They both drove in from Mumbai.  Dada knows what he is doing.

Again, I do not have any bias for any one speaker (don’t even know Dada Mote in person that well!), everyone did so very well for us.

Vishal Harane, for what he put together at his work place using ANT (just under 3 days), was simply a great experience to watch and learn from.  I can go on and on like this for every session, but the space is limited and I have to get back to my work as well.

My Comparisons with the Conferences in the USA

The comparisons with the conferences in the USA will loom over my mind, by default.  But I attribute a few things lacking to the growth aspect of conferences at IndicThreads.

My mind was tuned to having parallel sessions and being able to choose a session where I want to get trained.  At Q11, there was however only one big hall for learning!  I couldn’t think of many “lacking” points at all.  Harshad has good experience in arranging the shows.  The professionalism shown by speakers was one of the best, as I mentioned earlier.  The consistent slide formats, good designs, aspects on the content arrangement for maximum absorption by the slide readers, real-time Q & A sessions, quizzes and prizes were all welcome and gave a pleasant appeal to the overall event.

What Can be Better / New Ideas

An obvious general difference between East and West — usage of English (well, I struggle myself with arrangement and good choice of words, as you can see in this article) during presentation.  And so we do not need “perfect” skills, just slight modifications with an element of clarity transferred from that in the slides’ content to every sentence that you speak.  Again, that’s about clarity only and nothing about undertaking the usage of any fancy English.

When speakers implement (more) clarity during speeches, here is a new idea for this conference (just for the sake of it) –> Harshad can even think about live broadcasting of the conferences where people from outside India can join the live sessions.  Yes, Harshad can charge a fee for such attendance. 🙂

The Best Take-away Point

The best take-away point for me will be the personal interactions with the fellow attendees and speakers.  A few of the speakers are local to the Pune city, and therefore if I were to get / offer help at any point regarding new emerging topics, I can rush for a get-together to a place which is only at a drivable distance.

Harshad encourages local speakers to come out and respond to the RFPs (and participate).  Hopefully, in the future, there will be “parallel” sessions (!), offering choices of topics, at conferences like Q11.

Call for Papers: ClubHack 2009 Information Security Conference

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Click on logo for PuneTech wiki page on ClubHack
Click on logo for PuneTech wiki page on ClubHack

ClubHack is an initiative to bring security awareness to common people who use computers and internet in their daily life. It’s a member driven open community to make cyber security a common sense. The phenomenal growth of the Internet economy has led to a sharp increase in computer crimes and hacking incidents. ClubHack aims at making technology users aware of the risks associated with cyber transactions as well as the security measures.

ClubHack2009 is the third annual ClubHack conference and will revolve around technical presentations/demonstrations on topics from the world of Information Security. These presentations are expected to be of 40 minutes each. The schedule time for each presenter would be 50 minutes out of which 40 minutes are for the presentation & 10 for the question-answer sessions.

ClubHack is inviting submissions on technical topics or demonstrations that can be included in the conference. This is a list of suggested topics:

# Protocol / Application based vulnerability in networks and computers
# Firewall Evasion techniques
# Intrusion detection/prevention
# SPAM fighting
# Data Recovery and Incident Response
# Mobile Security (cellular technologies)
# Virus and Worms
# WLAN and Bluetooth Security
# Analysis of malicious code
# Cryptography and Cryptanalysis
# Computer forensics
# File system security
# Secure coding & code analysis
# Hardware modification
# Patch writing for vulnerabilities
# Open source hacking toolkit
# Cyber Crime & law

This is more of an indicative list, the papers submission can be on other topics also but have to be close to this & the theme of the event.

Important Dates
CFP Open: 15th August 2009
CFP Close: 15th October 2009

How to submit
Click Here

For more information about ClubHack see the PuneTech wiki page for ClubHack.

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Call for Speakers – IndicThreads Conference on Java Technologies, Pune Dec 2009

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indicthreads logo smallThe IndicThreads Java conference is a technology conference that happens in Pune every year. The conference has in-depth, vendor-neutral technical sessions about a wide range of topics in the Java space. If you have done some interesting work in or related to Java, you should consider submitting a proposal.

PuneTech has detailed coverage of last year’s IndicThreads Java conference. For even more details, you can see the list of speakers and the slides used in their presentations at the conference website. That should give you an idea of what this conference is about.

Here is the call for speakers reproduced from the conference website:

Call for Speakers

IndicThreads.com invites submissions for the 4th IndicThreads.com Conference On Java Technology to be held on 11th and 12th December 2009 in Pune, India. The conference is the premier independent conference on Java technology in India and is the place to be, to learn the latest in the Java world while meeting with like-minded individuals from across the industry.

IndicThreads welcomes submissions from subject experts across fields, geographic locations and areas of development. Topics of interest include new and groundbreaking technologies and emerging trends, successful practices and real world learnings.

Topics appropriate for submission to this conference include but are not restricted to the below, stated in no particular order –

1. Java Language Specs & Standards
2. Optimization, Scaling and Performance Tuning
3. Cloud Computing
4. Rich Internet Applications, Ajax and Web 2.0
5. Scripting languages for Java like JRuby, Groovy, Rhino, JavaFX.
6. Open Source Frameworks
7. Enterprise Architecture
8. Spring
9. Virtualization
10. Social Networking
11. Security
12. Agile Techniques, Extreme Programing, Test Driven Development
13. New and emerging technologies
14. Case Studies and Real World Experiences

Submission

  • Please note that marketing-oriented submissions aimed at promoting specific organizations or products will not be accepted.
  • All sessions will be between 50-90 minutes. One / both of your proposals might be accepted.
  • The audience consists mostly of senior developers and project leads. Before submission consider how your submission can provide best value to this target segment.
  • Submissions will be accepted only on the website and not through emails. Please complete the entire form including the two session proposals.
  • The decision of the conference team as regards sessions, durations, timings, speaker benefits and all related aspects will be final and binding.

Speaker Benefits

  • Complimentary Full Conference Pass
  • We will arrange for your hotel stay and cover the room tariff. Please note that hotel incidentals will not be covered.
  • We will reimburse up to Rs 5000 from the air fare or the actual, whichever is less.
  • Speaking at an IndicThreads event gets you recognition as a subject expert.

Write to [ conf AT rightrix DOT com ] in case of any other queries.

Important Dates

  • Submission Deadline – 31st August 2009
  • Conference Dates – 11 and 12 December, 2009
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Hi Tech Pune Maharashtra 2009 Conference: 26 & 27 Feb

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Hi Tech Pune Maharashtra is a two-day conference on technology that is held in Pune every year. This year, the theme is “IT in Governance” and the schedule features a number of very interesting speakers. I attended this conference last year, and live-blogged it here and here.

Here are some of the lectures that I am looking forward to. On Thursday, Dr. R.A. Mashelkar is giving a keynote speech on a vision for Pune. Mr. Vijay Kumar Gautam, the COO of the Commonwealth Games is also speaking. I had the opportunity to hear him talk at the last Hi Tech Pune conference, and I was absolutely blown away. He is a great speaker. Anil Valluri, MD of Sun Microsystems India is also speaking. Although I know nothing about him, I am hoping that as MD of Sun, he would have interesting things to say.

On Friday, afternoon, Anup Tapadia of TouchMagix will talk about product innovation. TouchMagix is my new favorite Pune startup and we are publishing an interview with Anup on PuneTech later today. So, I think that should be interesting. TouchMagix technology will also be on display on both days, so that’s another reason to go check it out.

Baba Kalyani of Bharat Forge will speak later. One of his talks that I attended started of slowly, but improved significantly later, and was worth it in the end. So that is another one that might be interesting.

There are other talks that you might find interesting. See the full schedule. The conference will be at the Hotel Orchid near Balewadi Stadium (or, to use its real name: Shri Shiv Chhatrapati Sports City Balewadi). It’s from 1:30pm to 7pm on Thursday (26th) and full day on 27th. It is free for anybody to attend, but you must register here.

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OpenSocial Developers Conference in Pune – 20th Dec

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What: A conference for all OpenSocial Developers
When: 20th December 9:30am to 6:30pm
Where: Tower C, Panchshil Tech Park, Yerwada Pune – 411006      View Map
Registration and Fees: This is a free conference, but attendance is by invitation only. If you register now, you might still get an invitation.

Details:

A group of OpenSocial enthusiasts from Pune have come together to create this conference. The event is aimed to unite all the OpenSocial Application Developers from all over the country and just share/code/have fun and maybe inspire others to take up OpenSocial Development.

This event will also help towards awareness of OpenSocial and building a strong OpenSocial developers community.

Who should attend?

Anyone who developed any application based on OpenSocial platform or anyone who want to learn how to create OpenSocial Applications.

What’s the menu?

There are two tracks of speakers going on at two different halls. See the detailed schedule for more information. Another section is dedicated to codelab. A few developers will develop an application for the “India I Care” NGO. If you want to participate, just the organizers know on the Developer Garage Mailing list. At the end there will be an “Application show case” where OpenSocial application owners can demo their application.

Blogging and Twittering

Follow @devgarage on twitter for official Developer Garage updates. In general, people blogging or tweeting about this event are expected to use the odgpune tag, which means that searching for this term will give you everything you wanted to know about this event. (And please use that term in your own blogs or tweets.)

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Recession, Linked-In, OpenSocial, Grails and more at IndicThreads Java Conference

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Note: Most of the presentations are online at the conference homepage.

The IndicThreads conference on Java technologies, which is an annual occurrence in Pune happened over the course of 3 days last week, and IndicThreads were gracious enough to invite me to attend the conference (sort of a press pass, so to speak), and although I wasn’t able to attend the whole conference, I did manage to squeeze in a couple of hours each day, and was very glad that I did, because I ended up with some really enriching sessions.

On the first day of the conference, the two big names of the tech industry in Pune, Ganesh Natarajan and Anand Deshpande gave keynote addresses. Ganesh, who is CEO of Zensar, and President of NASSCOM gave the NASSCOM view of the coming recession. His main thrust was that the Indian software / BPO industry will not be as badly affected by the recession as the rest of the world. He had a large number of graphs and figures to make the following points:

  • We had already been tightening the belt for almost an year now, so we are in much better shape to handle the recession than those who weren’t being so prudent
  • We are creating new products, tackling new verticals, and focusing on end-to-end service (and these claims were all backed by facts and figures), and this diversification and added value makes us resilient

And he spent a lot of time pointing out that to do even better, or primary focus needs to be the tier 2 / tier 3 cities, 43 of which have been identified by NASSCOM and whose developement will get some attention. Also, our tier 2 / tier 3 colleges are sub-par and a lot of work is needed to improve the quality of students graduating from there. NASSCOM has started a number of initiatives to tackle this problem.

Since this was a conference for Java techies, Anand Desphande, CEO of Persistent, presented his view of the broader context in which the Java programmers exist, and what are the things they need to think about (other than their code) to have a better long term view. Basically:

  1. Multicore chips, and why programmers need to worry about them
  2. Mobile Telephony: the desktop/laptop is no longer the primary target device for programmers. Think about the mobile users, and how what they want is different from the traditional PC users
  3. Cloud and SaaS: is coming in a big way, and will change the way people use software. Also, it makes life easier for users, but much more difficult for programmers. So need to improve skills in these areas
  4. Web 2.0 and Social Networking: these are exciting new fields with a lot of growth. They require a different kind of programming mindset.
  5. Rich Internet Applications: Similar to above
  6. Large Volumes of Diverse Data (including BI and analytics)
  7. Open source is on the rise. As programmers, you must have a good understanding of various open source licenses
  8. Gaming and Entertainment boom: Too many programmers think of only corporate world & green monitors etc. Think different. E.g. Gaming and entertainment are large markets and require a different mindset to come up with new ideas in these fields.
  9. Green IT: Instead of worrying about speed and efficiency, for the first time, worrying about power consumption has started affecting programmers
  10. Be a part of the community. Give back. Do open source. Join CSI ACM. IEEE. (and I would like to add contribute to PuneTech)

Anand also predicted that in the next 6 months, the Industry will see serious job cuts and salary cuts, and he things it is unavoidable. But pointed out that those who take trouble to keep themselves updated in their area of expertise, and go deep (instead of just doing “enough”) will not have a problem, and in fact will be best positioned to take advantage of the situation when the financial situation starts recovering after 6 to 9 months.

I missed the rest of day 1, but it has been covered in great detail by Dhananjay Nene. on his blog, as well as Varun Arora on the IndicThreads blog (part 1, part 2).

The highlight of day 2, and in fact the highlight of the whole week for me, was the presentation by DJ Patil, Chief Scientist of Linked-in. DJ Patil is in charge of all the data analysis that happens at Linked-in – basically the advanced guess they make like: “people who viewed this profile also viewed these other profiles”, and “people whom you might know” etc. He was not listed on the conference schedule – and was just passing through, and got invited to talk. He gave a great talk on an overview of how linked in works, their strategy for linked-in apps (the third-party apps that are integrated into the linked-in website). Again Dhananjay has already captured most of DJ’s important points on his blog, so I will not repeat those here. But I did have a very detailed conversation with DJ afterwards, and one of the things that came through was that they are looking seriously at India and wondering what they can / should do to get more Indians on linked-in. India already has about 4.8% of linked-in’s users. He was very open about trying to find out what are the things about linked-in that we don’t like, what are the things in linked-in that we would like to change, and what are the features we would like to see. If you have suggestions, send them over to him – he is dpatil on twitter.

The third day had a session on Grails by Harshad Oak, and if you are not familiar with Rails, or any of the other “programming by convention” schools of software, it is definitely something you should check out. It can reduce development times by orders of magnitude on things like building web applications and other things that are done over and over by programmers all over the world.

For other talks that happened, but which I missed, unfortunately, I haven’t been able to find any reports or blog posts giving details, but you can see the conference schedule to get an idea of what went on.

MahaBio – A 2-day bio-technology conference at UoP – 14/15 Nov

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Event Name: MahaBio 2008 – 2-day conference on bio-technology
When: Nov 14, 15 all day.
Venue: Chandrashekhar Auditorium, IUCAA
Registraion and Fees: Details are sketchy, but I think this will be free for anyone to attend. Those interested should see the MahaBio 2008 website, and make contact at the email address provided

Details:

The event titled ‘Mahabio 2008’ will take place in Pune on November 14 and 15. Various political figures will be in attendance:  Inauguration by Chief Minister Vilasrao Deshmukh. Presentations by Ashok Kolaskar, former vice-chancellor of UoP, A S Ninawe, vice-chancellor of Maharashtra Animal and Fisheries University, Nagpur and Dilip Deobagkar, vice-chancellor of Goa University among others.

But, Dr R A Mashelkar, chairman, Maharashtra Biotechnology Commission will address the inaugural ceremony, and also there will be actual academic papers being presented. Also, an exhibition of biotechnology will be held at Jaykar library in UoP where, about 20 industries, related to biotechnology, shall put their stalls.

So, I think, if you are interested in biotechnology, and are willing to put in a little effort to separate the wheat from the chaff, I think it will be worth visiting, at least the exhibition, if nothing else. A little more information is provided by an Indian Express article on this topic. I have sent an email to the organizers, and will update this article later today if I get a response.

Conference on Advances in Usability Engineering, Nov 27/28

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What: A 3-hour, free event for World Usability Day, and a 2-day, paid conference on usability engineering, both featuring the who’s who of Usability in Pune, and some experts from outside too.

When: World Usability Day event is from 3pm to 6pm on Nov 27th; The Conference on Advances in Usability Engineering is on Nov 27th and 28th, full day.

Where: Sumant Mulgaonkar Auditorium, ICC towers, 403-A, Senapati Bapat Road. Map.

Registration and fees: The World Usability Day event is free for all to attend, and no registration is required. The full conference fees are Rs. 3500 for professionals, Rs. 2000 for academics, and Rs. 500 for students. Details here.

Details – World Usability Day Event

A gathering of usability practitioners is organized with many participatory community events to encourage informal discussion, knowledge sharing and networking. Usability professionals, user experience designers, design teachers, IT professionals, managers, software developers, students etc. are welcome to attend.

This event will consist of the following:

Photo Essay Competition on ‘Usability in Transportation’

The participants of this competition are expected to highlight usability problems and difficulties faced by people using a series of photographs and apt description of possible solutions. The photographs have to be focusing on any of the usability problems pertaining to transportation in terms of design of vehicles, transportation systems, traffic signals, road signage systems and communication, journey booking systems, etc. It should also touch upon design, engineering, social, cultural and ergonomic issues related to transportation.

Jury members for Photo Essay Competition

Dr. Sanjay Tripathi, Senior Consultant (Usability), TechMahindra Ltd, Pune -Chairman
Bhakti Khandekar, Principal Designer-User Interface , Infosys Technologies, Pune -Member
Taral Kulkarni, Senior Usability Engineer, Persistent Systems Ltd., Pune -Member
Kedar Kadam, Usability Engineer , Persistent Systems Ltd., Pune -Member

Usability Quiz

It is going to be a fun quiz contest to test our know-how of usability. The quiz will cover questions related to web-usability, user centered design process, human factors, user experience design etc. The best answer for each question will be awarded! So come prepared for the Usability Quiz!

Quiz Coordinators

Ganesh Gaikwad, Principal Human Factors Engineer, Symantec, Pune
Atul Manohar, Lead User Experience Management Practice , Satyam Computer Services , Ltd. Pune
Nagesh Susarla, Manager / Principal UI Designer, Symantec Pune
Shashank Deshpande, Director , Clarice Technologies , Pune.

Panel Discussion on ‘Multi-disciplinary Perspectives of Usability’

Whose property is it anyway? Engineering, Design, Management, Psychology, Ergonomics ?
It is an interactive deliberation between panelists and participants to understand the difficulties faced by those who aspire to practice usability. Following panelists will represent different domain perspectives of usability.

Panel Moderator :
Dr. Dinesh Katre, Group Head- Human Centred Design and Computing, C-DAC, Pune

Panelists :
Dr. Pradeep Yammiyavar, DoD, IIT, Guwahati – Psychology
Dr. Neela Rajhans, Professor, College of Engineering, Pune -Ergonomics
Prof. Pradeep Pendse, Dean IT/Business Design , Welingkar Institute, Mumbai. -Management
Prof. Aniruddha Joshi , Associate Professor , IDC , IIT , Mumbai. -Design
Mr. Sameer Chabukswar, Head, Usability Engineering, Persistent Systems Ltd. Pune -Engineering

Details – Conference on Advances in Usability Engineering

Normally, we at PuneTech do not feature information about paid workshops, trainings, or conferences. But every once in a while, an event comes along which appear to have exceptional technical content, which in our subjective opinion makes it worth the money. The Conference on Advances in Usability Engineering, 2008, hosted by Vishwakarma Institute of Information Technology, is one such event, where the impressive list of speakers, and the detailed schedule makes us feel that this could be a good event to attend. (Please note: PuneTech is a purely non-commercial website and does not take any considerations (monetary or otherwise) for any of the content on the site. Decision to feature content on the site is made by the editors purely on the basis of interestingness and technical content.)

Broad themes of the conference:

Offshore Usability
Cross-cultural aspects, remote usability methods and tools, challenges in user requirements research, etc.

Usability to Bridge the Digital Divide
Designing ICT products and applications for rural users, such as e-governance, e-learning, localization of user interface.

Usability Engineering
Institutionalisation, processes & practices, multidisciplinary dimensions, best usability practice, impact of adaptation of user centred design approach in SDLC process and project management, agile process, interaction design and client architecture, internationalisation of user interface, etc.

User Experience Design for New Media
Web, Mobile, PDA, Touch-screen, new interaction models, interaction design for development, etc.

User Experience Research
Tying user experience to strategic business innovation objectives, UX methods and research approaches for emerging markets with unique technology adoption curves, user experience innovations for Indian consumer and enterprise products, next generation user-driven technologies, etc.

Multidisciplinary Challenges of HCI in Education
Fusion of diverse disciplines in the syllabus of Human-Computer Interaction, user experience design thinking into the design / engineering / management curriculum, etc.

If you are not familiar with Usability, or not convinced as to why it is such a vitally important field of study, check out past PuneTech articles on usability.