Tag Archives: persistent

Event: 75-year celebration for Prof. Mathai Joseph, and talk by Pankaj Jalote on Research in Engineering

ACM-India (Association for Computing Machinery) And CSI-Pune (Computer Society of India Pune Chapter) invites you for an event to felicitate Prof. Mathai Joseph on his 75th birthday. 16th June, 4pm, at Persistent Systems, SB Road.

With a distinguished career that spans industry (TRDDC) and academia (TIFR, University of Warwick), Mathai is among the few who have witnessed the story of the Indian software industry unfold.

On this occasion, there is also a talk by Pankaj Jalote, director of IIIT Delhi (earlier HoD CS at IIT-Kanpur).

A Career in Research in Engineering

Talk by Prof. Pankaj Jalote

There is sometimes a lack of clarity about what research is, how is engineering research different from engineering, and what does it mean to be an effective researcher. In this talk we will first discuss what research is, relationship between science and engineering research, difference between academic and industrial research, between applied and basic research, etc. Then we will discuss how research is evaluated and some aspects of building an effective engineering research career.

About the Speaker

Pankaj Jalote is the Director of IIIT-Delhi (Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology Delhi). Earlier he has been an Assistant Professor at University of Maryland College Park, Chair Professor at IIT Delhi, and Head of Computer Science Department at IIT Kanpur. He has also been Vice President at Infosys for 2 years, Visiting Researcher at Microsoft in Redmond for 1 year, and Interim Vice Chancellor of Delhi Technological University (DTU) for six months.

He has a B.Tech. from IIT Kanpur, MS from Pennsylvania State University, and Ph.D. from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is the author of five books, some of which have been translated in Chinese, Japanese, Korean etc, and the Indian edition of his text on Software Engineering was adjudged the bestselling book by the publisher. His main area of interest is Software Engineering. He has served on the editorial boards of IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, Intl. Journal on Empirical Software Engineering, and IEEE Trans. on Services Computing. He is a Fellow of the IEEE and INAE.

followed by

Felicitation of Prof. Mathai Joseph

Prof. Mathai Joseph will be in conversation with Anand Deshpande, Persistent and Venkatesh R, TRDDC.

Registration and fees

The event is on Saturday, 16th June, at 4pm. At Dewang Mehta auditorium, Bhageerath, Persistent Systems, SB Road.

This event is free and open for everyone to attend. Please register using this link: https://goo.gl/forms/hUjFPA3nuWVDFQyb2

>@PersistentSys acquires Pune-based Mobile Search and Ad firm @HoopzPlanetInfo

Persistent Systems has announced that it has acquired Pune-based Hoopz.

What does Hoopz do?

It allows users of mobile to see “interesting” information without having to specifically search for it. Based on whatever keywords happen to be in the content you’re currently viewing on the mobile, whether it is in an app, or a document, or a website, like facebook, twitter, or anything else, or an email, sms, Hoopz will show you other content it believes you will find interesting. It will show you other apps, or information, or it will show you ads.

Based on the above description, Business Standard is calling Hoopz a “web discovery technology” company, while Medianama called it a “mobile ad firm”.

Interesting, Hoopz is not sold/provided to consumers directly. Instead they’ve chosen to go via the OEM route:

As a strategy, Hoopz is targeted towards hardware manufacturers than the application eco-system. “Hoopz is not hardware dependent, but as a technology framework layer it needs to be integrated into the operating system. Hence we prefer to work with OEMs. At present Hoopz is with over half-a-million handsets,” said Surekha. Going ahead the company will focus on international expansion into regions like APAC and China.

Why did Persistent buy Hoopz? Especially considering that Persistent now has a venture fund and could just have invested in Hoopz, like it did with wearable tech startup Hyginex, video calling iPad app Ustyme and life sciences company DxNow?

Here is what Anand Deshpande had to say about that:

“We did have the option to invest in the company through our venture arm too, but the technology and space that Hoopz is made us believe that acquiring them would be better,” said Anand Deshpande, chairman and MD, Persistent Systems. Deshpande also explains that though the application fits into the consumer internet space it can be scaled into the enterprise set-up too.

and:

The acquisition fits in Persistent’s focus area of mobility and though Hoopz is consumer focused, Deshpande is betting on the data discovery platform than can be scaled to the enterprise segment. “Our objective is to align technology and the company. We keep looking at technologies and see how we can participate in them. This also means taking smaller companies to a bigger core group,” added Deshpande.

References:

Turing100 Lecture: Leslie Lamport by Madhavan Mukund; Skilling for SMAC by Anand Deshpande

Persistent System presents a talk on the life and work of Turing Award Winner Leslie Lamport, on 28 June, 2pm to 5pm, at the Dewang Mehta Auditorium, Persistent, SB Road.

In March 2014, Leslie Lamport was named the 2013 winner of the Alan Turing Award of the Association for Computing Machinery(ACM), widely regarded as the Nobel Prize in computing.

Over the past 40 years, Lamport has made several foundational contributions to the theory and practice of distributed computing. His early work includes the Bakery Algorithm for the mutual exclusion problem and an insightful paper on the importance of causality in a distributed system. He later investigated fault tolerance in the presence of so-called Byzantine failures—worst case scenarios that could disrupt the correct functioning of a distributed system. His distributed consensus algorithm Paxos is widely used in many modern replicated data storage systems. A recurrent theme in his work is the importance of precise specifications and formal reasoning in ensuring the correctness of concurrent systems.

Speaker: Madhavan Mukund, Dean of Studies, Chennai Mathematical Institute

After that there will be a short break for tea, followed by a talk on:

Skilling for SMAC – by Anand Deshpande

Social-Mobile-Analytics-Cloud (SMAC) technologies will play a significant role in the building of next generation software products and solutions. Building solutions on this SMAC-stack requires a unique set of technical skills, different from the traditional software programming. This talk will focus on some of the upcoming SMAC trends and the skills needed to stay relevant as these trends unfold.

Speaker: Anand Deshpande, CMD, Persistent

The event is free for everyone to attend. Register here

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 is year 2 of the the Turing 100 @ Persistent lecture series. The series started in 2012 to celebrates the 100th anniversary of Alan Turing’s birth by having a monthly lecture series, and the success of the talk series in year 1 has resulted in the series being continued in 2013. Each lecture is be presented by an eminent personality from the computer science / technology community in India, and covers the work done by one Turing award winner.

The lecture series has featured, or 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. Latest 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.

All the slides and videos of all the talks in the last year are available here.

Fees and Registration

The event will be at Dewang Mehta Auditorium, Persistent Systems, SB Road, from 2pm to 5pm on Saturday 28 June

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

Turing100 Lecture: Talk on the Life and work of Edsger Dijkstra

Persistent System presents a talk on the life and work of Turing Award Winner Edsger Dijkstra, on 22 March, 2pm to 5pm, at the Dewang Mehta Auditorium, Persistent, SB Road.

In 1972, Edsger Dijkstra was given the Turing Award for fundamental contributions to programming as a high, intellectual challenge; for eloquent insistence and practical demonstration that programs should be composed correctly, not just debugged into correctness; for illuminating perception of problems at the foundations of program design. Dijkstra is famous for his graph algorithms (shortest path, minimum spanning tree), for writing the first Algol-60 compiler, which was the first high level language with explicit recursion (which was implemented using stacks), structured programming, and a whole lot of important contributions to practical and theoretical computer science.

He is also the guy who killed the goto.

In this event, Ravindra Naik, Principal Scientist at TRDDC Pune, will touch upon some of the contributions of Dijkstra like – Design of Algorithms, Program Design, Programming Languages, Formal Specification & Verification and OS & Distributed Processing.

This will be followed by a talk on “Art and Science of Programming” by Shailaja Shirwaikar HOD, CS Nowrosjee Wadia College. The talk will present Dijkstra’s programming methodology. From writing short, readable and efficient programs to illustrating his point through the choice of apt examples, Dijkstra was an artist programmer. Structured programming, developing loop invariants to separation of Concerns, and Dijkstra’s emphasis on formalism in development of programs has eventually lead to the Science of programming. The formal approach of program development gives the programmer the confidence in the program developed by him and debugging would be unnecessary. Dijkstra believed in disciplined method of programming which is very relevant to the students of programming.

The event is free for everyone to attend. Register here

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 is year 2 of the the Turing 100 @ Persistent lecture series. The series started in 2012 to celebrates the 100th anniversary of Alan Turing’s birth by having a monthly lecture series, and the success of the talk series in year 1 has resulted in the series being continued in 2013. Each lecture is be presented by an eminent personality from the computer science / technology community in India, and covers the work done by one Turing award winner.

The lecture series has featured, or 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. Latest 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.

All the slides and videos of all the talks in the last year are available here.

Fees and Registration

The event will be at Dewang Mehta Auditorium, Persistent Systems, SB Road, from 2pm to 5pm on Saturday 22 March.

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

@PersistentSys acquires @CloudSquads – Pune/California based enterprise social media startup

Pune’s Persistent Systems has just acquired CloudSquads, a Pune and San Francisco based startup that builds social apps for the enterprise market.

After cloud-computing and mobile, the new hottest trend in the industry is SMAC (Social, Mobile, Analytics, and Cloud), and CloudSquads is smack in the middle of this trend. CloudSquads builds products that help companies like E*Trade, GE, Autodesk to use social media for customer support, sales, marketing. In addition they build apps that can be used for providing private social networking features within the enterprise.

From the press release:

CloudSquads helps companies develop a strategy for engaging with the modern social customer across all customer facing functions including brand, marketing, sales and support. The company implements platforms which provide rich capabilities that transform these interactions into healthy communities and then integrates those platforms with companies’ internal systems allowing them to better know and serve their customers.

and also:

“Social communities are the natural next step in the evolution and enhancement of external systems of engagement with customers, following the 1-800 number and corporate web presence,” said Ashish Seth, Co-Founder of CloudSquads, Inc. “CloudSquads helps global brands unlock the power of social to realize dramatic increases in employee productivity, double digit improvements in marketing and sales effectiveness and dramatically lower support costs, said Henry Bruckstein, Co-Founder of CloudSquads, Inc. “Combining the global reach and broad technology capabilities of Persistent Systems will allow us to multiply the transformative impact in the market.”

Why is Persistent buying CloudSquads? According to Ranga Puranik, President of Persistent:

“CloudSquads complements our software product development and SMAC (Social, Mobile, Analytics, Cloud) technology expertise with consulting, IP connectors and implementation services around social community platforms and is perfectly aligned to better serve our ISV and enterprise customer base.”

Persistent had recently reported that it had created “Persistent Venture Fund”, a venture fund to invest in early stage startups, mainly in the SMAC domain. Persistent Venture Fund’s first investment was in US-based ustyme, a free video call app for the iPad.

According to Anand Deshpande, CEO of Persistent, the fund will only invest in startups that are strategically interesting to Persistent’s business.

“We consider two aspects for selection. First is the technology area of the start-up and its similarity to our interests, and second the customers that it needs to align with our customer eco-system,” he added.

Turing100 Lecture: Talk on the Life and work of Andrew Chi-Chih Yao

In 2000, Andrew Chi-Chih Yao was given the Turing Award In recognition of his fundamental contributions to the theory of computation, including the complexity-based theory of pseudorandom number generation, cryptography, and communication complexity. For more details of his work, see the Turing Awards website

Jaikumar Radhakrishnan, of TIFR will talk about “Combinatorial Limits on Efficient Computation”, followed by Srikanth Srinivasan, Dept. of Mathematics, IIT Bombay, who will talk about “Yao’s complexity-based theory of pseudorandomness.”

The event is free for everyone to attend. Register here

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 is year 2 of the the Turing 100 @ Persistent lecture series. The series started in 2012 to celebrates the 100th anniversary of Alan Turing’s birth by having a monthly lecture series, and the success of the talk series in year 1 has resulted in the series being continued in 2013. Each lecture is be presented by an eminent personality from the computer science / technology community in India, and covers the work done by one Turing award winner.

The lecture series has featured, or 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. Latest 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.

All the slides and videos of all the talks in the last year are available here.

Fees and Registration

The event will be at Dewang Mehta Auditorium, Persistent Systems, SB Road, from 2pm to 5pm on Saturday 25th January.

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

Turing100 Lecture: Talk on Life & Work of 2008 Turing Award Recipient Barbara Liskov

In 2008, Barbara Liskov was given the Turning Award for contributions to practical and theoretical foundations of programming language and system design, especially related to data abstraction, fault tolerance, and distributed computing.

Ajay Deshpande, Chief Architect at Persistent Systems will give a talk on the life and work of Barbara Liskov, on 31st August, from 2pm to 5pm at Dewang Mehta Auditorium, Persistent (SB Road).

The event is free for everyone to attend. Register here

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 is year 2 of the the Turing 100 @ Persistent lecture series. The series started in 2012 to celebrates the 100th anniversary of Alan Turing’s birth by having a monthly lecture series, and the success of the talk series in year 1 has resulted in the series being continued in 2013. Each lecture is be presented by an eminent personality from the computer science / technology community in India, and covers the work done by one Turing award winner.

The lecture series has featured, or 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. Latest 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.

All the slides and videos of all the talks in the last year are available here.

Fees and Registration

The event will be at Dewang Mehta Auditorium, Persistent Systems, SB Road, from 2pm to 5pm on Saturday 31 August.

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

Turing100 Lecture: Talk on Ken Thompson & Dennis Ritchie (creators of Unix)

In 1983, Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie were given the Turing Award “for their development of generic operating systems theory and specifically for the implementation of the UNIX operating system.”

Prof. T.M. Vijayaraman will give a talk on the life and work of Thompson and Ritchie, and the history of Unix, on 27th July, from 2pm to 5pm at Dewang Mehta Auditorium, Persistent (SB Road).

The event is free for everyone to attend. Register here

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 is year 2 of the the Turing 100 @ Persistent lecture series. The series started in 2012 to celebrates the 100th anniversary of Alan Turing’s birth by having a monthly lecture series, and the success of the talk series in year 1 has resulted in the series being continued in 2013. Each lecture is be presented by an eminent personality from the computer science / technology community in India, and covers the work done by one Turing award winner.

The lecture series has featured, or 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. Latest 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.

All the slides and videos of all the talks in the last year are available here.

The next talk in the series will be TM Vijayaraman talking about Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie. In August, Ajay Deshpande will talk about Barbara Liskov, and in September Hemant Pande will talk about Fran Allen.

Fees and Registration

The event will be at Dewang Mehta Auditorium, Persistent Systems, SB Road, from 2pm to 5pm on Saturday 27 July.

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

Event Report: Transforming and Scaling Education – D.B. Phatak

(This is a live-blog of the talk D.B. Phatak gave at Grand Finale event of the Turing100 Lecture Series titled “Rethinking Education – Transforming and Scaling the Learning Model”. Note, this is a live blog, so please excuse the fact that it is unstructured, incomplete, and might contain errors. Note: this talk is being live-cast to 30+ colleges and other institutions all over India.)

Anand Deshpande’s introduction of D.B. Phatak

  • Prof. Phatak is my Guru. I have not been his student, formally, but I know him since early 90s and I always go to him for advice before anything important.
  • He did his engineering from Indore and PhD from IIT Bombay.
  • He got the Padmashree last year
  • He is a great speaker and anytime he is going a talk, you should always attend it.

Transforming and Scaling Education – by D.B. Phatak

  • This talk will touch upon these topics: 1) Learning, 2) Education, 3) Scaling, 4) Open Sourcing of Knowledge and 5) Technology Crystal Gazing

Learning

  • We are all familiar with learning in groups. Classroom learning. Fixed time slots. Typical: 1 teacher, 50 students, 1 hour. Teacher has (hopefully) pre-prepared the lecture. The students are supposed to listen with attention, throughout the hour, but this never happens.
  • So does learning happen in a classroom? Partially. Maximal learning happens when you try to apply knowledge that you’ve acquired.
  • All the advocates of e-learning and e-everything claim that if there is access to good quality knowledge, that is enough for anyone to learn. This is false. If just access to knowledge was good enough for learning, then librarians would be the smartest people on earth.
  • Learning needs applying knowledge, failing to apply that knowledge, correcting the failures. Without these steps, learning cannot happen.
  • Can an individual learn entirely on his/her own? Eklavya. Yes, there are cases of this. But don’t forget that here is only one Eklavya, but 7 billion non-Eklavya humans who also need to learn.
  • Why do we learn? Primarily for survival. Then betterment of ones life. Two other reasons which not everybody follows: learning for the sake of learning, and learning to advance human knowledge (research).
  • Unfortunately, we seem to have separated “research” and “education”). But research shouldn’t be just the domain of PhDs writing papers. The most important things needed in research should really be included in the mindset of everyone – Meticulousness. Curiosity. Precise Articulation. Diligence. Discipline. Rigor.
  • The most important learning happens from the age of 0 to 5 (-9months to 5 if you consider Abhimanyu), before the child goes to school. Social behavior. Basic Articulation. A second language. Ethics. Humility.

Education

  • We think of education as a formal system of knowledge being imparted through training and/or research. But education is happening all the time. Every interaction with someone else is an opportunity for self-education.
  • Our existing system is broken. Too much emphasis on rote learning. Children cannot apply what they learn. Industry says that less than 25% of our engineers are employable (and apparently the number in China is even lower).
  • We as a society have concluded that getting a degree with good marks implies that your career will be successful. And also, that the manner in which the degree and marks are gained is irrelevant – so optimizations (classes, cheating, leaked papers) are widespread.
  • The teaching is syllabus driven, and the learning by students is examination driven. The teacher must stick to the syllabus because the exam papers will be checked by a different teacher based on a paper set by a third teacher.
  • Is autonomy the answer?
  • The problem is not that our existing system is broken. The problem is that our system refuses to break! It is so well-entrenched. So any solution cannot emerge from complete disruption. The change has to be incremental and needs to work with the system.

Scaling

  • A claimed advantage of India is the demographic dividend. 300 million people under the age of 19. Educating them well can lead to huge gains for us. But we spend a very small fraction of our GDP (compared to other developing countries).
  • Gross enrollment ratio – the ratio of students who actually enroll for higher education to those actually eligible for higher education – is 60-80% in developed countries. In India it was 8% about 6 years ago. It has been brought to 13-14% now. We are hoping to bring it up to 30% by 2020. Double! To achieve that, we need to double all our educational institutions in 7 years. This is a tall order.
  • Another problem: last year, our engineering colleges’ capacity was 1.45million, whereas enrollment was 1.25million. So, while capacity is growing, enrollment is not growing. Parents and students have begun to believe that getting an engineering degree might not be worth it in all cases.
  • This is the situation with engineering education. It is much worse as you go lower.
  • Think of the problems we face, and the scale of the problems. And we need to solve them at that scale. If we double all our higher educational infrastructure in 7 years, and we convince students/parents to join the new schools, we’ll just get the enrollment ratio to just 30%. And we need to get to 80%
  • Teachers need to be convinced that their main job is not to teach. The main job is enable students to learn. The student should be able to transcend the knowledge of the teacher if/where needed. Also, student should be able to learn in the best possible manner for that student. The manner will be different for different students.
  • Our current education system allows a fixed amount of time for learning, but given that different human beings learn at different rates, it results in variable amount of learning. How does our education system deal with this difference? We grade the students. And denigrate the students who get lower marks. Not just society, friends and family start looking down on the student, but the student himself loses confidence and motivation.
  • What is needed is fixed amounts of learning in variable time (as long as the time is not too long). Is it possible to do this? Maybe – the technology, for the first time in human history, might allow this. Conventional education does not admit this possibility.

Open Sourcing of Knowledge

  • One of the important reasons for creation of the copyright and patent laws was to ensure that after a fixed amount of time, the knowledge contained there is available for all of humanity. But industry is manipulating the system to increase the amount of time.
  • The open source movement, creative commons are ways to get around the problems now being caused by copyright and patent problems.
  • There is lots of knowledge available on the net for free downloads, but because they are not appropriately licensed, it is not possible to distribute this knowledge in a system like Aakash. It is quite likely that the original author would have happily consented to the knowledge being used in this way, but often it is not possible to contact the person, or other problems get in the way. So good knowledge gets lost because of lack of awareness of open sourcing of knowledge.
  • However, if there are companies who are spending money on innovation, and would like to benefit monetarily from those innovations, it is only fair to expect that they use copyrights and licenses to enforce their rights. But as far as knowledge dissemination is concerned, open sourcing the knowledge is what will benefit the most people. There needs to be a balance between these two forces.
  • To do anything sustainably – including bringing changes into education – there needs to be revenues and financial management. But, for some reason, India has conferred a moral high ground to the education sector, and there is a belief that education sector should not be making money. That is not a sustainable thought.
  • Premji Foundation has an initiative in rural Karnataka where they are using computers to enhance education. They’re not teaching computers to the students – they are using computers to improve teaching of Kannada, Maths, etc. The program is funded by the foundation, the government, and the students. (There was a proposal to make this free for the students by taking more money from the government, but they found works better if the students pay.) The foundation has used controlled studies to show that the technology results in significant improvements in education.
  • IIT-Bombay runs a course to train teachers. It reaches 10000 teachers in 250 institutions across India. They’re trained by faculty from IIT Bombay. 4 of these centers are in Pune. This initiative is extremely well received. It is a costly model because it costs Rs. 6400 per teacher for a 2-week program – but by introducing a fee for teachers (because the teachers and colleges do benefit from this program) they’re hoping to reduce the cost to run this program.
  • MOOCs (Massively Online Open Courseware) like Coursera and MIT OCW are a new entrant with a lot of promise. IIT-Bombay has just concluded an MOU with edx and should be the first Indian university to offer an MOOC in about 6 months. Some courses can easily scale up to 1 lakh students. This would ensure that quality education will reach the masses.
  • Sam Pitroda makes a point that students who earn credits via MOOCs should be permitted to transferred credits/marks in their educational instituation. i.e. a COEP student taking an IIT-Bombay MOOC should be able to get COEP credits for passing that course.
  • Currently MOOCs are free, but there needs to be a revenue model for MOOCs. IIT-Bombay believes that knowledge should be free – so all the course material should be available using an open source license, but actual interaction can be paid.
  • But, one problem of MOOC is that often students don’t complete the course, or don’t take it seriously. One big advantage of actual physical classrooms is that in spite of all the distractions, you still end up paying attention to a significant fraction of the lecture.
  • These problems with MOOCs will be solved, and MOOCs will play a very large role in scalable education in India. Via internet. On the cloud.

Technology Crystal Gazing

  • MOOCs will be big – and will become the predominant technology platform for education. (IIT-Bombay picked edX instead of Coursera and others because edX is open source.)
  • Everything will be on the cloud
  • Bandwidth requirements will increase significantly
  • Every educational institution should plan for 1 gbps bandwidth.

Concluding remarks

  • Government must invest much more money in education. Government should not be a benevolent dictator. Education institutions, good or bad, need to get autonomy. Why do we have bad institutions who are simply degree factories? Because industry and society tremendously value degrees and marks. As soon as industry discovers that it can quickly and accurately evaluate students/job-seekers on the basis of their actual capabilities (as opposed to their marks and degrees), universities’ arrogance will disappear, and education will become much better.
  • The same technology which allows us to teach lakhs of students simultaneously and scalably, will also allow companies to assess and evaluate lakhs of students quickly and accurately.
  • Education does not end when you graduate from an educational institution. Education continues forever. Students and professionals need to understand this, and companies need to start focusing on this aspect.
  • Parents need to re-think their priorities. Forcing your child to prepare for JEE for 2 years is causing them to lose two years of their life that they could be using for actual education. And they’re learning to cheat – attending classes and skipping college, but getting “full attendance” at college anyway is being encouraged by parents.
  • It is well established that the best education of a child happens in his/her own mother tongue. Yet, most parents opt for English education. This is acceptable for parents who converse with the children in English on a regular basis. But this is a tiny fraction.
  • Students: enjoy education. Enjoy solving problems. Enjoy life. Dream big. But work hard.
  • There are 300 million Indians younger than 19, younger than the people in this room – and they’re waiting for us to do something for them. Independent of whatever else you are doing in your profession, you must think of making some contribution to making life more meaningful in terms of better learning and better education for those 300 million.

Turing100 Lecture: Rethinking Education by D.B. Phatak – 29 June

As a grand finale for the Turing100 Lecture Series that was held all year at Persistent, this time, there is a talk on “Re-thinking Education – Transforming and Scaling the Learning Model” by Padmashree Prof. D.B. Phatak of IIT-Bombay.

The event is free for everyone to attend. Register here

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, from 2pm to 5pm on Saturday 29 June. This event is free and open for anybody to attend. Register here