Tag Archives: persistent

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

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

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

About the Turing Awards

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

About Turing 100 @ Persistent Lecture Series

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

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

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

Fees and Registration

This is a free event. Anyone can attend.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Alan Turing – by Mathai Joseph

These are some rough notes taken during the talk.

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

Turing’s Theory of Computation – by Vivek Kulkarni

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Persistent Foundation – Donating 1% of Persistent’s Profits to Social Causes

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Most PuneTech readers will be familiar with Persistent Systems as the global IT company with 6300 employees, working in four key technology areas: Cloud, Mobility, BI & Analytics and Collaboration, for over 300 customers spread across North America, Europe and Asia. For more than two decades, Persistent has partnered closely with innovative enterprises and some of the world’s largest technology brands.

What is not as well know, however, is that since 1995, Persistent Systems has been donating 1% of its net profit every year to NGOs in the field of health and education since 1995. To institutionalize the Corporate Social Responsibility initiative the company formed a public charitable trust, named Persistent Foundation in 2008. The Persistent Foundation is primarily involved in three key areas of Healthcare, Education and Community Development.

This fiscal year, Persistent Foundation contributed Rs.1cr towards social work and supported 44 NGOs through their Pune, Nagpur, Goa and Hyderabad offices. Some of the unique activities and programs the Foundation carried out and participated in were student and girls scholarship program, cyber genius competitions across schools, infrastructure development at schools and villages, exhibitions for promoting NGO activities, breast cancer screening initiative, blood donation camps, text books and uniform donation drives, teaching English and Math to students of govt. run schools, planting trees to preserve the ecology of the hills in and around Pune, providing computer education to under privileged school children and teachers etc.

One of the aims of pioneering the Persistent Foundation was to encourage employees to take part in social welfare activities. ‘We have received a great response from the employees who enthusiastically participate in various initiatives like Student Scholarship Program, Green Persistent Movement, Blood Donation Program, etc.’ Says Sonali Deshpande Chief Trustee of the Foundation. This year the Foundation has also launched an innovative ‘Social Entrepreneurship’ program for the employees of Persistent. ‘Under this program the employees will be given a unique opportunity to implement their ideas related to social welfare which will be supported by the Foundation.’ Says Ms. Deshpande.

The Persistent Foundation focuses on the improvement of its immediate neighbourhood and the overall betterment of society. ‘We firmly believe that it is our moral duty to give back to the society that lends us an identity.’ Says Ms. Deshpande. The areas of health, community development, and education require immediate attention and the Persistent Foundation has been very actively involved in upholding these causes since its very inception.

The Persistent Foundation is actively soliciting proposals from local NGOs who are doing work in these focus areas.

Overview of KLISMA – Loyalty/Group buying startup incubated at Persistent

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So Customer is King; and the “loyal” King gets rewards. But how many of us really carry all the paper/plastic around or remember to redeem these? KLISMA, is a new customer loyalty program, that can be used via your mobile – which you always have with you.

KLISMA is primarily focused at providing group buying benefits to employees of corporate and institutional clusters for its services, but it also supports individual customers as well.

KLISMA offers a mobile based membership card. A corporate employee or an individual user can register (free) and get a mobile based ID across all participating retailers in the program. The user can even group family members under one ID. Once the account is setup, the user will be able to obtain digital receipts, return products, redeem m-coupons, and participate in retailers’ loyalty programs using mobile-based KLISMA ID. This service eliminates paper clutter, lost receipts for product returns, the frustration of keeping track of discount coupons and plastic loyalty cards in wallet, purse or key chain. So, you are now a “green shopper” as well.

KLISMA goes far beyond linking everything to the cards a user already carry in their wallet or purse. KLISMA constantly searches through promotions and offers to find the best deals on everything from clothing to groceries to electronics to restaurants. KLISMA’s suggestions are unique to the user, as they’re based on what you typically purchase. For example, if we like a certain store, it might offer us a m-coupon from them for “10% Off All Purchases of Rs.1000 or more”. Or, if we like a certain product, it might show us a “Buy 1, Get 1 Free” m-coupon.

Ajay Aggarwal, the Chief Customer Experience Officer at KLISMA says ‘KLISMA is a comprehensive platform for modern consumers to plan, shop and manage their entire consumption cycle and it also enables modern retailers to deliver desired shopping experience to these consumers.” To say it in a simpler way, KLISMA works more like the “armed forces canteen service” for corporate employees. In a way it engages with corporate customers to deliver its services to its employees.

I bet you are now reminded of Groupon or Snapdeal. But KLISMA begs to differ. KLISMA enables its members to buy anything ranging from a car to a cinema ticket at the time they wish to buy, the price they wish to buy and retailer they to buy from. Since KLISMA is completely member driven and not retailer driven it is truly a pull platform which is the core difference whereas all others are push models. Apart from that, it offers deals to its members. There is a unified loyalty program across all retailers, personalised promotions based on individual shopping pattern and behaviour, very wide products & services range (unlike Groupon and Snapdeal) and mixed channel experience over internet, mobile and phone support.

Ajay Aggarwal has been associated with retail industry since 1993 and post 2006 he tracked the consumer challenges in this industry when he felt the need to have a platform to push for shopping experience advocacy. “I firmly think this will be the future need of matured modern consumers”, assures Ajay.

KLISMA comes from Persistent, and Ajay Aggarwal waxes eloquent when he is asked about his experience of being incubated in Persistent.

“I started working on KLISMA in June 2009 and its basic framework comprises of Cloud, BI, Mobile and Collaboration technologies. This is where I shared the concept with Dr. Anand Deshpande in November 2010 and he invited KLISMA to be part of Persistent and committed his support to make it happen. We worked out a unique innovative model of incubating this within Persistent and it has been a great experience of working as an entrepreneur within a corporate. Very soon KLISMA shall be spun out as a separate entity, jointly owned by Persistent, founders, employees and other investors. I must say large amount of credit for the success goes to Persistent to allow us to operate independently and objectively without any bias.”

We asked Anand Deshpande, CEO of Persistent about how and why Persistent, traditionally a software product outsourcing company, is getting into incubating technology startups. Anand says:

“I am a great believer in the Indian consumer story. KLISMA is a technology based Company for the Indian consumers and we are excited to have built the platform. Persistent has funded and participated in other technology platforms another example would be Parasharplus (http://www.parasharplus.com).

“In addition to incubating products within Persistent we have also announced a partnership to connect entrepreneurs to customers. Recently, we have partnered with 1M/1M an initiative setup by Sramana Mitra who has a goal to help a million entrepreneurs reach $1 million in revenue. Persistent as a technology partner will be reselling and also be a channel for products from select 1M/1M entrepreneurs. In addition, Persistent Systems will also provide outsourced product development services to these companies. In this way, we look forward to help entrepreneurs succeed by bringing new technologies to market.”

In short, other Pune startups that are targeting Indian consumers, and would like some help in reaching the market could approach Persistent for some sort of a partnership, similar to Ajay & KLISMA’s incubation in Persistent.

Ajay is of the opinion that this is the decade of e-commerce in India. Consumer maturity, internet and mobile penetration, 3-G and maturity of supply chain infrastructure in India will give a huge push to this channel in the next 10 years. Like the traditional retail e-commerce growth will also be controlled and limited by government policies, especially FDI in retail. He has no doubt that post 2020 e-retailing space in India will not be different than anywhere else in the world. So if going green and paperless and intelligent is something you like, check out KLISMA’s website