Tag Archives: turing100

Tech Events this Week: GoogleIO, AngularJS, Leslie Lamport, SMAC Skilling, WebGL and more

Events, , , , ,

Here is a list of technology events happening in Pune over the next few days. To be informed of these events in advance, you should subscribe to get the PuneTech calendar event announcements by email. Click here to subscribe.

Pune Google Developers Group: Google IO Extended

  • Date: 25-26 Jun
  • Location: Pune Int’l Incubation center, Dnyanvatsal Commercial Complex, Karve Nagar, Pune

Most awaited Developer Conference Google I/O is on its way. GDG Pune presents Google I/O Extended in Pune on June 25th. On extensive demand of GDG member’s and follower’s we are going to showcase Google IO live streaming on 25th June at 9PM IST. at PIIC karve nagar, Pune. We also organized event of key notes on 5th July at Synerzip Kothrud.

About Pune-GDG

Pune GDG is the place for developers to discuss google technologies. Pune Google Developer Group meets on the once every month. Our members are using or want to learn more about developing applications using Google technology, including: – Google Ajax APIs – maps, search, visualization, gadgets (JavaScript), Android – mobile development (Java) – Google App Engine – scalable cloud computing (Python and Java) – Google Web Toolkit – web development platform (Java) – Project Hosting.

Fees and Registration

This event is free and open for anybody to attend. Please register here: http://www.meetup.com/Pune-GDG/events/190538162/

Please double-check the date/time/venue of the event at the above link. We try to ensure that PuneTech calendar listings are accurate, but occasional errors creep in.

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SPIN Pune & @CSIPune Event: HIPAA Security Rules and their mapping to ISO27001

  • Date: Thu, 26 Jun 6:30pm – 8:30pm
  • Location: CSI Pune Office, Prabhat House, Damle Path, Off Law College Road, Behind INDSEARCH

Synopsis

Organizations that are subject to HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act), need to comply with the Privacy, Security and Breach Notification rules defined by the US department of Health and Human services (HHS). This topic will discuss how organizations that have implemented Information Security Management System (ISMS) as per ISO27001, can readily demonstrate compliance with most of the HIPPA security rules, by mapping their ISMS policies and Procedures to the Privacy and Security rule requirements.

Speaker Profile – Sanjay Kulkarni

Sanjay Kulkarni: Associate General Manager, Corporate Quality Assurance, Persistent Systems ltd. More than 20 years of industry experience in IT and Manufacturing industry, specifically in Quality Management Systems

Skills: Quality Assurance, Compliance with QMS Standards/Models such as ISO9001, CMMI, ISO13485, ISO62304

About CSI Pune

Computer Society of India (CSI) is one of the oldest computer science user groups in the country, and CSI Pune is has been one of the most active chapters in the country by virtue of its numerous activities and contributions in various fields. It has helped the people in implementing computerized systems in various sectors such as Industry, Banking commercial, Public sector Research and Development establishments and Government departments. With several programs and a strong IT professional network, the Pune chapter has been a part of the growth of Pune’s IT industry.

Working at the grass-root level, the chapter has also contributed toward stronger computer education is various ways. With chapters in various colleges in Pune, CSI has a very wide reach amongst the students of computer science too.

Fees and Registration

This event is free and open for anybody to attend. Register here: https://eis.persistent.co.in/eis/hrms/hrmsweb/webui/ExternalSurveyResponse.aspx?Id=77e2f8c6-a145-4f85-a40b-f7aa2c303d2f

Contact info.csipune@gmail.com for details.

Please double-check the date/time/venue of the event at the above link. We try to ensure that PuneTech calendar listings are accurate, but occasional errors creep in.

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(Paid) Startup Dash: 3-day Startup Mentoring+Pitching Event

  • Date: 27-29 Jun
  • Location: Thoughtworks Technologies (New Office), 6th Floor, Binarius Building, Yerwada

Inc42 Magazine, TLabs and Nasscom 10,000 Startups have teamed up to bring India’s first highly curated event for early stage startups, StartupDash, which will act as a catalyst for startups in MVP stage. It is coming with a complete package of Launchpad, Team Building, PitchUp and Mentorship opportunities in 3 major startup focused cities – Delhi, Pune and Bangalore.

Some of the people attending the event are Shashank Deshpande, Rohan Dighe, Avinash Sethi, Baishampayan Ghose, Navin Kabra, and Anand Ovalekar.

For more details, see http://startupdash.in

Please double-check the date/time/venue of the event at the above link. We try to ensure that PuneTech calendar listings are accurate, but occasional errors creep in.

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Expertalks: AngularJS Applied – Case Study of a Production App

  • Date: Sat, 28 Jun 10:00am – 2:00pm
  • Location: Equal Experts Office, 4-C, 2nd Floor, Cerebrum IT Park, B3 Kumar City, Kalyani Nagar

AngularJS is a fast gaining popularity as a JavaScript framework for building rich and interactive Single Page Applications following the client-side MVC design philosophy.

At Equal Experts, we’ve recently completed a real-world mobile-web application built using AngularJS. It’s live & more than kicking in production today… 🙂

In this session we would like to present a case study of our experience with AngularJS.

We’ll go over the practical challenges we ran into (…that are typical use cases for any rich internet application of today…) and how we addressed those challenges using various features of AngularJS.

Session Format

This session will assume that the audience is familiar with fundamental AngularJS constructs and mechanics.

The main aim of the session is to share knowledge among developers who have some experience of using AngularJS in the wild.

This will not be an ‘introductory’ tutorial-oriented session.

PRESENTER: Avinash Agreeable

Resources

For those who’ve not used AngularJS before and still wish to participate, here are some great resources to get you started with AngularJS.

We hope you befriend AngularJS beforehand, which will be necessary to fully appreciate the content and intent of this session.-

About EXPERTALKS

EXPERTALKS is a series of free tech workshops organized at the Equal Experts office in Pune. See http://www.meetup.com/expertalks/ for more information about the EXPERTALKS meetup group.

Fees and Registration

This event is free and open for anybody to attend. Please register here: http://www.meetup.com/expertalks/events/187699582/

Please double-check the date/time/venue of the event at the above link. We try to ensure that PuneTech calendar listings are accurate, but occasional errors creep in.

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Turing100 Lecture: Talk on the Life and work of Leslie Lamport

  • Date: Sat, 28 Jun 2:00pm – 5:00pm
  • Location: Dewang Mehta Auditorium, “Bhageerath”, Persistent Systems, SB Road

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

Please double-check the date/time/venue of the event at the above link. We try to ensure that PuneTech calendar listings are accurate, but occasional errors creep in.

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Venture Center Event: A documentary on the psychology of Industrial Design

  • Date: Sat, 28 Jun 3:00pm – 4:30pm
  • Location: Library, Venture Center, NCL Innovation Park, Pashan Road

“Objectified”: A documentary on the psychology of Industrial Design

The items you think the least about may have the most effective designs, according to the 2009 film “Objectified.”

Take the Post-it note. Have you ever considered that someone put a lot of time into its appearance?

The movie explores the unconscious but influential relationship we have with the objects around us, and why the smallest tweaks in design make an enormous difference.

Nearly everyone spends their life surrounded by the work of industrial designers, but very few people understand the process by which your furniture, cell phone, or alarm clock came to look and feel the way they do, and how the elements of design interact with our own ideas and assumptions about value and functionality. Objectified, which features interviews with a number of major designers who discuss how products move from the drawing board to the marketplace, and the philosophy behind the look, feel, and function of the things in your home.

Anchored by Firoz Siddiqui

Firoz works as Inovation Manager with Fauresia Interior Systems. He has also worked with Tata Motors and Mahindra, in their Design Dept. He has 13 yrs of experience in the field of Design and automotive products. His expertise is in Designing, Prototyping, Testing and Mechanisms. He is a serial innovator with many patents to his credit, some of them being personal

About Venture Center

Entrepreneurship Development Center (Venture Center) – a CSIR initiative – is a not-for-profit company hosted by the National Chemical Laboratory, Pune. Venture Center strives to nucleate and nurture technology and knowledge-based enterprises by leveraging the scientific and engineering competencies of the institutions in the Pune region in India. The Venture Center is a technology business incubator specializing in technology enterprises offering products and services exploiting scientific expertise in the areas of materials, chemicals and biological sciences & engineering.

Fees and Registration

This event is free and open for anybody to attend. Please register here: http://www.eventbrite.com/e/documentary-film-tickets-11880748639

For more information, contact: Miss. Lipika Biswas, Venture Center, Phone: +91-20-20250934/64011024; Email: eventsdesk@venturecenter.co.in

See also: http://www.ipface.org/workshops.php

Please double-check the date/time/venue of the event at the above link. We try to ensure that PuneTech calendar listings are accurate, but occasional errors creep in.

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SLP Pune Event: Leveraging Accelerators & Incubators

  • Date: Sat, 28 Jun 3:00pm – 5:00pm
  • Location: Venture Center, NCL Innovation Park, Pashan Road

Leveraging Accelerators and Incubators

As an entrepreneur one is constantly intrigued by the deluge of accelerators and incubators that exist around the world. What options exist for you as an entrepreneur? As you look to startup in Pune which ones make sense for you? Listen to a panel of startup CEOs and founders talk about their experiences and perspective on leveraging accelerators and incubators.

Panel Members :

  • Dr. V. Premnath: Head NCL Innovations, Head, IP Group; Scientist, NCL; Director, Venture Center
    • Dr. V. Premnath holds a B.Tech. from the Indian Institute of Technology – Bombay and a Ph.D. from The Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA. He has also been a Chevening Technology Enterprise Fellow with the Centre for Scientific Enterprises, London Business School and Cambridge University, UK.
  • Avinash Shenoi, CEO and Founder, Instaclique. Participated in Target’s accelerator.
    • Avinash has a Bachelors degree in Computer Engineering from Pune University and Masters in Computer Science from the University of Maryland, USA. He has experience and expertise in successfully running several startup companies across two continents.He has built and led teams to design and build enterprise products for Information Security, compliance and custom software development.
  • Sarang Lakare, PhD. Founder and CEO, IntouchApp. Participated in Microsoft Accelerator
    • Sarang is an Innovator my mind and Entrepreneur by heart. He has a BE from Govt COE Pune and PhD from SUNY Stony Brook, NY, USA. After 12+ years experience working at 2 startups and a Fortune 100 company he moved back to India to pursue the dream of starting up on his own in India. He has over 40 publications, holds 5 US patents and has 14+ patent applications in the field of medical image analysis.
  • Nitin Gupta, Founder & CEO, Navstik. Experienced with options from Government bodies.
    • Nitin is a technopreneur, and has been working on engineering R&D for over a decade. He did B.Tech and M.Tech from IIT Bombay, and MS in Aerospace Engineering from University of Maryland. Nitin has been involved in multidisciplinary research on modeling, simulation and automation of dynamical systems.

About Startup Leadership Program

The Startup Leadership Program (SLP) is a highly selective, 80-hour, 6-month world-class training program and lifetime network for outstanding founders and innovators. SLP was founded in 2006, operates in 23 Cities with 1300 fellows & 1000+ startups. SLP Fellows have founded 700+ companies that have raised $400 million, and include breakthrough and award-winning startups like Savored, TomNod, Ixigo, NatureBox, SideTour, Micello, Momelan, Novira, Runkeeper, Sensobi, Shareaholic, Solar Junction, Voicetap and Ubersense.

Website: http://www.startupleadership.com

About Venture Center

Entrepreneurship Development Center (Venture Center) – a CSIR initiative – is a Section 25 company hosted by the National Chemical Laboratory, Pune. Venture Center strives to nucleate and nurture technology and knowledge-based enterprises by leveraging the scientific and engineering competencies of the institutions in the Pune region in India. The Venture Center is a technology business incubator supported by the Department of Science & Technology’s National Science & Technology Entrepreneurship Development Board .

Website: http://www.venturecenter.co.in

Fees and Registration

This event is free and open for anybody to attend. As far as I can tell, no registration is necessary. Maybe you can register here: http://punestartups.org/events/event/show?id=1988582%3AEvent%3A336907

Please double-check the date/time/venue of the event at the above link. We try to ensure that PuneTech calendar listings are accurate, but occasional errors creep in.

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Book Launch of “Startups! Finding Funding” & Networking Event for Entrepreneurs

  • Date: Sat, 28 Jun 5:30pm – 8:00pm
  • Location: Sumant Moolgaokar Auditorium, Ground Floor, Wing A, ICC Trade Center, SB Road

SME JOINUP presents the launch of a book titled ” Start-ups ! Finding Funding ” authored by Vikas Kumar and Mehul Darooka

The book covers 20 stories of entrepreneurs who found innovative and alternative ways to fund their startup . The book examines each of these methods and lays bare the pros and cons of each method

  • Each of the methods is explained by a startup/company who has already used that method for funding
  • Each of the stories carries the journey of the startup, how they used the method and what were the implications
  • The Author who is also an investor critically analyses each method, its pros and cons and should you attempt to try out these methods.
  • There is a FUND-O-METER at the end of each story to help you judge the merits of this approach.

Fees and Registration

This event is free and open for anybody to attend. There is no registration required.

Please double-check the date/time/venue of the event at the above link. We try to ensure that PuneTech calendar listings are accurate, but occasional errors creep in.

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EMB3D Meetup: Basics of WebGL – Presentation from Imagination Tech. Explore use cases

  • Date: Mon, 30 Jun 12:45pm – 4:45pm
  • Location: Autodesk Pune, 11F, 36/3-B, Business Plaza, Koregaon Park Annex

See http://www.meetup.com/EMB3D-Pune/events/188563862 for details.

About EMB3D

Exploring new technologies for creating, publishing and viewing 3D content and data on the web, for consumers.

Fees and Registration

This event is free and open for anybody to attend. Please register here: http://www.meetup.com/EMB3D-Pune/events/188563862

Please double-check the date/time/venue of the event at the above link. We try to ensure that PuneTech calendar listings are accurate, but occasional errors creep in.

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Social Media Day Pune

  • Date: Mon, 30 Jun 6:30pm – 8:30pm
  • Location: Jimmy Hu – 390, Sanskruti Lifestyle Complex, Opposite Post 91, Lane 7, Koregaon Park

Lighthouse Insights and The Other Guys are celebrating Social Media Day in Pune.

Agenda: Come greet, meet like-minded people, have a drink, gossip more, make new friends and drive back home safely. The event is not restricted to social media experts, it is open for all as man is a social beast. They are trying to spice up the event, will update soon.

Food and Beverages: They are not yet funded to help in your food and drinks bill but they have got an offer from the good guys at Jimmy Hu.

Pay Rs.350/- and have 2 Beers + 1 Starter. Is that exciting enough? Want to drink more the bar is all yours!

Sponsorship: They are looking for sponsors. Interested parties contact: prasant@lighthouseinsights.in

Registration: It is a free and open to all event. Please register here: http://lighthouseinsights.in/social-media-day-pune.html/ – they promise not to add you to their newsletter.

Please double-check the date/time/venue of the event at the above link. We try to ensure that PuneTech calendar listings are accurate, but occasional errors creep in.

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(Paid) Basic English Workshop for Tech Professionals/Entrepreneurs

  • Date: 1-31 Jul
  • Location: Venture Center, NCL Innovation Park, Pashan Road

Learn : Learn Spoken English with Basics of Grammar

  • English Grammar
  • Formation of Sentences
  • Communication Skills
  • Role Play
  • Public Speaking
  • Voice & Modulation guidance

Fun Interactive programs. Practical Application of course contents.

For Whom

  • Entrepreneurs, Start-ups, Professionals, Corporates, Home makers, Students and interested Individuals of Semi-English mediums

  • Duration : 5 weeks | Starts on 1st July – Ends on 31st July 2014

  • Timings : 3pm -5pm
  • Classes : Mon -Fri
  • Course fees : Rs 2100/-

About the Trainer – Mrs. Lakshmi Srinath

The session will be conducted by : Mrs. Lakshmi Srinath, Founder-Director of Girijamba English Foundation (GEF), English Language Communication Skill Trainer, IELTS Trainer – British Council Certified.

14 + years of experience in training Corporates, Individuals, Home makers; Collegians | A Freelance Content writer | A blogger

A visiting faculty for Business English Communication at INIFD,MIT, ASOM, VIT

About Venture Center

Entrepreneurship Development Center (Venture Center) – a CSIR initiative – is a not-for-profit company hosted by the National Chemical Laboratory, Pune. Venture Center strives to nucleate and nurture technology and knowledge-based enterprises by leveraging the scientific and engineering competencies of the institutions in the Pune region in India. The Venture Center is a technology business incubator specializing in technology enterprises offering products and services exploiting scientific expertise in the areas of materials, chemicals and biological sciences & engineering.

Fees and Registration

This course costs Rs. 2100, and open for anybody to attend.

For registration and payment, contact: Miss. Lipika Biswas, Venture Center, Phone: +91-20-20250934/64011024; Email: eventsdesk@venturecenter.co.in

Please double-check the date/time/venue of the event at the above link. We try to ensure that PuneTech calendar listings are accurate, but occasional errors creep in.

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

Events, Featured, , , , ,

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

Events, Featured, , , , , , , ,

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

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

Events, Featured, , , , , , , ,

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

Events, Featured, , , , , , ,

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)

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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

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(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

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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

Turing100 Lecture: Life and work of Judea Pearl – 9 Mar

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As part of the Turing100 Lecture Series this time, there is a talk on the life and work of 2011 Turing Award recipient Judea Pearl, followed by a “Turing 100” quiz that teams of professionals and students can participate in.

Judea Pearl was given the Turing award for the development of a calculus for probabilistic and causal reasoning. On Saturday, 9 March, Mukund Deshpande, Head of the Business Intelligence and Analytics Competency at Persistent will talk about this work.

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 9th March. This event is free and open for anybody to attend. Register here

Turing100 Lecture: Life and work of John Backus (Fortran|BNF) – 2 Feb

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The Turing100 Lecture Series come back with the 6th session. This time, there are two Technical talks, centered around the life and works of 1977 Turing Award recipient, Dr. John Backup.

In addition to several other contributions, Dr Backus is well-known for his pioneering work on Fortran as well as the inventor of the Backus-Naur Form (BNF) which is widely used as the notation for formal syntax.

On Saturday, 2nd Feb, Abhijit Vichare, will talk about the life and work of John Backus.

This will be followed by a session on “Early History of Fortran: The Making of a Wonder” by Prof. Uday Khedkar, Department of CSE, 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 2nd February. This event is free and open for anybody to attend. Register here