• Anshu Jain, from the graduating class of 2005, was nominated as Senior Technical Staff Member (STSM) at IBM Watson, a significant technical recognition for an IBMer. IBM recognizes leaders in the technical track, through a technical career path, and the STSM position precedes one of the highest technical honors at IBM which is the Distinguished Engineer (DE). Anshu will be responsible for key components of the Watson Discovery Solutions.
  
• The paper titled "Ontology based smart learning environment for teaching word problems in mathematics" has won the First Best Paper Award in the International Conference on Smart Learning Environments ICSLE2014 held in Hong Kong during July 24-25. The extended version of the paper is invited to be published in Smart Learning Environments Journal published by Springer. The authors of this paper are Aparna Lalingkar, Prof. Chandrashekar Ramnathan and Prof. Srinivasan Ramani.
  

Events

• 55th Board meeting was held on July 6.
• 14th Annual Convocation of IIITB was held on July 6. Prof. Partha Prathim Chakrabarti, Director, Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, was the chief Guest of the event. Including 3 from Ph.D. and 3 from M.S. by Research degree programmes, 161 students received their degrees.
  For details: http://www.iiitb.ac.in/14th-convocation
  Press coverage on the convocation at:
  1. MTech Students Choose Society Over High Paying Jobs
  2. After gold medal in M Tech, they are raring to serve society 3.http://www.vijaykarnatakaepaper.com/Details.aspx?id=14372&boxid=23918391
• IIITB hosted “USAID-KREDL Solar Rooftop Consultation Workshop” on July 9, which was organized, as a part of the PACE-D Technical Assistance (TA) Programme, by US AID and Karnataka Renewable Energy Development Limited (KREDL), in collaboration with Bangalore State Electricity Company Limited (BESCOM). The objective of the workshop was to provide a platform for commercial and industrial users with interests in developing rooftop solar projects; to bring them together with sector experts and utility personnel; to facilitate greater exchange of ideas and to enable growth of solar energy capacity in the state. The workshop inaugural ceremony was convened by Honorable Minister for Energy, Government of Karnataka, Mr. D. K. Shivakumar.
• The new batch of students for M.Tech 2014-16 joined on July 11. 136 students joined for M.Tech.(IT) and 19 for M.Tech. (ESD) programmes. The preparatory term started on July 14.
• IIITB has recently entered into a partnership with the United Nations Asia Pacific Centre for Information and Communication Technologies and Development. The partnership seeks to create an effective platform for enhancing capacity of policy makers and officers of government and industry in the design and use of ICTs in government functions. As a part of this initiative, the Centre for IT and Public Policy conducted a 2-day workshop on ICTs and Governance for senior officers from the government and industry during July 17-18. The workshop provided the participants an opportunity to interact with experts and fellow practitioners and gain from each other's experience of using ICTs.

Publications

• The book, “E-Governance in India: Interlocking politics, technology and culture, by Prof. Bidisha Chaudhuri, has been published by Routledge, London & U.K. in May 2014, in the series Routledge Advances in South Asian Studies. The book is of 152 pages, with ISBN: 978-0-415-73790-6 (Hardback), ISBN: 978-1-315-77521-0 (eBook). E-Governance has been one of the strategic sectors of reform in India since late 1990s under the rubric of ‘good governance’ agenda promoted by International Organizations. As India’s policy focus changed towards economic liberalization, deregulation and privatization proliferating domestic and foreign investment, ICT (Information Communication Technology) has been one of the leading areas for such heightened investment. Consequently, there has been a burgeoning interest in deploying ICT, in revamping the public service delivery and eventually the overall system of governance. This book analyses e-Governance in India and argues that such initiatives did not take place in isolation but followed in the footsteps of broader governance reform agenda that has already made considerable impact on the discourses and practices of governance in India. Employing interdisciplinary methodology by combining approaches from the Political Sciences, Sociology and Postcolonial/ transcultural studies, this book presents a qualitative account of the policies and practices of e-Governance reform in India along with a detailed case study of the Common Services Centres (CSCs) Scheme under the National e-Governance Plan of the Government of India and its resultant impact on the overall system of governance. It unfolds general theoretical issues in terms of the relationship between technology and governance and the entanglement of politics, technology and culture in the complex whole of governance. This furthers one’s understanding of the impact of the transnational governance reform agenda on post-colonial and post-communist societies of the developing world. Making an important and original contribution to the emerging field of e-Governance and to the existing body of research on governance in general, this book will be of interest to students and scholars of Political Science, Political Sociology, South Asian Politics and Governance.
• Prof. B. Ashok, "On the importance of length scales in determining the physics of biological systems", (invited book chapter), Chapter 7, p.53-64 in "Nature's longest threads: new frontiers in the mathematics & physics of information in biology", eds. J. Balakrishnan & B. V. Sreekantan, World Scientific Publishing Co., Singapore (2014).
• The paper titled “Detecting Programming Language from Source Code using Bayesian Learning Techniques” was accepted in the 10th International Conference on Machine Learning and Data Mining, St Petersburg, Russia. Conference was held on July 21-24. Jyotiska Nath Khasnabish, Mitali Sodhi, Jayati Deshmukh and G Srinivasaraghavan are the authors of the paper. The paper will be published in the Proceedings of Machine Learning and Data Mining in Pattern Recognition.
For details : http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007%2F978-3-319-08979-9_39

Faculty & Staff

• Prof. S. Sadagopan attended the press meet on Smart city project of ELCITA on July 2.
  
• Profs. S. Sadagopan, Debabrata Das and Jyotsna Bapat attended the MIT-India 15th Anniversary in Bangalore on July 6.
  
• Prof. Jyotsna Bapat attended Microsoft Faculty Summit from July 13-16 are Redmond, USA.
  
• Prof. Ashish Choudhury, Ph.D. from IIT Madras, has joined the institute as Assistant Professor with effect from July 1. After his Ph.D. he had worked as a visiting scientist at Indian Statistical Institute Kolkata for a year and then as a research assistant for two years at University of Bristol. His research interests include theoretical cryptography, with specialization in cryptographic protocols.
  
• Mr. Thotreithem Hongray has joined as Research Associate in the Center for Complex Systems and Soft Matter Physics in the Institute with effect from July 21.
  
• Dr. Aastha Madaan, Ph. D from University of Aizu, Fukushima, Japan, has joined as Post-doctoral Researcher in the area of “Trusted Data Exchange” at the Center for Data Sciences in the Isnstitute with effect from July 23.
  
• Mr. V. S. Prakash, has joined the institute as Officer on Special Duty (OSD) with effect from July 28. Prior to joining IIITB he was Special Director, Karnataka State Natural Disaster Monitoring Center. In the past, he had worked in the Department of Science and Technology Karnataka, the Department of Mines and Geology, Karnataka, and the Ministry of Water Resources, Governments of India.
  
  
• Ms. Angel Jeena, M. A. in Economics from IIT Madras, has joined as Research Associate in the Center for IT and Public Policy (CITAPP) with effect from July 28.
  

Students

• Anuj Duggal (MT2012024), now an alumnus, was invited by Google to attend Google I/O, an annual conference for developers and technologists, at San Francisco on June 25-26. Google recognized his contribution to the developer community, Google Developers Group (GDG) Bangalore, and invited him for the event. Currently, he is associated with Intel Technologies as Graphics Software Engineer. He also holds a responsibility of Innovator and serves as Intel Software Evangelist in the Intel Developer Zone.
  
• Konakondla Sai Aravind Kashyap (IMT2013019) has been selected as Microsoft Student Associate (MSA) for the year of 2014.


• Nitesh Kumar, alumnus and research assistant, and Harsha K. C. (MT2013056) participated in the MIT Global Startup Labs Programme 2014, India. This was a six week program conducted by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to encourage innovation and develop technical entrepreneurship. 33 participants, constituting 12 teams, were selected from 450 applicants from all over India. The mentors, who are students and alumni of MIT, had experience in start-ups, rapid prototyping, design, technology and entrepreneurship. They were successfully able to do prototype and showcase 3D printing with Plastic, Soft Clay (Play-Doh), Chocolate and Halwa. There was a final demo day at Google Bangalore where they showcased their product and got the attention of several entrepreneurs, investors and media. This project is guided by Prof. T. K. Srikanth.
  For details: http://animoto.com/play/F8uH9qZ8Jul1FybAefQeCA
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sRESrYXBoJw

Guest Talks

• “Challenges and opportunities of using ICTs in the Indian capital markets” by Mr. C B Bhave, former Chairman of SEBI and NSDL on July 2.
• “Campus Connect Initiatives” by Target Group (Mr. Anand Das and Ms. Jyothi Ramakrishnan) on July 8.


• "Emotional Intelligence for a Successful Career" by Prof.S S Prabhu to MIIT PGDSD students on July 8.
  
  
• “Current trends in programming languages and research” by Prof. Aditya Kanade, CSA, IISc on July 11.
  
  
• “Comprehensive Static Analysis of Embedded Software (C/C++, Ada) using Polyspace products” by Mr. Prashant Mathapati, Mathworks on July 22.
  

Campus Visitors

• July 1: Prof. Amit Sengupta, Tata Memorial Cancer Hospital, Mumbai.
• July 1: Satyen H Parikh, CEO& Founder Team Talent & Empowerment Consultants.
• July 8: Anurag Mehrotra CEO - IT Business.
• July 9: Mr Sridhar, CMD of Sankhya Infotech.
• July 22: A senior delegation from ITI namely Mr. Chakrabarti, Additional GM and Plant Head Bangalore plant and R&D, Mr. T. N. S. Raghavan, DGM-Business Development, Mr. Ramesh B. R., Manager, Projects and Planning, Business Development Manager- Corporate visited IIITB to take forward the already signed MOU between ITI and IIITB.
• July 25: Mr. Rathnakumar, GM, KRIDL.
• July 28:- Dr. Soumen Roy, Assistant Professor, Bose Institute, Kolkata.

• August 8: iMTech batch (2014-19) joins.
• August 9: Prof. V. Sridhar’s book release.
• August 11: Last date for course registration.
  
• August 13: 41st Senate Meeting.
  
• August 15: Independence Day celebrations.