Events

• The Post Graduate Diploma in Software Development (PGDSD) Programme for Myanmar students was inaugurated on May 5 at IIITB by Mr. Bhavesh R. Trivedi, the Deputy Secretary to Government of India (Development Partnership Administration), Ministry of External Affairs. This programme has been launched as a part of the bilateral cooperation between the Government of India and Government of Myanmar. IIITB, as a mentor institution to Myanmar Institute of Information Technology (MIIT), is implementing the first phase of the Programme where students from Myanmar will be hosted and taught in
• Final term exams for Term II (2014-15) were held May 5-10.
• A felicitation ceremony for Prof. Ramani was organized in the IIITB campus on May 7, in honour of him getting inducted into the Internet Hall of Fame. The event included talks on "Internet of the past" by Prof. Ramani and "Internet of the future" by Prof. Debabrata Das.
• The Cross-Currents Indo-UK Workshop, with talks from eminent researchers and speakers from both the UK and India, was held during May 12-14 at IIITB Campus. The workshop is being funded by the dot.rural India Spoke Fund, the AHRC and the RCUK Digital Economy Community and Culture Network + (CCN+).
  For details: http://cross-currents.appspot.com/
   
  http://www.communitiesandculture.org/,
• The Director, faculty and staff of the Institute were happy and proud to hold the graduation day for the students of the first Certificate Course on Analytics Essentials as well as for Udaan program on May 15. The event was presided over by the Director, with Shri MN Vidyashankar, Chairman IESA, being the chief guest. Twenty five students from the state of Jammu and Kashmir under the Udaan program graduated with a Post Graduate Diploma in Software Development (PGDSD), while 19 working professionals participated in the graduation ceremony for the Analytics course. The chief guest for the day and the Director congratulated the students for their achievement, and inspired them with their vision of the future opportunities that lay before them.
• One year of work on the new hostel construction was completed on May 22. The work on building the 600-room hostel began on May 22, 2013 and is slated to complete on December 30, 2014. The hostel will have an indoor gaming facility and in-house kitchen and dining facilities.
• Farewell to Dr. Ryan Cooper, Director, Research, RedMed Health Systems was given on May 29. At IIITB, Dr. Cooper had co-taught a special topics course on ICT in Health care in Term II (2013-14), along with Dr. Balwant Godara and Prof. Subhajit Sen.
• The interviews for admissions to the M.S. by Research and Ph.D. programmes were held June 9-13. There was an additional written examination only for the Data Sciences domain.
• The sixth Ramanujan, Math, and IT conference (RMIT2014) was held June 15-17. The conference series is sponsored by the National Board of Higher Mathematics, and IIITB.  The event featured tracks on both pure and applied mathematics. Prof. Yogananda of SJCE, Mysore, spoke about Ramanujan's work, including his series for PI, and the theta and mock-theta functions. Prof. George Andrews of Pennyslvania State University addressed the conference by Skype, speaking about "Ramanujan: His work and its meaning". In the applied mathematics track, Prof. Siva Atreya of Indian Statistical Institute, Bangalore, spoke about "Statistics of Social Networks", Dr. Neeraj Kayal of Microsoft Research Labs on "Arithmetic Computation and the VP versus VNP" problem, and Dr. Amit Despande of Microsoft Research Labs on "Sampling for subset selection and applications". Dr. Binay Panda from Ganit Labs and Dr. Rohit Gupta from Strand Life Sciences addressed the gathering on bio-informatics. Prof. Y. Narahari excited a packed hall, speaking on game theory. Prof. B. Ashok of IIITB spoke on "Force fluctuations on Nano-scale".  The conference was well attended, and testifies to the abiding interest in mathematics, both pure and applied, in the local community. Plans are afoot to make the next year an even bigger success. The conference website is www.iiitb.ac.in/RMIT2014/index.html
• Profs. S. Sadagopan, Debabrata Das and K. R. V. Raja Subramaniyan visited Myanmar for the Ground breaking ceremony at Mandalay on June 17.
• The 40th Senate meeting was held on June 25.

Publications

• The paper, "Effect of charge on the dynamics of an acoustically forced bubble", published by T. Hongray, B. Ashok, and J. Balakrishnan, Nonlinearity vol.27, p.1157-1179 (2014) was presented online on May 7 and has appeared in the June 2014 issue of the Journal. Nonlinearity is published jointly by IoP (Institute of Physics) Publishing, Bristol and the London Mathematical Society.
• The paper, "A Generic Framework and Methodology for Extracting Semantics from Co-occurrences", has been accepted for publication in Data & Knowledge Engineering (DKE Journal). The authors of the paper are Aditya Ramana Rachakonda, Srinath Srinivasa, Sumant Kulkarni and M. S. Srinivasan.
• Balaji Parthasarathy presented a paper titled "Innovating for the Bottom of the Pyramid: Case Studies in Healthcare from India" at the 3rd International Conference on Technologies for Development, at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, from June 4-6. Yuko Aoyama of Clark University, and Niveditha Menon, were second and third authors respectively of the paper.
• The paper, "Machine Learning and Data Mining in Pattern Recognition", by Yogalakshmi J., and Chandrashekar R. , has been accepted and will appear in the Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence, Springer Verlag .
• The paper, "Automatic Generation of Valid and Equivalent Assessment Instruments", by Shilpi Banerjee, and Chandrashekar R., has been accepted and will appear in the Proceedings of the International Conference on Smart Learning Environments 2014 (ICSLE 2014).




• The paper, "Ontology-based Smart Learning Environment for Teaching Word Problems in Mathematics", by Aparna Lalingkar, Chandrashekar R., and Ramani S., has been accepted and will appear in the Proceedings of the International Conference on Smart Learning Environments 2014 (ICSLE 2014).

Faculty & Staff

• Prof. S. Sadagopan attended the launch of historic event of RuPay Dedication to the Nation at Rashtrapati Bhavan on May 8. President Shri Pranab Mukherjee dedicated the RuPay network service to the nation in the presence of a large number of senior executives of banks and government officials. RuPay is going to make a difference not only as a solution option to the banks in India, but also as the main vehicle for Financial Inclusion.
• Balaji Parthasarathy was invited to deliver a talk on "ICT as an enabler of growth in developing countries - the example of Bangalore" at the Annual Event of Chamber Trade Sweden in Stockholm on May 18.
• Prof. Chandrashekar Ramanathan gave a talk titled "Teaching hospital model for Engineering education - A disruptive look at industry - academia interaction" as a part of the workshop titled "Business Side of Software" at the International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE 2014) held at Hyderabad on June 7.
• Prof. Sujit Kumar Chakrabarti, (along with Mr. Sreenivas Sharma from Altisource) presented a talk on “Leveraging Campus to create in-house Open source Automation framework for multi technology platform (A Project under STeP-IN Forum – IIIT(B) collaboration)” at STeP-IN Summit 2014 held in Taj Vivanta, M. G. Road on June 26. STeP-IN forum is the largest professional forum of software testing professionals in APAC.
• Prof. Sridhar Varadharajan has joined IIITB as a faculty member on June 25.

Guest Talks

• June 4: “Electromagnetic Spectrum, Landscape of Wireless Communications,” by Mr. Radhakrishna Arvapally, Architect, Alcatel-Lucent arranged through IEEE COMSOC.

Campus Visitors

• May 9: William Foster, Financial Attache, US Embassy, New Delhi.
• May 15: Dr. M Srinivas, Chief Engineer, KRIDL.
• May 15: Dr. Manjunath G., Joint Labour Commissioner and Joint Secretary, KB&OCWWB, Bangalore.
• May 19: Mr. Mauricio Sucasas, Asia Pacific Leader, IBM India Pvt. Ltd.
• May 20: Mr. Anubhab Bandyopadhyay, Founder, Director-Business Development at Wydyl Technologies.
• May 22: Dr. Pankaj Kulshreshtha, former Senior Vice President of Smart Decision Services - Analytics and Research at Genpact Ltd.
• May 26: Dr. Chandrashekar (formerly with KSFC) and Dr. Harsa Kestur, Director, RIMSR
• May 29: Mr. Vineet Kshirsagar, Senior Director & Group Head - Government Business, Oracle India.
• June 5: Mr. Rajinder Gandotra, Founder and CEO, Avekshaa Technologies (P) Ltd.
• June 9: Mr. C.V. Madhukar, Omidyar Networks
• June 23: Mr. Ravi Chouhan, Managing Director, SAP India.
• June 26: Mr. V. V. Pathy, Head, Business Development - Education Agilent

• August 4: Term I (2014-15) begins.
• August 4 : Arrival of integrated M.Tech new batch
• August 11: Last date for adding/dropping courses.
• August 13: The 41st Senate Meeting.