• "Novel Methods for Supply Chain Management Incorporating Uncertainty", US Patent 8,620,729 has been assigned to IIITB, as of December 2013. The authors of the patent are Prof. G. N. S. Prasanna and his students. For further details:
  http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=HITOFF&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsearch-bool.html&r=1&f=G&l=50&co1=AND&d=PTXT&s1=%22gorur+narayana%22&OS="gorur+narayana"&RS="gorur+narayana"
• Our doctoral student Anjali Mohan (PH2006902) is the recipient of the 2014 A. K. Chakravarti award of the Association of American Geographers (AAG) for the Best Graduate Student Paper on South Asia. The award is for her entry titled "From Hierarchy to Heterarchy: the State and Municipal Reforms Programme in Karnataka, India." The formal announcement and presentation of the award will take place at the AAG Annual Meeting in Tampa, Florida, U.S.A., April 8-12, 2014.
• The paper titled “Clustering Students based on Student Performance - A Partial Least Squares Path Modelling (PLS-PM) Study” authored by our doctoral student J. Yogalakshmi (PH2011002) won the Best Paper Award (Poster) at the XRCI Open 2014 - First Open Innovation Symposium conducted by Xerox Research Center India. Prof. R. Chandrashekar is her thesis supervisor.
• Dean’s list honors students for their academic performance. M. Tech. students with CGPA 3.75 or higher, and iMTech students with CGPA 3.6 or higher find a place in the list. It is announced twice annually and is published on our webpage. Dean’s list used to be referred to as Director’s Merit List until December 2013, after which, we have adopted the universal practice.
  Following students were honored with Dean’s list:
  Reijul Sachdev, Anusha P. S., Chandan Yeshwanth, Tanmayee Narendra, and Anand Murthy, B Laasya, Devarsh K. U., Nigel Steven Fernandez, Garimella Annapurna Gayathri, Kumaresh Krishan, Aditya Sanjay Paliwal, Shiva Ashish Thumparthy, Meghana M. Reddy, P. S. Srinivasan, Simran Dokania, Mesha B., Sheril M. Lawrence, Trisha Mittal, Soma Ravali, Kartikay Nagal, Jayati Deshmukh, Raghav Bali, Lalwani Amarkumar Bhagwandas, Avipsa Nayak, Vijay Huddar, Ritu Sharma, Gopal Shukla, Shivam Upadhyay, Ashish Kumar Gupta, Patil Sanjivani Rajiv, Amrutha M, Harsha N Bhushan, Kumudini Kakwani, Ankesh kumar Sengar, Satya Prakash.
  For further details: http://www.iiitb.ac.in/deans-list

Highlight of the Month

• Spandan is the intra-collegiate annual sports event conducted by the students. It is open for participation by the students, faculty, staff and alumni. Spandan was held from March 7-9, and witnessed active participation from the students and an overwhelming response from the alumni. The event was inaugurated by the Director. Sports events, such as, cricket, badminton, football, basketball, volleyball, throw ball, table tennis, carrom, chess, LAN gaming, were organized, just as the past years. This year, 3 more games were introduced namely Kho-Kho, mini-marathon and slow bike race. Registrations for the events were closed one week prior to the event. Badminton received the most number of registrations, totalling 280 for both singles and doubles. The new events Kho-Kho, mini-marathon, slow bike race were well-received by alumni as well as students.

Events

• FLAIR Programme was held at IIITB, February 7-March 24.  We conducted a 2-week training programme on Moodle for teachers from Kerala as a part of the Fostering Linkages in Academic Innovation and Research (FLAIR) programme, which is an initiative of the Department of Higher Education, Government of Kerala.
• Admissions 2014 are open for all the programmes. The online registrations have begun for M.Tech. (IT), M.Tech. (ESD), and iM.Tech. programmes on March 1 and for M.S. by Research and Ph.D. on March 15. The online registrations close for the research programmes on April 15, and for the M.Tech. and iM.Tech. programmes on April 30. For further details: http://www.iiitb.ac.in/admissions
• International Women's Day was observed worldwide on March 8, which was during Spandan. In the spirit of the day, there was an all-girls sports event, namely, a throw ball match during Spandan. Additionally we celebrated the event on March 19 by screening the film, "The Iron Lady," which is a 2011 British biopic of Margaret Thatcher, or Baroness Thatcher, former British Prime Minister. Meryl Streep had won the Academy Award for her portrayal of Mrs. Thatcher. The film was directed by Phyllida Lloyd, CBE. Meenakshi D’Souza and the SAC coordinated the events.
• We had our first Research Scholars Meet, on March 12, for which all our current research students, part-time as well as full-time, were invited to a get-together event. The event was briefly addressed by the Director and the Dean (Academics-R&D).
• We also kickstarted the Great Ideas talk series at the Research Scholar Meet on March 12. The format for the event broadly is 3 to 4 speakers will speak for 15 minutes each, on couple of powerful ideas that were truly spark of an idea. Profs. Srinath Srinivasa, B. Ashok, G. N. S. Prasanna, and Balaji Parthasarathy spoke at the event. The general themes that were touched upon were technologies driven for adapting to one's natural environment, saturation, bottom-up effect such as in bean-bag theory; size matters such as in the use of cellular structures for building space elevators and bubble cavitation; how neuroscientists perceive the brain differently from computer scientists in the context of artificial intelligence; an institutional approach to understanding technological change as socially endogenous rather than an exogenous phenomenon. Jaya Sreevalsan Nair moderated the event.
• IIITB hosted the ACM Siggraph, Bangalore chapter event on March 15, which was a talk by Mr. Manjunath R., on “Adaption of Rasterization Techniques in Tile-based Rendering”. Manjunath is a Principal Engineer at Samsung Electronics. Jaya Sreevalsan Nair, who is the Vice-chair for ACM Siggraph Bangalore chapter, helped in organizing the event.
• IIITB launched the second edition of its certificate course titled, “Analytics Essentials”, on March 22, for which working professionals are the primary target audience. The course spans over 12 weeks with classes scheduled on Saturdays. It has been a well-received program, and the participants are drawn from different companies such as Cisco, HP, Siemens, etc. The course is anchored by Prof. R. Chandrashekhar. The course is run by instructors, drawn from both academia and industry, to provide participants with a healthy mix of concepts and practical case studies and projects.

Publications

• Mohit Kumar and Debabrata Das, “Scaling Number of Active Links in Linux Kernel Bond Driver Having Heterogeneous Network Interface”, Journal of Wireless Personal Communication, Springer, March 2014 (accepted).
• Paper titled "Avoiding Deadlocks using Stalemate and Dimmunix" has been accepted under Poster section of the International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE 2014). The authors of the paper are Surabhi Pandey, Sushanth Bhat and our doctoral student, Vivek Shanbhag.

Faculty & Staff

• Balaji Parthasarathy visited Austria, Finland, France and Finland, February 27-March 6, to interview policy makers and representatives of firms as part of the project “The Challenge of Globalization: Technology Driven Foreign Direct Investment and its Implications for the Negotiation of International Investment Agreements”. The project is supported by the Volkswagen Stiftung (Germany), the Riksbanken Jubliemsfond (Sweden) and the Fondazione San Paolo (Italy).
• Profs. Madhav Rao, Srinath Naidu, Subhajit Sen, and Subir K. Roy, from the ESD (Electronic Systems Design) domain, visited University of Cambridge, ARM Holdings, RaspberryPi Foundations and Accelerator India in Cambridge and the Imperial College in London, March 10-14, under a British High Commission funded academic visit program. The visit was focused towards understanding the different areas of research and explore different modes and areas of engagement in the broad areas of ESD - flexible electronics (based on organic semiconductors), nanoelectronics, carbon nanotubes, EDA, computer architectures for security, etc. This was a follow up visit based on the engagement started by the Vice-Chancellor of University of Cambridge in September 2013 during his visit to IIITB to set up a Bangalore Cambridge Innovation Network to foster academic collaborations between University of Cambridge and leading institutes in Bangalore, such as, IIITB, IISc and NCBS. Our team visited many leading laboratories and departments in University of Cambridge and met different researchers to outline specific projects that can be funded by the Research Council of United Kingdom and UKIERI. The places visited include the Nanoscience Centre, Centre for Advanced Photonics and Electronics, Centre for Large Area Electronics, Department of Material Science and Engineering, Computer Laboratory and Cambridge Innovation and Knowledge Centre and Cavendish Laboratory.
• IIITB has been identified as the mentor institution for Myanmar Institute of Information Technology (MIIT). MIIT is a National Centre of Excellence established by the Government of the Union of Myanmar to impart education and conduct research in the areas of Information Technology. The Institute is being established with the help of the Government of India under a MOU entered in to between the two Governments. Profs. R. Chandrashekar and K. R. V. "Raja" Subramanian visited Myanmar for conducting entrance examination on March 16 for selecting students for the first PGDSD (Post Graduate Diploma in Software Development) programme of MIIT.<
• Prof. Jyotsna Bapat presented a position paper on “Service Oriented Enabler for IoT” at the Indo-Dutch workshop held at IIT-Delhi on March 19-20.
• Prof. Srinath Srinivasa presented the paper "SortingHat: A Framework for Deep Matching Between Classes of Entities," at the 10th International Workshop on Information Integration on the Web (IIWeb 2014), which was colocated with ICDE 2014, Chicago, Illinois, USA, on March 31. The paper is authored by Sumant Kulkarni, Srinath Srinivasa, Jyotsika Nath, Khasnabish, Karthikay Nagal, and Sandeep Kurdagi, and will appear in the Proceedings of IIWeb 2014.
• Prof. Tricha Anjali has joined IIITB as an Associate Professor on April 1, 2014. She received her Integrated M.,Tech. (EE) from Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay in 1998 and Ph. D. from Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta in 2004. Since 2004 she has been with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago. Her broad research interests include computer networks and wireless networks. More specifically, design and analysis of multipath routing schemes, heterogeneous radio access network selection and game theoretic approaches. She is a senior member of IEEE.

Students

• Our doctoral student, Ritesh Kumar Kalle (PH2007901) gave a talk on “Energy Efficiency Standards for Indian Telecom” at the "Indo-European Dialogue on ICT Standards and Emerging Technologies", which was held in Delhi, March 13-14. The event was organized by European Telecom Standards Institute (ETSI). Prof. Debabrata Das is his thesis supervisor. For further details:
  http://www.etsi.org/news-events/events/735-2014-03-indo-european-dialogue-on-ict-standards-and-emerging-technologies
• The paper titled “Characterizing Utilitarian Aggregation of Open Knowledge” by Srinath Srinivasa, Sweety Agrawal, Chinmay Jog and Jayati Deshmukh was accepted at 1st IKDD-Conference on Date Sciences. The conference was held in Delhi, March 21-23. Sweety Agrawal presented the paper.

Guest Talks

• “Adventures in Silicon Valley,” by Dr. Burleigh Cooper on March 26.
• “Administration of Elections in India,” by Mr. M. N. Vidhyashankar, IAS, on April 2.

Campus Visitors

• March 4: Ms. Sujatha Ramdorai, Gyanome, discussed with Profs. S. Sadagopan, S. Rajagopalan, S. S. Prabhu, and P. G. Poonacha, about the free online mathematical resources for school children in English and other vernacular languages.
• March 7: Mr. Jose Lorenzo, Executive Vice President of Schneider, who is in-charge of the Eco Business.
• March 10: Ms. Malathi Srinivasan, Country Manager – Project Pavlin and Academic Initiative, IBM India Pvt. Ltd.
• March 17-19: NAAC Peer Team.
• March 21: Mr. Mahesh Dutt Kolar, Associate Vice President, Finacle, Infosys Technologies.
• March 26: Mr. Sanjoy Sarma, CEO, C-DoT Alcatel Lucent Research Center to Wireless Network and IMS Lab.

• April 16: Jugaad Innovation: an interactive discussion with authors of “Jugaad Innovation,” Prof. Jaideep Prabhu and Mr. Navi Rajdou. For further details: http://www.jbs.cam.ac.uk/media/events/event-details/?ee=23
• April 28-May 5: excite students programme for students from Kumaran’s School and Navodaya School, Bangalore at the Institute.
• May 5-10: End term examinations.