Events

• The 2^nd batch of Sponsored M.Tech. for Samsung Research (Bangalore) engineers started on January 1.
• IIITB Community lunch was arranged on January 1.
• Prof. V. N. Muralidhara was felicitated by Mr. Sandesh Bhat, Vice President, IBM India Software Lab on receiving IBM Shared University Research Award 2014 on January 7.
• Prof. Sadagopan, Director, and other faculty members attended a lecture by Turing Award winner Prof. Silvio Micali at Infosys on January 7.
• Analytics Essentials 3 was completed on January 10 and Analytics Essentials 4 started on January 17. The programme was inaugurated with the lighting of the lamp and a speech by the Director.
• Lohri is a popular Punjabi festival that is traditionally associated with the harvest season, so it is known as the harvest Festival also. Lohri was celebrated on campus on January 13.  As per the tradition, a bonfire was lit, students gathered around the rising flames and threw til (sesame) and peanuts into the fire. The entire campus of IIITB danced to the tunes of Punjabi folk songs.
• MyAutobiography, a unique social media was launched on January 21 in IIITB. The platform is intended to provide all the students and faculty at IIITB to start recording their own autobiography on an individual portal provided to each member. On the occasion, the founder of the initiative, Mr. Yogesh Kochhar, announced contests with prize money of INR 1 Lac and internships for two months for two deserving students in the upcoming summer break.
  For details: www.myautobiography.in
• SPICMACAY Bangalore chapter organized a concert of Carnatic music, which was hosted on campus, by the eminent Carnatic singer Padma Bhushan Sangeetha Kalanidhi Shri T.V. Sankaranarayanan on January 23. It was a treat to listen to the artiste and the evening was a mesmerizing experience for all present there.
• IIITB celebrated the 66^th Republic Day on January 26. It included flag hoisting, an inspirational speech by the Director, a speech by Prateeksha (IMT2014040), a patriotic song by the student choir and singing of the National Anthem. The programme ended with distribution of sweets followed by kite flying.
  For video:
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kg1hCwNRExU&list=UUtzrbJ_ndsynuc2X_W3C9zw
• '8 Bit - A Byte of IIITB', is a student-run college magazine. With the frequency set to twice a semester, the first issue was launched on January 26 by the Director. The magazine captures the essence of campus life as everything is included from the student's perspective.
• IIITB Incubation board meeting was held on January 28.

Publication

• The paper titled “Graduate Course in Software Testing” by Profs. Meenakshi D'Souza and Sujit Kumar Chakrabarti, has been accepted, and will be presented at the International Workshop on Software Engineering Education on February 18 (Co-Located with ISEC 2015) Bangalore, India.
• The article titled “Who is liable in platform business?” authored by Profs. V. Sridhar, and T. K. Srikanth, has been published in Financial Express on January 13.
  http://www.financialexpress.com/article/fe-columnist/who-is-liable-in-platform-business/29201/
• The article titled “Project Management Lessons in Outsourced Product Development” by Prof. V. Sridhar, and Mr. Anees Haidary, has been published in Manage India. (a publication of Project Management Institute India) in December 2014.
  http://www.pmi.org.in/manageindia/volume5/issue11/article.of.the.month.html
• The article titled “Emergency! Take the call”, authored by Prof. V. Sridhar, and Mr. R. Venkateswaran, has been published on Economic Times on December 12, 2014
  http://blogs.economictimes.indiatimes.com/Telecomteteatete/the-time-for-integrated-emergency-communication-and-response-system-is-now/
• The paper titled "Wallah: Design and Evaluation of a Task-centric Mobile-based Crowdsourcing Platform" by Suhas Dev (MT2012142), Abhishek Kumar, Kuldeep Yadav, Shailesh Vaya, G. Michael Youngblood has been published in MOBIQUITOUS 14 Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Mobile and Ubiquitous Systems: Computing, Networking and Services. This paper is a result of work that Suhas had done during his 6 months internship at Xerox Research Center India.
  More details:
  http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2693008
  http://www.eudl.eu/doi/10.4108/icst.mobiquitous.2014.258030

IIITB in Media

• Now, a social networking site to help chronicle your daily life, Deccan Herald, January 22. 
• 10 tips for innovators and app developers, Yourstoryin, January 13
• Google is interested in helping in Digital India: Vint Cerf, Business Standard, January 7.

Faculty & Staff

• Prof. Sadagopan and few faculty members attended a High-Level Workshop on “Strategies for Engineering Education in India Towards 2025” on January 9.
• Prof. Chandrashekar Ramanathan's nomination as ACM Senior Member has been accepted. The Senior Member Grade recognizes "those ACM members with at least 10 years of professional experience and 5 years of continuous Professional Membership who have demonstrated performance that sets them apart from their peers."
• Prof. V. Sridhar and Prof. Manjunath D. (IIT Bombay) were the co-chairs for the Mobile India 2015 Conference held on January 9 at Bangalore.
• The Director, faculty members and students attended Hari Sahasrabudhe lecture series on “Inflections in Computing”, initiated by Mr.s Narayana Murthy and conducted jointly with IIT Kanpur, for the January 2015 edition Prof. Steve Awodey, from CMU is speaking at Infosys and IIT Kanpur.
• Prof. V. Sridhar presented the paper titled “Flexible Spectrum Management”, and also conducted the workshop at the SITM-TEC International Research Conference on January 16-17 in Pune, India.
• Jaya Sreevalsan Nair and Beena Kumari were invited to attend and present at the DST National Airborne LiDAR Meeting at IIT Kanpur on January 19-20. They presented their work on "Remote Interactive Visualization of Parallel Implementation of Structural Feature Extraction of Three-dimensional Lidar Point Cloud".
• The proposal “Cross-border Digital Flows and its Economic Impacts”, by Prof. V. Sridhar, has been selected for funding of about $9,600 (one of 10 selected) in the South Asia Network of Economic Research Institutes (SANEI) 16^th Round Regional Research Competition.
• Prof. Bidisha Chaudhuri presented her poster on "E-governance and social inclusion: The case of women entrepreneurs in Rajasthan" in the Human Computer Interaction track at the Xerox Research Center India's XRCI Open event on January 22-23.
• There are new faces and roles on campus. Details of their joining:
  Prof. Janaki Srinivasan (Ph.D., University of California at Berkeley, U.S.A.), Assistant Professor, January 15.

Students

• Naveen Pai (MT2013087) was interviewed by Toptalent for sharing his placement experience. The site is one of the most popular placement preparations site in the country. The interview of Naveen Pai was in the context of his placement at Bloomreach and it covered his experience on preparation for the campus placement. This is the second time a IIITB student has been featured on their site. This initiative by Toptalent is intended to to help students prepare for job interviews and other placement activities.
  For details:
  http://www.geeksforgeeks.org/toptalent-interview-naveen-got-bloomreach/
• Team Lunatics from IIITB participated in the Google Hackadroid Competition held during January 9-10 in Google Office, Bangalore. The theme of the Hackathon was to develop fitness related apps using Google's Fit API. Team members are Mayur Bhole (MT2014065) and Anand Tirthgirikar (MT2014126).
  Their idea involved developing an Android application to train users for a particular sport, which involves building stamina, e.g. running, cycling, etc. The user initially selects the level of training (beginner/intermediate/advanced) and a target metric, corresponding to which a training plan is given to the user. The user's daily records (step count, distance etc.) are captured by wearable devices or sensors on the smartphone and are stored to a cloud using Google Fit API so that users can access that data from anywhere.
• Team Engidroids participated in the Mahindra Comviva Hackathon competition held during January 22-23 in Mahindra Comviva, Bangalore. Team members developed an Android application for tracking worker performance in manufacturing companies. It automates the paper- based worker records by providing supervisors a facility to view their workers’ performance anytime and anywhere. ​Team members are Mayur Bhole (MT2014065), Nisarga Lolage (MT2014061) and Jigar Dave (MT2014027).
• Sumant Kulkarni presented his poster entitled "Deep Matching: Explainable Semantic Matching Algorithms," co-authored with Prof. Srinath Srinivasa, at the XRCI Open event, organized by the Xerox Research Center India, on January 22-23.
• DST-SERB  has granted funding for Rajikha Raja (PH2012006) to attend the international conference SPIE Medical Imaging 2015 to be held in Orlando, Florida United States, during February 21-26 for presenting her paper "DTI - DKI fitting: a graphical toolbox for estimation and visualization of diffusion tensor and diffusion kurtosis imaging”.

Guest Talks

• January 5: “Secure Silicon: Enabler for the Internet of Things” by Dr. Walden Rhines, CEO of Mentor Graphics Corporation.
  For video:
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hKj7JYAp4ic&list=UUtzrbJ_ndsynuc2X_W3C9zw
• January 7: “Cluster-based Design for Multihop Cellular Wireless Networks” by Dr. Hrishikesh Venkataraman, Editorial board member of Transactions on Emerging Telecommunication Technologies.
• January 7: "Dark side of Metcalf's Law" by Mr. Sascha Meinrath, Director (X-Lab) and Open Technology Institute (Founder).
  For video:
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T5Otu8aGOu8&list=UUtzrbJ_ndsynuc2X_W3C9zw
• January 21: Computing the relative stabilities and the per-residue components in protein conformational changes” by Dr. Arijit Roy, a postdoctoral researcher at Laufer Center, Stony Brook University.
• January 28: "Issue-based Variability Management” by Dr. Anil Kumar Thurimella, Leading requirements engineering and management related activities at Harman Automotive Division and senior researcher at the chair for applied software engineering at TUM.

Campus Visitors

• January 8: Dr. Vinod Rai, Chancellor & Dr. Rupa Vasudevan, Vice Chancellor, Rai University.
• January 15: 100 B.Sc. (IT) & B.Sc. (Mass Media) students from Sanpada Oriental Education Society affiliated to the University of Mumbai visited IIITB as part of their industrial visit to know more about the impact of IT to their career and prospective career paths in IT.
• January 28: Mr. Mona Bharadwaj, Country Manager - IBM Innovation Centre.
• January 30: Mr. Rajan Singh, Founder and CEO, CourseBrew.

• February 10: Meeting of the Governing Body.
• February 11: 44th Senate Meeting.
• February 16: Announcement of call for applications to Master of Science by Research and Doctor of Philosophy programmes for July 2015.
• February 23-28: Mid-term examinations week