Achievements

• J. Yogalakshmi (PH2011002) won the best paper award for the paper titled "Mutual Information based Weighted Fuzzy Clustering" in the First IEEE International Conference on Contemporary Computing and Informatics (IC3I'2014) held in Mysuru, India.
• The paper titled "AN SNR Estimation Based Adaptive Hierarchical Modulation Classification Method to Recognize M-ary QAM and M-ary PSK Signals" has won the Best Paper Award in the 3rd IEEE International Conference on Signal Processing, Communication and Networking (ICSCN 2015) held during March 26-28 in MIT Chennai. The authors of this paper are Shweta Ghodeswar (PH2010903) and Prof. P.G. Poonacha. 
• Nitesh Kumar (MT2011093) was invited to give a TEDx talk at Indian Institute of Foreign Trade (IIFT) Delhi (http://www.tedxiiftdelhi.com), at its inaugural edition, "Off the Beaten Path", on January 17. For details: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1OHdA8qHj5E

Events

• Spandan is the intra-collegiate annual sports event at IIITB conducted by the students. This year Spandan was held during March 6-8, with active participation by students, faculty, staff and the alumni. Sports events, such as, cricket, volleyball, basketball, football, chess, carrom, badminton, table tennis, and throwball, were conducted as last year. A Musical Night was arranged as part of Spandan. Gully Cricket was the new addition for this year. The event was inaugurated by the Director.
• International Women’s Day was celebrated in the Institute on March 8. In the spirit of International women’s Day, Spandan organisers, SAC members and IIITB Women’s cell jointly organised Mini Marathon. Prof. Arpita Patra from IISc won the mini marathon. As another event for International Women's Day Celebration, the Director had a lunch get-together of the women faculty members on March 9. In continuation of the celebration, the Women’s Cell organised a screening of Bengali film “Mahanagar” on March 18. The film, directed by the late Satyajit Ray, features Madhabi Mukerjee as the protagonist.
• IIITB organised the IBM Bluemix meetup on March 11. In the meetup IBM team explained the IBM's Open Cloud Foundry and Bluemix.
• IIITB celebrated Alumni Day on March 14, which is an annual event at the Institute. The alumni, from the first batch who graduated at the turn of the millennium, to those who graduated in 2014, gathered with their families. The Alumni Council was represented by its President, Naveen Goudar. Prof. Das, Dean (Academics and R&D) represented the Institute and delivered the inaugural address. Mounika, student of iMTech and MC for the occasion, welcomed the gathering. Naveen recollected his days at the Institute as part of the first batch graduating from the Institute, and articulated the importance of alumni and the key role they planned in the growth of educational institutes all over the world. Prof. Das traced the growth of the Institute over the years. He highlighted some of the newer initiatives, programmes and achievements of the Institute. He also spoke about how alumni could partner with the Institute in the areas of knowledge exchange, joint research, etc for the benefit of alumni and the Institute.
• The highlight of the Alumni Day was the panel discussion on a topic of high interest for the alumni: “Technical Career Growth beyond the Glass Ceiling”. The interactive panel discussion, moderated by Naveen Goudar included Mr. Sudip Banerjee (former President Wipro, former CEO L&T Infotech), Mr. R. Vidyasagar (former HR Head of EMC, Philips, Motorola, etc) and Ms. Shikha Gupta (HR Director, Schneider Electric) as the insightful panelists with rich and diverse industry experience in both HR and business functions. The lively panel discussion answered the burning questions that Alumni had in the context of their careers, as well as highlighted the qualities and practices to be inculcated to achieve success in their careers.
• The Alumni Day has remained a wonderful networking opportunity for the alumni, the faculty and the current students.
  For Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tCOEwqqs4tY
• A day-long PDF Liberation Hackathon was organized by the Centre for IT and Public Policy (CITAPP) in association with Fields of View and Datameet on March 21.  The event was attended by 42 students from IIITB, from the MTech, MS/PhD and iMtech programmes. The participants divided themselves into ten teams and chose a PDF document to work with. The idea was to expose the participants to the need of open data and have them convert tables of data out of PDFs into more accessible formats, including CSV and speadsheets. Seven out of the ten participating teams 'freed' data from PDFs; the extracted data has been uploaded on to a public folder.
• Summer internship placement for iMTech 2012 batch is in progress, with 44 of 49 students having been placed.

Publication

• Nayak S(MT2010140), Vakrani P(MT2012156), Purohit A(MT2012106), and Prof. G.N.Srinivasa Prasanna presented their Virtual Labs paper in the conference, T4E 2014 under the title ​"​Remote Lab for Robotics: Architecture, Design and Implementation challenges", which has been published in the digital library of IEEE Xplore.
  For details:
  http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/articleDetails.jsp?arnumber=7009575&punumber%3D7008944%26sortType%3Dasc_p_Sequence%26filter%3DAND(p_IS_Number%3A7009516)%26pageNumber%3D3
• The article titled “Unfinished tasks in the liberalization of spectrum for mobile services” by Prof. Prasad R., MDI, Gurgaon and Prof. Sridhar V. has been featured in Economic and Political Weekly, on March 28.
  http://www.epw.in/special-articles/unfinished-tasks-liberalisation-spectrum-mobile-services.html
• The article titled “Internet of masses” by Profs. Sridhar V. and Srikanth T.K. has appeared in Financial Express on March 23.
  http://www.financialexpress.com/article/fe-columnist/internet-of-masses/56340/
• The article titled “A differential calculus” by Prof. Sridhar V. and Prof. Venkatesh, G. IIT Madras has been featured in Economic Times on March 17.
  http://blogs.economictimes.indiatimes.com/et-commentary/net-neutrality-smart-personalised-data-pricing-need-of-the-hour/​

Faculty & Staff

• The paper entitled "E-Governance and Public Service Delivery at the Grassroots: a Study of ICT Use in Health and Nutrition Programmes in India", authored by Prof. Amit Prakash, has been accepted for publication in the 'Information Technology for Development' journal.
• Balaji Parthasarathy delivered the keynote address, upon invitation, on Frugal Innovation at the 4th IPR Researchers' Confluence on IP Challenges in Frugal Innovation at the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay. The conference was hosted by the Shailesh J. Mehta School of Management of IIT Bombay with the National Institute of Industrial Engineering Mumbai on March 27 - 28.
• Mr. V. S. Prakash, the Registrar attended a programme organised by “Stree Jagriti” Magazine on March 8.
  For details: http://goo.gl/oAQKbj
• March 31 was the last working day for Ms. Chandrika (Finance Officer) and Prof. Niveditha Menon. The Institute gave a farewell party for both of them on the day. Ms. Chandrika had completed ten years of service at the Institute.

Students & Alumni

• Chinmay Jog (MS2012005) presented his paper titled "Distributing a Trust Framework for Utilitarian Data Exchanges in Inter-Organizational Collaborations" on March 19 at the 2nd ACM IKDD Conference on Data Sciences held in Bangalore. Sweety Agarwal and Prof. Srinath Srinivasa are co-authors of the paper
• The paper titled “Coverage Enhancement of PBCH using Reduced Search Viterbi for MTC in LTE-Advanced Networks” has been accepted by International Workshop on Device-to-Device Communications 2015 (D2D) to be held in IIT Bombay on May 25. The authors of the paper are Parthiban A (MS2013012), Sajal Kumar Das, Prof. Jyotsna Bapat, Prof. Debabrata Das. 
• Mr. Raghu A. (PH2008905) has completed Ph.D. Oral Examination on March 14. His domain is Web Information Retrieval and the title of his thesis is "Novel Techniques for extraction of structured information from unstructured text”. Prof. S. Ramani and Prof. S. Rajgopalan are the thesis Supervisors.
• Nitesh Kumar (MT2011093) collaborated with high school student, Shreyas Kapur of Modern School, New Delhi, and undergraduate student, Kaustubh Shivdikar, of Veermata Jijabai Technological Institute, Mumbai, to create a 3D fabric printer at the MIT Design and Innovation Workshop 2015 held in Gandhinagar. It was a week-long event where around 300 participants were mentored by faculties and students from Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 
  For details: https://vantikadixit.wordpress.com/2015/03/23/students-create-3-d-fabric-printer/
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hreuamiRhvw

Guest Talks

• March 11: “When robots are your co-workers, how does one ask for a raise?” by Mr. Akbar Ladak, Director of Client Solutions & Innovation and Senior Consultant & Innovation Evangelist - CTO Office Wipro.
• March 30-April 2: “Service Systems Engineering”, lecture series by Prof. A. Ravi Ravindran, Penn State University.

Campus Visitors

• March 4: Japanese Delegation.
• March 7: Ms. Tanusree Deb Barma, IAS, Director, Information Technology and Biotechnology at Government of Karnataka.January 28: Mr. Mona Bharadwaj, Country Manager - IBM Innovation Centre.
• March 10: Students from Little Flower Polytechnic, Bombay visited IIITB as part of their industrial visit.
• March 11: Mr. Shadakshariswamy, IAS, Director of Horticulture, Lalbagh.
• March 23: Rear Admiral K. S. Venugopal, Principal, Indian Naval Academy, Ezhimala.
• March 25: Delegation from Amsterdam consisting of Mayor Van der Laan, Mayor of Amsterdam, Mayor Van’t Veld, Mayor of Amstelveen and Ambassador Alphonsus Stoelinga.
• March 28: Dr. Dip Sankar Banerjee, BITS Pilani Hyderabad campus.
• March 30: Meeting with Mr. Kris Gopalakrishnan, Chairman, IIITB Governing Body regarding “Quality Initiative” and on e-Health Project.

• April 1-28: pravesh (http://pravesh.iiitb.ac.in) is live for submitting applications for admissions to research degree programmes.
• April 8: 45th Meeting of the Senate.