Events

• 50th Meeting of the Senate was held on April 6.
• MITRA, Alumni committee meeting was held on April 16. Some of the issues discussed in the meeting included elections to the Alumni Council election and nominations, and a designated date for Alumni Day.
  
  


• Two interaction and information sessions were held for potential students of the PGDDA program on April 16 and 30. The session on Apr 16 included a panel discussion with Mr. Ankit Jain of Roadrunnr, Ms. Kalpana Subbaramappa and Prof. S. Sadagopan. Panelists on April 30 included Mr. Sameer Dhanrajani of Cognizant, Mr. Vinit Vishal of Arvind Lifestyle Brands and Prof. Sadagopan. The theme for the two sessions was "Why Data Analytics is THE most sought after job of the 21st Century".


• The fifth Center for Data Sciences (CDS) workshop was held on April 18. The highlight of the event was an Invited talk by Prof. Chiranjib Bhattacharyya from IISc on "Topic Models". The event saw enthusiastic participation from the different labs affiliated to the center.


• Meeting of the COPAS project was held on April 21. Profs. Jyotsna Bapat, and Debabrata Das from IIITB and few faculty members from the University of Twente, the Netherlands, participated in the meeting.



• Networking and Communication Lab (NCL)
  http://www.iiitb.ac.in/ncl/workshop.html hosted a technical workshop on
   "Trends on Networking Communication" on April 22. The event saw several eminent speakers - three from industry, three researchers from NCL and one from Fourth Paradigm Research Lab, Government of India. It was attended by 35 researchers from industry as well as academia. Prof. Jyotsna Bapat was the organizing chair of the workshop.

  
  


• excITe programme for high school children was held during April 25 -27. 32 students from Kumaran's Academy in Bangalore, 10 from Ashok Leyland School in Hosur and 10 from Navodaya School, Mysore attended the 3-day programme. Many of our faculty participated by giving lectures and demos on high-interest topics such as “Turing Machines and the Mathematics of Computation” by Prof. Meenakshi D'Souza, "What is Engineering" by Prof. Chetan Parikh, “Physics at Small Scale” by Prof. B. Ashok, “ICTs and Development” by Prof. Amit Prakash, “Why Programming is so Hard” by Prof. Sujit Chakrabarti, “Cryptography” by Prof. Ashish Choudhury, "Context Aware Homes" by Prof. Jyotsna Bapat, "Machine Vision" by Prof. Dinesh Babu Jayagopi, “Visualizing the 3D World” by Prof. TK Srikanth and “How to control robots, aircraft...: Lessons from taking a Bath” by Prof. Sachit Rao. The students also visited the facilities of Tessolve in Electronics City. Overall, the programme was a success with positive feedback and increased awareness among the students.
  
  For Photos: https://goo.gl/photos/N71Qocohgg6hsVXP6
  
  
• As Mentor Director of IIIT Dharwad and as Chair, Prof. S. Sadagopan conducted its 1st Senate Meeting at IIITB on April 29.
  
  
• Board meeting of IIITB Innovation center was held on April 29.


Publication including Presentations


• Balaji Parthasarathy (with Yuko Aoyama of Clark University) presented a paper titled "The Hybrid Domain and ICTs: New Institutional and Technological means to Innovation in Emerging Markets" at the 112th Annual Meeting of the Association of American Geographers held in San Francisco during March 29-April 2. 

• Jaya Sreevalsan Nair presented her joint work with Beena Kumari (MS2013003) at the Dagstuhl Seminar on "Multidisciplinary Approaches to Multivalued Data: Modeling, Visualization, Analysis" during April 4-8, at Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz Center for Informatics, Germany. Her talk was titled "Substitutability of Symmetric Second-order Tensor Fields: An Application in Urban LiDAR 3D Point Cloud". The talk broadly discussed expression of local geometric descriptors for point clouds as positive semidefinite second-order tensors, substituting one such tensor field with another for structural classification, and the limitations of the proposed substitution operation. Dagstuhl seminars are themed seminar series where active researchers in computer science participate upon invitation, present their current work, and discuss open problems in their domain.
  For details on the seminar: 
  http://www.dagstuhl.de/de/programm/kalender/semhp/?semnr=16142

• The article titled "Regulating the sharing economy" authored by Profs. V. Sridhar and Srikanth has appeared in Financial Express on April 13.
  The same can be accessed at: http://www.financialexpress.com/…/regulating-the-sh…/235741/

• The article titled "IT sector employment: Time to think afresh" by Prof. Amit Prakash has appeared in The Times of India on April 15. The same can be accessed at: http://epaperbeta.timesofindia.com//Article.aspx?eid=31806&articlexml=IT-sector-employment-Its-time-to-think-afresh-15042016501007&Mode=1

• Dr. Aastha Madaan, Dr. Tiropanis Thanassis, Prof. Srinath Srinivasa and Dr. Wendy Hall. 2016. “Observlets: Empowering Analytical Observations on Web Observatory”, In Proceedings of the 25th International Conference Companion on World Wide Web (WWW '16 Companion). International World Wide Web Conferences Steering Committee, Republic and Canton of Geneva, Switzerland, 775-780.
  DOI=http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2872518.2890593 

• The paper titled “E-arth: Encouraging Smart Citizens to Disrupt the Cycle of E-waste” by Ankita Victor, Tarun Dutt , Iain Kettles, and Lisanne Binhammer, proposed and prototyped a Web platform + smart bin solution. The paper has been presented at MediaLAB Amsterdam.

• Sunil K. Vuppala (PH2009902) presented two of his papers titled “Optimization under uncertainty for Demand Response in Smart Grid” and “Stability Analysis of Energy optimization in smart grid”, both co-authored by Prof. G N Srinivasa Prasanna at INFORMS Conference on Business Analytics and Operations Research, Orlando, Florida, USA, during April 10-12. He also presented a poster titled "Stability Analysis of Energy optimization in smart grid", at the same conference. 
  http://meetings2.informs.org/wordpress/analytics2016/optimization/ http://meetings2.informs.org/wordpress/analytics2016/poster-presentations/

  
  

IIITB in Media

• RURAL AREAS - Microsoft takes step to expand internet reach
• Infosys co-founder S Gopalakrishnan launches app chronicling Indian IT journey


• Goodbye to high-pressure jobs


• TV Whitespace pilot project launched by Government of India
  

Faculty & Staff


• Balaji Parthasarathy was invited to deliver the opening keynote address titled "Towards Financial Inclusion for Underprivileged Women" at the 5th Women's Empowerment Conference of Chamber Trade Sweden held in Stockholm during April 6-9.
  

  Guest Talks
  

• April 6: "High Performance Parallel Programming on Modern Processors" by Dr. Vivek Kumar, a research scientist at Rice University.

• April 7: "Privacy Laws and Regulation" by Mr. Sunil Abraham, the Executive Director of Centre for Internet & Society (CIS).
  
  
• April 13: "High-Level Synthesis with Cross-Layer Interactions for Effective Design and Verification of Accelerators" by Dr. Swathi Gurumani Tanjore, Principal Research Engineer with the Advanced Digital Sciences Center (ADSC), Singapore, and Senior Research Affiliate with Coordinated Sciences Laboratory, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.



• April 20: "A Geometric Approach to Graph Isomorphism" by Dr. Pawan Kumar Aurora, post-doctoral research in the Department of mathematics and computer science at the Freie Universität Berlin.

• April 26:  "Knowledge management at the periphery: Initial reflections" by Mr. Linus Kendall, a Ph.D. researcher at Sheffield-Hallam University.

  
  
Campus Visitors


• April 19-20: Professor Haripriya Rangan, Director, Research and Academic Programs at the Australia India Institute, and Principal Fellow with the University of Melbourne's School of Geography, visited IIITB for discussions with relevant members of the faculty to initiate the process of having Australian students enroll for the M. Sc. (Digital Society) programme.

• April 20: Mr. Sachin, Hackerearth