Events

• IIITB Alumni Day 2016 was on February 7. Reliving the memories of the past and letting the feel of nostalgia grow, IIITB's alumni had great fun on February 7, while showing off their favourite spots within the college campus to their family members. The event was attended by more than 130 alumni along with their family making the event a huge success.  The Main Classroom (MCR), which was the primary venue of the event, was jam-packed throughout the indoor sessions. The professors of IIITB stole the show with their unbeatable wits and humour while the post-lunch session of 'startup stories of IIITB entrepreneurs' was yet another most appreciated session. Student volunteers supported the “kid-zone” for the event, where the small children of the alumni, who came along with their parents, were attended to. The event went on in the evening, when the alumni interacted with current students. The day proved to be a good networking event for the alumni and current students.
  For details: https://goo.gl/photos/5Y6cUMU3ZiwUaHzEA
• 49th Senate Meeting was held on February 10.


• The formal ceremony of IIITB taking over as the “mentor institute” of IIIT Dharwad, from NITK-Surathkal, was on February 16.
  



• 63rd Meeting of the Governing body was held on February 23.

• The upgraded Data Center was inaugurated by Mr. Kris Gopalakrishnan, along with other members of the Governing Body on February 23. This upgrade included wireless connectivity in the new hostel building, as well as installation and configuration of state-of-the-art network equipment in the Data Center. The Institute is grateful to Hewlett-Packard Inc. (HP) for their generous support and technical expertise in the design and implementation of the network. 



• CCICI (Cloud Computing Innovation Council of India) was held on February 25 at the Institute. The day’s program began with the Board meeting followed by the Annual General Body Meeting and subsequently a technical discussion. The agenda of the CCICI event included discussions on state-of-the-art cloud computing technologies, interoperability, and challenges for next generation of cloud technologies. The Director, Prof. Sadagopan, who is a member of the advisory board for CCICI, attended the meeting.
  Event coverage: https://www.facebook.com/events/1658475547706467/
  About CCICI: http://www.ccici.in/index.php

  The 3rd edition of I-MACX AXLE was inaugurated by the Director Prof. S. Sadagopan on February 26. The Director spoke eloquently about the opportunities and ecosystem access that IIITB offers for startups - and the need for them to dream big.

  Publication including Presentations

• The paper titled “The Nature of Activated Non-classical Hydrogen Bonds: A Case Study on Acetylcholinesterase–Ligand Complexes” by Prof. Brijesh Kumar Mishra has been published in "Chemistry - A European Journal", vol. 22 (8), February 18, 2016.The article was featured on the cover page of this edition of the journal. Lotta Berg, Dr. C. David Andersson, Dr. Fredrik Ekström, Prof. Anna Linusson are the other authorsof this paper. The paper is available at:http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/chem.201503973/full
  
  

• Prof. Sachit Rao has presented his paper titled “Effect of Control Saturation on the Tracking of Longitudinal States of an Aircraft” co-authored with Sulakshan Arya at the 4th International Conference on Advances in Control and Optimization of Dynamical Systems, NIT-Trichy during February 1-5. Also Prof. At the same conference Prof Sachit Rao has co-chaired 2 technical sessions.



• The article titled “It is time to redefine Net Neutrality” by Prof. V. Sridhar and Prof. Rohit Prasad (MDI Gurgaon) has been published in The Hindu Business Line on February 11. The same can be accessed at:
  http://www.thehindubusinessline.com/todays-paper/tp-opinion/it-is-time-to-redefine-net-neutrality/article8220336.ece
  

• Prof. Amit Prakash has written an op-ed article on “IT education in India” which has appeared in the Deccan Herald on February 16. The same can be accessed at: http://www.deccanherald.com/content/529105/it-education-policy-lost-catching.html




• Khusbu Bubna (MS2013009) has presented her paper titled “ACT (Abstract to Concrete Tests) - A tool for generating Concrete test cases from Formal Specification of Web Applications” co-authored with Prof. Sujit Chakrabarti at Modelling Symposium collocated with 9th India Software Engineering Conference held at BITS Pilani, Goa Campus on February 18.
  Publication Link: http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1561/paper3.pdf

• Prof. Sujit Chakrabarti has presented his paper titled “SymTest: A Framework for Symbolic Testing of Embedded Software” co-authored with Ramesh S., General Motors, Warren, MI USA at 9th India Software Engineering Conference held at BITS Pilani, Goa Campus on February 19.
  Publication Link: http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2856642



• Rajanikanth Kashi (PH2011004) has presented his paper titled "Formal verification of avionics self adaptive software" co-authored with Prof. Meenakshi D'Souza, S. Kumar Baghel and Nitin Arun Kulkarni at 9th ACM India Software Engineering Conference held during February 18 - 20 held at BITS Pilani, Goa Campus. 

Faculty & Staff

• Prof. Ashish Choudhury gave invited talks on "PRG and COA Security" and "Yao's Secure 2-party Computation Protocol” on February 2 and February 8, respectively, at the Workshops on Cryptography held at SERC, IISc Bangalore. The workshops were organised by the Information Security Research and Development Centre, Bangalore as part of the Information Security Education and Awareness (ISEA) Project, Phase II.

• The strategy planning meeting of the Anita Borg Institute (ABI) India Council was held at the Institute on February 3. The Director, Prof. S. Sadagopan, who is a member of ABI India Council, attended the meeting. The Council discussed strategies for achieving objectives set by the Council for the ABI India for 2016-18. The Council also discussed on the roles and responsibilities of its members for the next three years. This was followed by a lunch hosted by the Institute, where the Council members interacted with few of the women faculty members of IIITB.


• Prof. Meenakshi D'Souza co-organized, with researchers from Ericsson Research India, a one-day workshop on Software Architectures for Adaptive, Autonomous Systems. The workshop was co-located with 9th ACM India Software Engineering Conference, held at BITS Pilani, Goa Campus on February 18. 



• Prof. Sujit Kumar Chakrabarti attended HPC workshop at Siemens and collaboration opportunities with University of Technology Munich on February 29 on special invitation. He gave a presentation on the academic and research activities in IIITB in general and Software Engineering Lab (SELab) in particular.
  
  
• There are new faces and roles on campus. Details of their joining:

  February 1:  Prof. Amit Chattopadhyay, Faculty Member

  Academic Milestones

• February 17: Ms. Gopika Gopan K. (PH2014003) - State of the Art Seminar (Ph.D.)

Guest Talks

• February 3: “Identifying visible and invisible structures in explaining global patterns of Web Use” by Prof. Harsh Taneja, Assistant Professor, Missouri School of Journalism.
• February 3: “Communication Technology and People at the Margins: Mapping Social Changes and User Experiences” by Dr. Rajeev George Aricat, Postdoctoral fellow, Nanyang Technological University.


• February 17: “Visual domain adaptation - graph theoretic approaches” and“Image foreground extraction - mid-level feature mining for one-shot learning” by Dr. Biplab Banerjee, who just completed his post-doctoral research at the Image group, GreyC CNRS UMR-6072.
• February 27: “Detection algorithms for large-multi antenna systems and generalized spatial modulation” by Dr. Tanumay Datta, post-doctoral researcher at Laboratoire des Signaux et Systemes, Centrale Supelec, France. 

Campus Visitors


• February 10: A Danish delegation led by Mr. Thomas Vejlemand, Mr. Klaus Wenzel Jorgensen, Mr. Mohan Doshi, CTO, Ninestars.

• February 10: Dr. Pradip K. Dutta, Corporate Vice President & Managing Director, Synopsys (India) Pvt. Ltd.

• February 22: A team from Lowe's Innovation Labs, led by Mr. Kyle Nel, Executive Director.



• February 22:  Prof. Gerard Berry, College de France.

• February 29: Deputy Commandant INA and Commodore S. R. Sridhar, Commodore, Registrar, Indian Naval Academy, Ezhimala.