UG2k2 - A unique batch

After having seen their achievements here , there is something unique that this batch is planning to come up with. It has been informed that most of the current BTech final year students are planning to leave back their caution deposit money to start over some new fund. How are they exactly planning to make use of that money - Nobel cause or Scholarships is still being decided. Let us all see what they come up with.

The trend starts

Finally, a trend starts to have official batch trips organized. BTech 2k2, the passing out batch of 2006, went over to a place called Kurnool for one day (29th March'06). And it has been told that 50% of the total expenditure was paid by the institute. Check the details here and here

Amalgam. How it all began

Rakesh, an alumni of 2k1 batch, writes to describe the idea behind Amalgam and how it all began in late 2003. Did you know that it was posed as a challenge before the 2k1 batch? SLC didn't have faith in the organizing capabilities of the 2k1 batch. In less than 15 days they were asked to host an event which could attract more than 80% of the IIIT junta to the grounds. The event was not to have any prizes. No sponsorship was to be arranged. A modest Rs 10, 000/- was allotted for the event. All these seemed impossible and insane on the part of the SLC. The challenge was that if this could NOT be organized, the 2k1 batch would NOT be trusted with the responsibility of organizing Felicity.

So, what happened? They cribbed for a while. They thought for a while. Then they planned. And.. and they did it. They jolly well did it. And in style. Read the complete article for the entire thought process and the tactics involved. Hours of brainstorming. They even had The Making of the Amalgam. A curious character called Rohit Varma was floated. The students server website had popups.. for the first time in IIIT's history, and on logging in, you would be greeted with an Amalgam reminder -- to make it happen. And the best part -- everyone in the 2k1 batch was involved. All it needed was a challenge.

Vim and CS

Utkarsh writes about CS and how he misses it ...

smr posts a solid 13 page tutorial on vim ...

It's about the security rules now

'Life' is definitely one of the best decisions made by our sysadmins. Had the list not been there, how would have the students sent all these spams(?) ?

Yesterday, one of the students faced a problem where his parents were asked to leave the hostel within one hour. Guards have been asked to make sure of the outsiders not staying back within the campus for long hours. But once a student gives the confirmation of those outsiders being his/her guardians, shouldn't the rule get lenient? The rule is only meant to keep away the 'dangerous' people, not to keep away the guardians. Concerned authorities are requested to inform the security guards about the rules in an appropriate way.

The last few days

With just about 16 days left to go, UG4 is all in party mood. Want to live every bit of the remaining few days of their college life. While some might be just waiting to flush out of this place, for most, these few days seems like the time to do everything which one thought to do in college... freak out like hell breaking loose. Seniors are busy giving treats to juniors (and others). More seniors are still planning.

So, if you are close enough to a senior and he/she hasn't treated you yet, you yourself are to blame. So go ask for it.

It's about the stationary shop now

Earlier the mess and now the stationary shop. The list called 'Life' really seems to be working. Since yesterday, our inboxes have been getting flooded with lots of mails over the stationary shop being ridiculous, the stationary guy being a cheater, the shop not opening at scheduled timings, the services that he provides being delayed. There are a whole lot of accusations made. But for all that, the students do not seem to be working. Sending a mail isn't the solution. If one really wants an action to be taken, initiate yourself. You wouldn't find a leader to lead all the time. At times, all it results in is those junk mails and the matter getting closed after that.

Dr Madhu Muthyam is back

The band of bloggers and Halley separately write to report that Dr Madhu Muthyam, aka MaMu, is back in campus. Dr Muthyam had gone on a leave about an year ago. However, the faculty list on the iiit site still shows him on leave. Halley is happy to see again his not the conventional proffessor whereas The band of bloggers are like nahin.........!

No Amalgam. What's new?

After a series of postponements, Amalgam has eventually been cancelled. This is the second year in succession that Amalgam has been cancelled. And everyone is like: What's new?

Introduced in 2004 by the B.Tech 2k1 batch, Amalgam was an unparalleled hit event with about 95% turnout, exceeding Felicity participation by leaps and bounds -- a stupendous feat for the IIIT population. It created a history of sorts, and everyone wanted to have it each year. So what went wrong this year and the year before? What was it that the B.Tech 2k1 batch did which the present batches cannot even think about?

Does the job of the cultural council end with sending invitation mails for participation? Wasn't it expected that the interest-level for a dry call for participation would be unenthusiastic? What was done to tackle that? For one, B.Tech 2k1 targetted especially this aspect. A sizeable crowd of each batch had been involved in making it happen in 2004, and the performance was heartening. If the scattered pics/videos available on the LAN are to be believed, the 2k1 organizers had conducted several morale boosting steps to fire up the enthu, including taking pics/videos during rehearsals and conducting video interviews of the batch organizers while in preparation. A fictious character, Rohit Varma, was floated and everyone was curious and amused. The end result -- a phenomenal participation in Amalgam. Can't such efforts be repeated? What's stopping? Are we short of ideas? Have we stopped thinking?

Oh my grades!

ShArK, of the Shark TV fame, runs a thoughtful post on the attendance policy and their effects on the grading system. He's raised some points on the grade adjustment policy. If you look at the grades and their meanings here it's clear that grades are meant to reflect academic acheivement. But after the attendance policy was introduced, the rule-book was forgotten to be updated. So, if you have 74% attendance and you get an 'F', it means that you did not learn anything in the course, as per the policy. There are two things, really: 1. Is it fair to adjust grades for attendance? 2. Shouldn't the policy be changed to reflect that an 'F' could also be due to non-attendance, and not necessarily coz you couldn't pick up any concepts in the course?

From Junk to Giants

Ever seen the old discarded systems gathering dust in one of the closed
labs #329, #331, etc? They are planned to be put to use now for making a
computation cluster. I V Aprameya Rao and Rohan Monga have obtained all
required permissions from Dr Kamal to use these systems to make a
compute cluster. The cluster will initially involve 6 systems and will
be setup in #331. Using an open source cluster-management package
(Oscar), they'll be able to perform huge computations on the cluster.
What's the use? Well, you never know. This is just the first step in
converting junk system to giant computational clusters. How about
running the proxy server on a cluster?

(Article by: Nirnimesh)

Is "research at undergraduate level" motivating enough ?

IIIT boasts of "research even at the undergraduate level". Good, infact excellent, but i have a question - what purpose does this serve ? P.Anandam (Managing Director, Microsoft Research Bangalore) while giving a talk on MSR Bangalore in IIIT said "As your professors Prof Sangal , Prof PJN will tell you that you cannot survive in a research lab or in other words have a research carrer without a PhD.". What does this mean ? This means that the research we do here at the undergraduate level has no meaning or is of no use if we do not augment it with a PhD (or atleast an MS) degree to help us get a decent research carrer in future. With just a B.Tech degree we can get only (barring a few exceptions) development positions in industry which does not require research anyway. Speaking of getting a PhD degree, we all know that students prefer to go to the states when it comes to higher education in the technical field(i mean a MS or a PhD). A recent survey indicated that in the field of computer science Indian universities produce only 50 PhD's per year compared to around a thousand produced by the US universities. This is what makes scores of students each year work hard to apply to the graduate school at various universities.

Our batch did the same. I will not give you certain statistics: Out of the nine 9 pointers 6 applied for a graduate degree in the US universities. Out of the 6 only 1 student (Sharath) has got multiple offers from among the top 20 colleges. The other 5 have either no calls or calls from their backup universities, nothing from the top 20 colleges. These students have excellent academic record, good courses and projects, decent gre scores, solid recos, almost everything required to secure an admission in the top colleges(not to forget some of them even have publications to their names), then where is the problem ? Ours is not the only batch facing this problem, Krishna Pradeep, gold medalist 2004 batch got an offer from only 1 of the 4 colleges he applied to. Though that 1 was good enough you can noway explain the 3 rejects for as excellent a student as pradeep. And if this is the problem toppers are facing what can the others expect?
One of the reasons our seniors usually quote is that "our institute is not known" and to be frank that is nobodys fault. Name comes with nothing other than time, and no matter how good a university is it needs time to be recognised as a center of excellence.

So whats the solution? To get a solution let us have a look at the only success of our batch, Sharath. How did he get through so many top schools? No doubt he has excellent credentials to his name but the best part of his application was a solid recommendation from Dr. Prasad Jayanthi (those of who do not know, Dr. Prasad Jayanthi is a professor at the university of Darthmouth in the US and has been a visitng faculty at IIIT for the last 2 years, an excellent researcher and very well known in his field). He not only gave Sharath a reco but also spoke to some of the professors at the top universities to take him as a student. Result: Sharath has till date offers from Duke, Brown, Purdue, Dartmouth and Max Planc. Such is the power of a good recommender. If Dr. Prasad Jayanthi can do this for his student can't other IIIT professors. We have great professors in the likes of Prof. PJN, Prof. Sangal, Prof. Kamal, Prof. Jawahar, Prof. Prosenjit , who are excellent researchers and are very well known and respected in their various fields. At the site of the University of Maryland, College Park, "help you in getting a job" is listed as one of the points under the heading "what you can expect from your advisor?". Does the same responsibility not lie with our professors as well? How do they expect people to pursue research as a career if this is the senario. If we look at the MBA results of out batch we have 3 final
selection in IIFT , 2 final selection in FMS , 39 calls from the various IIMS and 6 calls from XLRI. What message do you think is conveyed to the present 2nd or 3rd year students who might be thinking hard on choosing a career.

I think the present third year must take this case with the director and other faculty members. Hope you people have a better experience to write in this regard.

contributed anonymously ...

New Server Room Staff

Two new staff members have become visible in the Server Room. [rk 'at' iiit.ac.in & ganesh 'at' iiit.ac.in] They are the new joinees about which we had buzzed earlier. They can be seen being trained by people in the server room. Of the two, one stays in campus. In a related story, Anurag Singh Rana, the one nominated for student sysadminship, has been denied appointment by Dr Pudi on the pretext that since one of the new staffs is anyway staying in campus, student sysadmins are not required!

Trips and all

There's an official trip coming up for the current final year students. Pranav, the campus life secretary, has indeed taken a great initiative to get all required permissions from the director and the dean. There's a written confirmation of students getting a day's attendance and for their FYP vivas getting over before 29th March, the day when they plan to have fun.

Another important news that may be of interest to most of the students around is that Pranav's trying out to form a new policy that will be called a "1+2+3+4" policy. According to this policy, first year batch would go out for a 1 day trip, second year for a 2 day trip, third year for a 3 day trip and final year for a 4 day trip, each year. The concept is to have 10 memorable days throughout the BTech.

Contributed by a final year student

IIITians reaching great places

With Dharmesh, Manikandan and Vardhman already recruited in Google, today, another MS by research student from IIIT, Mr Nirnimesh, got into Google Hyderabad. This indeed should give a deep sense of pride and motivation for all of us here. Now, none of those big shot companies are left over. We have IIITians everywhere, be it Microsoft, Google, Yahoo, Adobe, Nvidia, ATI, SAP, even Microsoft Research. Then we have IIITians at CMU, Oxford and other great universities. Apart from the technical (CS) achievements, our alumni have also got into IIMs. Ten years from now, we hope to find IIITians to be some of the top leaders around the world.

FSIS on 16th March 2k6

Okay first of all the student turn out to the FSIS (whose objective was to make the student life more organised in the next academic year) as usual turned out to be a damp squib. There were 0 first year students,four third year students , three second year students and good ol' Pranav from the final year.

So naturally the first issue brought up was the low turn out at an FSIS. One of the suggestions put forward was to make it compulsory for first years to attend the FSIS.(Psst! In fact during the later part of the evening , caught one of the third years firmly telling the first years' CR about this :) )

Then they started asking about the ill reception given to outside performers at IIIT.Dr.Mishra made a valid point that such performers who go to places all over the country to give shows might spoil IIIT's reputation even if they make casual statements like "I had a cold reception at that IT institute" :( .Once again , everyone decided to throw it all at the first years.That is to make it compulsory for the first year students to attend every cultural performance held at the University. (maybe appendage such a rule by de-activating the LAN in their labs , etc.,)

Pranav as expected had a long list of points , recorded instances from the past , corroborated by his recorded examples and statements.The issues he put forward :

• 
  Do somehting about the discontinuity that occurs in the even sem due to the winter vacations.
  Suggestions : Shift winter vacations. Also hold 1 mid sem before vacations (Of course second one was indirectly booed down by the students)
  
• Instead of cluttering events in certains periods of time (for eg. RnD,ExoR,BTP vivas) ...why not spread it over ?
  
• Instead of cluttering the mid-sem or end-sem exams (guess Pranav likes the "cluttering" terminology) why not distribute them over a period of time.
  This too was not in tune with the others who attended the FSIS.So it was shooed off.
  Prof.Govindarajulu's take : This is done to prevent last-minute cramming and also make the students study throughout the semester.
  

A decision was taken to get the new parliament formed ASAP. There will be no General online-elections.Rather a micro-democracy will be implemented in IIIT from now on. Each house selects representatives from each batch for every council (except perhaps Financial council).
Guess we will soon be having a Jumbo parliament !
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
PS : Serving tea at the FSIS was forgotten :(

Efficient Security

Today too, nearly a dozen cars with a large number of students from JNTU came over zooming to the institute for their fest campaign like the other day but unlike then, guards were efficient enough to stop them at the main gate this time. Two of those students from JNTU finally came walking inside till the main entrance and pasted the posters on the notice board. It was great to see such a strong control over the situation.

Mess Controversies

IIIT Hyderabad (as most of you know) has a concept of three messes now - North Indian, South Indian and a combined mess. When earlier it used to be complaints against the North Indian food, there seems to be more controversy over the South Indian mess these days. Students' comments:

1) They found beedi in the food
2) They found creatures and cockroaches in the food
3) Food quality degrading continuously with time
4) Complaints not being entertained
5) Food being served isn't worth more than Rs.10 in the best case
6) Immediate action required from Campus Life Council

The list called 'life' is really being used in the right way. It's fit for such discussions indeed.

Colourful day

Happy Holi people. The day, as each year, was celeberated with full enthusiasm, especially the first year students who enjoyed the day by tearing off each others' t-shirts. Most of the guys on the ground went around naked. Mr. Himanshu Aggarwal, the cultural secretary, was really worried when no one turned up on the ground for about an hour. Even most of the fourth year students went out of the campus to have their own piece of fun and guess what, they borrowed the colors from cultural council. Shame Shame!!

It was great to watch students going after their tutors, booing girls, smashing eggs, throwing people in drums, mud, ripping off the t-shirts etc. Everyone looked so thrilled. The colorful celeberation ended with thandai and pakode that were served in the end. Himanshu, one again looked worried but this time because there was a lot of thandai left over and hardly any one to drink. People didn't stop having fun at that moment too. They were seen throwing thandai over each other.

Among the faculty members, Dr. Abhijeet Mitra was seen enjoying the day with students. It's so good to have such a person as the SLC chairperson.

Overall, a great success whose major credit goes to Himanshu Aggarwal and other cultural council members who organized the event successfully.

Musical Night

After lots of postponments, Musical Night'06 is finally done tonight, 14th March. It was a success with the trend being continued for the second time. Last year, it was the music club (mainly comprising of Srikanth, Arun, MNSSK, Kalyan, Kiran TN and Akansh) who took over an initiative and pulled off the event.

The event got delayed for more than an hour. Some of the highlights:

1) A classical performance by Dr. Subendhu Ghosh
2) Interhouse Dance Competitions - Western Solo and Group, Classical Solo and Group
3) A brilliant informal event by two first year students - Pankaj Anthwal and Rajesh
4) Great performance by Insomnia
5) Small number of audience for Insomnia with hardly any head-banging crowd in front of the stage. Where have all the rock lovers been?
6) Huge participation by the first years for dance competitions
7) Students weren't satisfied with the decision of judges. Controversies at Mr. Ram (IIIT Alumnus) being a judge
8) Overall a successful event. Kudos to cultural council

It's TV time

Have you visited http://news.iiit.ac.in? It's ok if you have not, coz their latest production is http://tv.iiit.ac.in. And it's a crime if you don't visit this. Never before was TV viewing in campus so easy. This is a TV recording server working round-the-clock and you can vote for the programme to record for each half-hour slot. Also provided are links to the program schedules for all the TV channels. The voting system then records the program which fetches the highest vote.

Basically, a wonderful service if you want to watch your favorite TV programme but can never remember to make it to the TV room on time. Just schedule the programme and watch later.

(Article by: Nirnimesh)

Day Well Spent at IIIT

1) Formula 1 - Even after Michael Schumacher leading for a long time, it was Fernando Alonso who finally won.
2) Test Match - Kumble bowled well and took 3 wickets. Fourth day came to an end with England at 112/5.
3) Greatest ODI - An outstanding match between SA and Australia that broke lots of records. With the live match being streamed onto machines of most of the people, it was an excitement in itself.
4) Rang De Basanti - The night well spent with RDB's dvd print screened by our very own Movie Club.

.. Overall, a great Sunday ..

IIIT to host BarCamp

With the help of IIIT alumni and one of the visiting faculties, BarCamp Hyderabad is being conducted on 8th April'06 (tentatively). The theme for the discussion would be Web 2.0.

Barcamp Hyderabad is in the series of BarCamps being organized around the world- an adhoc Technology “Unconference” format. Here there are no spectators and everyone participates. Either deliver brief talks, a demo or atleast actively interact. In a BarCamp, Attendees are strongly encouraged to give a demo, a session, or help with one. You can help by taking notes on the wiki, blogging the event, helping to promote the event, or helping with logistics. Since, everyone who participates has a part to play, it's better conducted with everyone getting involved.

Following are the main players whom you could be in touch with:
Ramesh (rameshl AT progress DOT com)
Rajan ( thiyagarajan AT gmail DOT com )
Kopos ( poorna.shashank AT gmail DOT com )
Rajat ( rajat.gupta AT hotmail DOT com)

More information could be found here:
BarCamp Hyderabad
Birth of BarCamps
Bloggers' view

Post of the Week

The Post of the Week award goes to Ankit Garg (aka @nks) for the brilliant post on recreating IIIT's logo.
Witty, Hilarious and Creative, all at the same time.

a new logo for IIIT??

Check out Ankit Garg's blog. A brilliant creative work ...

LUG restructuring?

If the recent discussion on the mailing list is anything to go by, LUG, the largest club/user-group at IIIT, plans to restructure its proceedings. Earlier, the meet had been planned today, but as always it got postponed (Do something about postponements!!). What used to host only technical prophecies, LUG now plans lighter material during its talk, to get UG1 too interested.

There's a slight conflict on the nature of conducting the talks such. The discussion on the maling list shows a clash between an earlier mod, Vamsee, and the present mod Anurag Singh Rana. While Vamsee insists on having geeky stuf all the time to encourage development activities, Rana supports lighter discussions. Rana's initiative is welcome considering the fact the LUG has hardly been conducting any meets lately, leave alone development.

It befits to mention that some significant members of the LUG have lost interest in the group and left it (Sunil Mohan Ranta, Paresh Jain, Sunil Mohan Adapa). Perhaps the mods need to do something about this too. Consistency is the clue, they say.

LTRCian makes it to MSR

J Jagdeesh, the search guy from LTRC, has made it to Microsoft Research, Bangalore. The pay package is heavenly, as is natural for Microsoft Research. For quite some time now he had the "I am looking of a job" tag on his homepage. This offer should prompt him to remove that.

Last year, Soumyajit Deb from CVIT was the first IIITian to have entered into Microsoft Research. In another related news, Shiben is to visit Microsoft Research, Bangalore for internship this summer.

IIITian authors Slashdot post

Vardhman becomes the first IIITian to have authored a story on Slashdot. He was quick enough to notice the news about Google acquiring Writely which appeared on Google's official blog, and submitted the news to Slashdot under the pseudonym jaiva. True, the deal is not as huge as getting slashdotted oneself, but it's still a modest beginning.

For the uninitiated, Slashdot (/.) is a news community for nerds. Basically everything under the umbrella of "News for Nerds. Stuff that matters". All hot and happening technology news find a mention there. When a technology features in a Slashdot post, it is said to be slashdotted, leading tremendous traffic to the referred site, enough to shut the hosting server down if it's not a decent one.

Farewell and All

With just a month left for the even semester to end, it's time again to bid farewell to the senior most batches (BTech and MTech) on the campus.

1) Akansh writes his final set of things to be done during the time left in IIIT.
2) Third year students are worried about the placements which is nearly 8 to 9 months from now. Though, there isn't any news of they preparing for the farewell. Would the current final years have a nice time at farewell? Combining Amalgam and Farewell is another step towards spoiling(?) the farewell party.
3) Vakiba writes an excellent plot that should motivate students (especially those who are stepping into a tougher world) to find more challenges in life.
4) Rajan rambles a good set of resources for students who plan to startup their own venture in future. An immediate help to graduating students.
5) With time approaching for students to become engineers, big shots like Manikandan have got back on blogging.

Rhythm & Hues Talk @ IIIT

Prashant Buyyala from Rhythm & Hues (R&H) gave a lively and exhibitive presentation on The Making of Narnia, and the behind the scene efforts that go into converting an artists' imagination to the lively and photo-realistic scenes of characters like Aslan, the Lion, in the movie. The presentation which began at 4:30 PM concluded a few minutes back (at 6:15 PM). Prior to the presentation, Prashant visited CVIT to have a look at the demos there.

The Talk
Prashant insisted on the talk being guided by what the audience wanted to hear, rather than he blabbering around, particularly because as he mentioned, "I can go on talking forever on this." He showed videos of some background studies of real objects, like studying the dynamics of a real lion with the muscle movement, the fur, the expressions, etc, and the translation to the Computer Generated videos for the movie. So are the several other characters like the centaur, the birds, etc. The characters in the final battle in The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, are individual bots running on their own defined-set of AI.

Prashant mentioned that he had come to IIIT because "IIIT is the only place in India where Computer Graphics is in the main curriculum". People elsewhere don't do much graphics.

The company
Rhythm & Hues is the animation studio company behind the movie The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. R&H had other bigger names like ILM and Sony working for this movie. Besides, R&H has done over 20 major Hollywood films including Daredevil, The Cat in the Hat, Scoby Doo 2, The LongestYard. Their upcoming titles include: Superman Returns, Garfield 2, Fast and Furious: Tokyo Drift, and Charlotte's Web. In India, R&H has a subsidiary at Bombay.

The fliers (pamphlets) distributed about his studio mentioned in bold about using Linux and Open Source Software for their production purposes on their render farms comprising of 2000 processors. They're looking for people with computer graphics, Linux development skills and those who are passionate about open source to join their facility.

UG3 discussing placements

Even before this year's placements season is declared done, UG3 have started discussing placements. They had a placements meet yesterday evening to talk on the issue. Surely, the issue of there being no placements officer (after Mrs Padmaja left) is a highlight. The UG3 studs can be heard discussing these issues on the mess table, while they walk, everywhere. Looks like early risers.

Kudos to IIIT Alumni

Great news guys!! Recently, Nishkala got admission in ISB and now she's got into University of Michigan . She's really made us all proud.

Not just this, another IIIT alumni, Mr. Puneet Vohra got recruited in an investment banking firm at Honkong. He's getting paid something around $80,000.. He'll complete his MBA from IIMA this May'06.

A IIITian's girlfriend

Sukesh narrates how he profusely got occupied with his girlfriend that he gave up on a project that he was to put in Showcase. Perhaps there are more such projects which he procrastinated due to this love which is so lovely, so comfortable to be with. So much so that she also stopped him from frequenting the gym. But now he's parted ways with this love. Her name is Lazy Ness. In more than one way, Ms Lazy Ness is the GF of every IIITian. She's the reason why BTPs, musical nights, prelims get postponed. She's the reason why assignments keep getting postponed ad infinitum. It's her her her.

Summer Projects: Another twist

IIIT Buzz mentioned about the summer projects twice - here and here . But guess, there's yet another topic to be brought forward.

Considering the large strength [as in number of students] that the current junior batches have, the list of projects released might not be big enough. Many of the projects say that the prerequisite is taking up honours. Due to the rush, some faculty have to restrict projects for students who wish to do honours. Isn't that kinda unfair and giving lesser opportunities?

Rain God's blessings

Inder devta, the rain God, seems to be quite happy. Is it the showcase or is it something else? IIIT and surroundings had been blessed with heavy down pour for past 2-3 days. The whole OBH enterance was filled up with water that had a height of atleast 3 to 4 inches. This cool breeze, this water all around, green trees, wet roads, washed down buildings etcetera, everything looks so beautiful. Hey IIIT Alumni, remember the similar days when you were students at this institute? Exciting, weren't they.

Computers without internet

These computers seem to be so useless without the net connection and it's unfortunate that this problem has started troubling the IIITians for quite some time now. The whole night yesterday, i.e. March 7, right upto March 8 morning, the time period when a IIITian is most awake, net had been down. Only now, it seems to have been working fine. Not just this, even the speed's quite slow these days.

What exactly is the problem? Is it more number of downloads or is the ISP problem? SysAdmins listening?

Feedback on Showcase

Shekhar Dwivedi, an alumni currently at GE, has sent a feedback about the Showcase. The showcase was visited by two people from GE, and as is evident, they were sumptuously impressed. Despite not many people from industry visiting the Showcase this time, it's heartening to hear such nice feedback.
The mail as sent to Dr PJN (later fwd-ed to cvit) follows:

Dear Sir,

I am doing good here and am going on a leave to home from 8th to 20th
march. I wanted to give you the feedback of R & D showcase from GE.
Rakesh and Ramkumar are back from R & D showcase of IIIT and since then
they are praising the institute, professors and students in each and
every meeting here. Ramkumar Saptharishi is so impressed that he has
written a mail to entire GE Healthcare team praising the institute and
the energy of the students and professors there. He is bugging me since
then to get as many students from IIIT as possible and wants to have a
"IIIT Alumni" in GE in coming years. Rakesh has also send a mail to
entire research labs here describing his experience about the showcase,
placements and the projects he saw there.
It is really good to hear such good things about the institute.

thanks
yours,
Shekhar

Summer Projects' Dilemma

It's that time of the year when the 2nd year-ites are faced with the dilemma of choice of project and faculty for the summer. They have to respond back with their preferences by 10th March.

Naturally, the choice should be in favour of where the interest is. In case one is not able to figure out where one's interest is, one should talk to all the prospective faculties and see what projects they have in mind. Surely, something would strike more than the rest, and that's your choice. Besides, when else would seniors be of better use? Ask your seniors about their experiences while doing their projects with a faculty, the kind of guidance that they got, their expectations, everything. Of course, there can be no "one shoe fits all" advice. This is the time when you're starting to do real projects. Leave no stone unturned to make a fair personal decision.

Expectations shattered

Mr. Ankit Fadia's talk turned out to be a total disaster though some students seem to have been really impressed by the 'freeware' softwares that he demonstrated. By the end of the talk, his motive behind coming over to the institute was totally evident - Campaigning for his new course that's starting up this April.

1) Each of those 'cracking' softwares that he used during the talk are freely available and that in no way indicated his competency in Networks Security.
2) Many students already knew about those softwares and had used them.
3) Most of his jokes, though seem to have been liked by many, were totally sick. Porno was the key behind them.
4) He wasted time in telling about each and every feature of those softwares, typing mails to demonstrate the use of smtp, calling in multiple volunteers when things could have been demonstrated with just one of them there.
5) He advertised about his new course during that talk where those things aren't appreciated.
6) His talk more or less indicated that he considers IIITians to be low grade students where such trivial things had to be presented in such detail.

Pranav did an excellent job by sending over a mail to students apologozing for the 'poor' talk that we had today.

Women reservations required?

Akansh writes a post on male chauvinism where he mentions (in brief) a point regarding women reservations.

The men:women ratio in IIIT is no more than 15:2. Is it that these women aren't intelligent enough to get admissions in such premium institutes (IITs too have similar ratios) or is it because of the re-location reasons? There could be many other personal reasons too but the point is whether women reservations should be encouraged to have an equal distribution of men and women in the institute. This issue is not just a 'buzz' for engineering institutes, it's discussed everywhere. These days, women reservations are being encouraged (officially / unofficially) even in industries. Corporates find multiple benefits in having a balanced ratio of men and women.

Summer Projects

Like each year during this period, (this year too) IIIT faculty has offered certain summer projects for the students to take over. These projects count as an internship experience under respective departments - CVIT, CDE, Robotics, LTRC, Communications etc. and definitely provide you with a substantial amount of experience to be added on to the resumes. Most of the projects are good and challenging. But there are two related issues that create a lot of 'buzz' among the students and are thus worth a post in IIIT Buzz Blog.

1) Are they really required: Certain students seem to be so confused about the idea of working here in those 'hot' and 'sizzling' summers, that they discuss the issue with every possible person whom they know. Working on projects is totally a personal decision and as of now, comes only from self-motivated students, it not being included into the curriculum. Working on these technical projects in summers is more of an advantage to the second and third year students because they're suppossed to have covered most of the background study through various courses.

2) Industry internship or IIIT Projects: Students at this time are generally confused whether to take over one of these projects or go for industry experiences. This is more of an issue among the second year students because the fate of most of the B.Tech third year students is written through a mutual discussion between the students and the respective faculty that they've been working with. It's advisable to work on summer projects at IIIT after the second year because the chances of getting good work in an industry are rare. It's more advisable to work on industry projects after third year because there are more opportunities then.

All said, there's another important issue related to these internships or projects. Should working in summers be made a part of the curriculum as in various other colleges? Should it be a compulsion for each student to work in atleast one of the two periods - after second or third year? Most of the arguments are in favour of the decision because it would help students to become technically more intelligent. Infact, working here in IIIT is definitely more enjoyable than staying back at homes, reasons being - 24 hr internet access, lots of movies, music, games and freedom ofcourse.

R&D Showcase - Really required?

After spending two long days in R&D Showcase, most of us have this questions on our nerves - Is the real meaning and motive behind IIIT's R&D showcase being spread out?

Those 2 days were long because there was hardly anyone to look at the displayed projects. Most of the junta was from among the IIIT students itself. Then there were people from JNTU, VNR-VJIET and some other local colleges. Unexpectedly, there were hardly any visitors from the industry which was not only demotivating for the students who kept their projects on display, it even led to the loss of real meaning behind conducting such events. As expected, students from local colleges asked all kinds of 'not-so-appreciable' questions - "Which programming language?"; "How many lines of code?" ; "How much time did it take?" ; "Which operating system does it work on?" ; "Why not a different programming language?" ; "Can you give me the sources from where you learnt the technology?" ; "Could you please send me the documentation and the code of your project - here is my email id" etcetera.

There were people from ATI and GE, but were mainly interested in projects under CVIT, IIITH. They did visit other labs and rooms but weren't keen enough and hence weren't motivating for the students under other departments.

Showcase definitely did bring certain advantages on the table. Some of them being:
1) Students from IIIT junior batches (mainly 1st and 2nd year) got the real feel of studying in a reputed college like IIIT where the projects' standards are undoubtedly high.
2) IIIT students got an opportunity to interact with each other and build social networks.
3) IIIT students improved their presentation skills by demonstrating the project to people from different backgrounds.
4) Students got a 2 day leave from the institute - Friday, 3rd Mar and Saturday, 4th Mar'06.
5) Some (very few) visitors took over students' ids and phone numbers and are expected to contact them sometime in future. Who knows, may be there's a job or internship offer waiting in the queue.

Overall, the showcase wasn't that big a success as expected but nevertheless got some fringe benefits for the students here. One thing that's so disheartening about this R&D is that there's no news about students getting T-shirts as previous times. That's least expected from the institute. All the students who demonstrated their projects should get a T-shirt. It's always included in the budget of Showcase. Why not this time? Any faculty member reading this? You're kindly requested not to break such trends.

R & D Showcase - Day 1

First of all, the distinguished lecture was cancelled. The demos were setup around 9 AM. But hardly anyone turned up until noon to see them. All through the day there were very few non IIITians visible. Among the little few, most were seen outside the main building admiring the campus rather than the projects. There were almost no industry visitors at all. So what was the problem? Does all the fault lie with George Bush? Or does it lie with the decision to have it on a friday? Wouldn't have saturday and sunday made a more sensible choice? Wasn't it on weekends in the previous years. (Remember the crowds which almost choked the main building last year?) What are the reasons behind this shift? Also, why was it advanced from 10-11 march? Whom should we seek for the answers? Spare a thought for those who had gone through so much trouble to set up their project demos and have been left waiting all day to be able to show them to someone.

Are all the projects worth it?

Definitely NOT.

1) In some cases, project guides ask their students to arrange for project demonstrations, just for the sake of displaying them. Those projects and tools may be the easiest of all to build but they'll be there in the showcase.

2) In all these years that I've been in IIIT, lots of projects are repeatedly displayed. Accepted that some of those projects are indeed an achievement for our institute but are they really required to be displayed each time? Shakti, DLI tools, Content-based Image Retrieval, SMILES: Extracting Equations from Latex Documents, eSagu, Movie Recommendation System are only some of those projects that are dispayed each time project demonstrations are held. Isn't one year a long enough time to build new projects?

The number of projects to be displayed this time are so high in number that there aren't enough classes to occupy them. Making rules such as not repeating a project demonstration would encourage students to work hard and finish off things in time. There may be leniency for some of them where additional tools are built such as Shakti or Digital Library of India but for many others, it's not really appreciable to have repetitions.

Are we really excited by research?

Looking at a bunch of people pack their bags and leave campus for home this evening made me wonder. Wasn't this the same attitude the faculty accused the students of when they used to bunk events like Felicity.

We have had EXoR for the past 2 years and the RnD showcase for the past 3. Every year the number of people coming here to 'ogle at our brilliance' is increasing. That is good in a way, the institute gets its fame increasingly polished every year. But is this an indicator for the effect that it ought to produce? These showcases intend to attract more and more students to join our institute's ranks in its post-graduate program. But is this really happening? How many M. Tech, MS or PhD's have joined IIIT 'inspired' by EXoR or Showcase, I did hear that some people have come down here to do their summer internships but how big is the effect? The faculty can simply quantify these numbers in their marketing strategy to show that research excites/bites/inspires.

A look at the domestic scene raises questions as well. Though more people joining the honors programs may appear good but what is the produce of these research fields? The number of killer applications or new systems being showcased has been on the decline with most the project demonstrators being reluctant about their job at the showcase and instances of many old projects being shown over and over again. We had Prez Kalam for the deployment of the first Ravi system from LTRC, e-sagu and Shakti have been there for long now, PC-TVT came with a bang, went i dont know where. We need more systems that can be 'branded' bigtime, concrete results of research. Afterall, every research problem is intended to become or add to an application that makes something better than it was. Something that makes a difference! More quality results in terms of development till the end, shows the fruits of research more tangibly. Another problem is of the faculty-students ratio in the research labs and overall. Many students get away with little work just because the professor is busy with lot of things. More faculty members are needed and this gap is not being filled in fast.

All this is while the oblivious ones watch India battle England in the hostels. Ignorance is indeed bliss for them, but is this a side-effect of the excessive propaganda about IIIT - The research Institute among the students? Afterall, one tends to yawn after sometime.

R&D Showcase - A Threat to Bush?

Is R&D Showcase a threat to George Bush? These policemen roaming around in the campus think so. Hostel guards were asked to inform them about any visitors in the name of R&D showcase that's starting tomorrow - 3rd and 4th of March.

OBH guard (Mr. Mehndi Hasan) told them about 12 visitors who've supposedly come from Jammu and Kashmir [Is R&D that famous?]. A team of 6 to 7 of those armed policemen went straight to those visitors' rooms. And only God knows what happened in there. Probably no one was found to be a 'militant' or a 'terrorist' or a 'threat' to US President's Hyderabad visit tomorrow or else there definitely would have been a chaos all around.

More and more visitors coming over to look at the IIIT projects displayed in R&D showcase is indeed an achievement. Can it be eventually transformed into IIIT's technical fest? Or could these projects be displayed along with some technical competitions which might attract more guests?

Finally students step up

Case 1
Finally, some of the B.Tech fourth year students have decided to talk to faculty about considering the convenience of students too before deciding upon the postponements of FYP vivas.

An anonymous coward puts up an argument here , (the first comment) saying that it's basically we who started the culture of postponements. But the point is, don't we get things postponed after a mutual consent with the faculty or tutors. Then, why can't faculty take a small step to discuss upon the final timings before actually imposing them on us? Bad relationships, aren't they?

Case 2
On the other hand, campus life prepares itself to discuss "Rationale behind Security and Campus Env.rules" with faculty in FSIS today. There has been a strong effort by this man and it would be shameful on our parts if we don't even attend the FSIS this evening. So, if you felt anguish after hearing the new rules that might come into affect from next semester, this is your last chance. Or else, you don't get the right to comment or show your anger at those rules.

Postpone this and that too

Postpone this, postpone that. Postponements have become as much a part of our life here as anything else. Everything that can be postponed, are postponed. Yesterday, cultural sent a mail citing three postponements (BTP, musical night, prelims). And this is not the first time musical night and its prelims is being shuffled. Ok, happens, high-priority hard-pressed things come up, but can't that be planned and avoided? We all have calendars, don't we. Can't we for once stick to the schedule, even if that means starting late?