Start-Up Now!

Volume 4, Issue 1

Editors Column
Rest is not idleness, and to lie sometimes on the grass on a summer day listening to the murmur of water, or watching the clouds float across the sky, is h a r d ly a was te of time. (John Lubbock ) As the semester comes to a close and the great summers stretch ahead, lets take a break with this new refreshing issue, before the final grind for the majors. Find out whats happening in the department. From welcoming the new faculty, to introducing some in t e r es ti n g p r oj e c ts , t o d i s c u s s i n g t h e v a r i ou s prestigious awards given to faculty members of our department, this issue covers it all. Not only do we discuss the various events covered by the ACM Student Chapter like talks/seminars by various high profile speakers, workshops, contests etc but also various other events of the department like freshers given by ACES and the departmental fest. ACM India Annual Conference which was held in January proved to be an enriching experience for all those who attended it. A glimpse of the same is given in the pages ahead. Did you wonder how various companies got their names? Well move directly onto the fun section for details! Th e news letter tea m appreciates the receipt of articles and feedback received so far and continues with the hope that this edition will also be enjoyed by the readers. Looking forward to continued participation from professors and students in future editions!

Brought out by ACM STUDENT Chapter

CSE Newsletter

"It is not the critic who counts, not the man who points out how the strong man stumbled, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena; whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs and comes short again and again; who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, and spends himself in a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows in the end the triumph of high achievement; and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know n e ithe r vic tory nor de feat."( Theodore Roosevelt, 1910) Fortune indeed favors the brave! It takes the greatest amount of courage to take the first step, the rest just follow. And its this leap which we fear. The constant worry about not meeting expectations, messing up, falling down, prevent us from taking risks. The risk which could fulfill our dreams if we gave ourselves the chance. In order to become a successful entrepreneur you may well have to pay your dues. You'll most probably have to fail a few times, learn from your lessons, and only then be able to come through a winner. While you don't have to take wild chances, you do have to take calculated and educated risks.

It is human instinct to shy away from mistakes and blame ourselves for making them.. However, mistakes are simply opportunities to learn something new. The more mistakes a person makes, the more they will have learnt and the greater chance they will have of succeeding on their next try. The key, however, is to learn from them and take them as stepping stone for the next milestone. All this and more is reflected in the Adam Story. Launched at CES 2010 by Notion Ink , an entrepreneurial venture by IIT grads, Adam is their first go, in the tablet market. Regularly reviewed and featured in prominent media, it has quickly grown into an internet love child. Spec-tospec, Adam has stood on its own against every tablet n the town, including the iPad. Sold out in minutes during its pre-booking window, Adam is the first device in the world to integrate two breakthrough power-saving components - nVidias Tegra 2 Chip and a Pixel Qi screen. Though the launch was marred with glitches, the world media has hailed Notion Ink for taking on the Goliaths. The essence of 'starting up' can be best summarized by this issue, which predominantly focuses on budding ideas, be it SURA projects, new workshops or the interesting personality profile reflecting the strife and triumph of Adi Shamir. Read on for more!

Inside this issue:

Start up now Project article SURA Honor the mentor Newsflashes Personality Profile Faculty Profile The Power of Gram Vaani ACM India Annual Conference Fun Section

1 2 3,4
4

5,6 7 8 9

10

Aditi Kapoor, Chief Editor

11,12

Contributed by: Savin Goyal

An interesting project article:

WSS-NFP: Tool for Web Service Selection Based On Non-Functional Properties Using Soft Computing
Student : Sunita Tiwari Supervisor : Prof Saroj Kaushik Publication details : Sunita Tiwari and Saroj Kaushik, WSS-NFP: Tool for Web Service Selection Based on Non-Functional Properties using Soft Computing, International Conference on Machine and Web Intelligence (ICMWI2010) ,Proc of IEEE ICMWI 2010, Oct 2010, Algiers, Algeria, ISBN 9781 -42 44-8608 -3, D O I: 10.1109/ ICMWI.2010.5648127, pp 28-34 URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/ stamp.jsptp=&arnumber=5648127&isnumber =5647825 1. Introduction 2. Technical Details The tool we have developed can be customized for any domain of web service. The proposed tool consists of three main components, namely, Publish Module, Ranker Module, and Fuzzy System Design & Training Module. The overall design of the proposed tool is shown in figure 1. The web services provided by the service providers need to be advertised or published. Different providers can register or publish their services in the service registry using the publish module. System Design and Training module is further divided in two parts namely System Design module and Training module. Since Fuzzy Techniques provide powerful ways to solve the real world problems having uncerNon functional properties are response time, reputation, cost, reliability etc. specifying the following :

Number of input parameters for a specific domain The possible fuzzy sets and their membership function parameters Initial rule base based on their experiences and intuitions.
The proposed tool provides GUI for designing the system. A fuzzy system can model the quantitative aspects of human knowledge and reasoning process without using precise quantitative analysis. But it takes lot of time to design and fine tune the membership functions which quantitatively defines the linguistic terms. We have used neural network to automate this process and reduce the time while improving the cost. We have used ANFIS for fine-tuning the membership parameters of the system designed. The ranker searches the set of services that matches the clients functional requirements and then rank them on the basis of non-functional properties of the advertised services. Users preferences for non-functional parameters are considered by taking weight for each input parameter. These weights are then taken into consideration while the rule evaluation in the fuzzy system. 3. Conclusions We have proposed and implemented a tool WSS-NFP for web service selection based on non-functional properties using soft computing techniques. Results generated by WSSNFP are comparable with existing mathematical models. A system for particular domain can be customized and trained using the proposed tool. We have provided GUI to facilitate the use of the tool by the different users of the system. In our future work we will incorporate the feedback knowledge from web service execution in the service selection. Contributed by: Sunita Tiwari
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Web services provide a promising solution to an age old need of fast and flexible information sharing among people and businesses. Selection of web service has become a tedious job because of the increasing number of service providers providing services with similar functionality. In this work, we have developed a selection tool (WSS-NFP) for web services which can rank services based on their nonfunctional properties such as performance, delay etc. We have used soft computing techniques for selection and discovery of web services based on non functional properties. Web service may be fully described by two sets of properties namely functional and non-functional. Functional properties describe what a web service can do and nonfunctional properties describe how good a web service can do. Functional properties include input, Output, conditional output, precondition, access condition and effect of service. These functional properties can be characterized as the capability of the service.

tain and unpredictable environment. Therefore we have used this approach to solve the problem under consideration. The domain expert will design and train a Neuro Fuzzy System for each web service domain. The domain expert can customize the system by

Some interesting SURA proposals

1. Description of Community Model for Cloud Computing and Virtualization based network. The implementation will see not only monetary benefits to IIT but a customized user interface required by an Institution. An institution like IIT Delhi will see a tremendous computational power being generated out of almost nothing.

3.

Student: Abhishek Gupta and Jatin Kumar Supervisor: Prof. Sorav Bansal Details: Application provisioning, maintenance, high availability and disaster recovery make virtual machines ideal for use in a setup where computational power of computers is not used up to the optimum level. For example, VMWare, but its non-intuitive and a bit complex interface along with high software costs calls for an application which replaces the VMWare in an institute setup

Optimization of slot allotment of courses in IITD

Students: Utkarsh Ohm and Suyash

Roongta
Supervisor: Prof Naveen Garg

2.

FPGAs as accelerators for NextGeneration Sequencing(NGS) Applications

Details: Every semester each dept with-

Student: Dhruv Jain Supervisor: Prof. M Balakrishnan Details: Bioinformatics is a field which

like IIT-D. Also, being highly customized to our needs we will be better able to utilize our resources. For building such interface the help of an API namely libvirt will be taken. A recent study in General Computing Lab have shown the actual usage statistics of Lab Computers to be less than 5% of what would have otherwise been possible. Thus, our model will focus on utilizing the computational power of already available Lab Machines which are available most of the times. The work on client-server model has already been done and at present, focus is on better UI and command-line interface for the same so that it can soon replace the VMWare based network. The implementation will see not only monetary benefits to IIT but a customized user interface required by an Institution. An institution like IIT Delhi will see a tremendous computational power being generated out of almost noth-

concerns with application of information technology and computer science to the field of molecular biology. A very popular discipline in bioinformatics is Next-generation sequencing or DNA sequencing. It specifies sequencing methods for determining the order of nucleotide bases-adenine, guanine, cytosine, and thymine in a molecule of DNA which is then assembled for analysis. A central challenge in DNA sequencing is sequence alignment, whereby fragments of much longer DNA sequence are aligned and merged in order to construct the original sequence. A wide variety of alignment algorithms and software have been subsequently developed over the past few years. Some commonly used ones include BWA-SW , Bowtie , Mosaik , Velvet , SOAP and MAQ. These algorithms have been implemented successfu ll y on pr ocessor s and supercomputers. Most of these take lot of time to execute on General purpose processors. Hardware accelerators such as FPGAs and GPUs can be used with processors to fasten these applications. As per our knowledge there are very few reports published in literature about accelerating these applications using FPGAs. This project aims at exploring FPGAs as accelerators for these applications resulting in speeding up sequence alignment by using hardwaresoftware co-design.

out much cooperation from other departments floats courses in a slot of their choice. This leads to comflict of interest for many students especially pursuing minor degrees or courses across say, more than 2 departments. We propose that each student fills in his choice of courses without the slot in mind following which we allot slots to courses minimising the number of conflicts giving higher weightage to core courses. Max cut Local Search algorithms and Particle Swarm Optimisation are among several algorithms that we plan to test.
4. Plagiarism Detection Tool

Students: Alankrit Chona and Harsh

Gupta
Supervisor: Prof Huzur Saran Details: A plagiarism detection tool is the need of the hour in the modern world with software being written and plagiarized at a bewildering pace. Importance of such a tool in academic scenarios can hardly be over emphasized.With a bewildering range of techniques available, for this purpose there is a compelling need for up-to-date comparative research into their relative effectiveness,Challenges such as detecting plagiarism in a wide variety of programming languages remain. There is a growing need to devise an efficient algorithm, with realistic runtimes, the validity of whose results can be argued.

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Some interesting SURA proposals contd.

5. Automated Diagnosis and Detection of Brain Disorders with Image Processing Students : Soniya Goyal Sudhanshu Shekhar Supervisor: Prof. K. K. Biswas
Details: Neuro-Disorders have been a

and

performance and its effect patient management, factors influence the ability of obs er ver t o i n t er pr et information.

on that the th e

challenging area for the Medical Sci ence because of both the technological constraints and the time taking diagonosis available so far but many a times also because of the late detection of the disorder due to following reasons : The present technique of MRI scans and diagnosis of disorders called Radiology, is highly practical in the sense that the radiologist should have complete knowlege of brain parts and success of an imaging technique is judged not just on the images themselves but on the radiologist's

Then , there are several cases where many recent diseases detected in human brain are so closely related that it is almost not possible for a human eye to detect the difference between them and come up with one of them with certainty for example in case of Alzheimers disease, Hu n t i n g t on s d i s e a s e , or Parkinsons disease. Also the very large gap between the number of neuropatients to the number of neurologists in India and the time taking Manual analysis of one MRI scan often take the disorder to danger stages before even the patient get to reach a doctor .

So with this scenario in mind we have come up with the technique of image processing to be used on those MRI images of the patients. In this we would be comparing the images with the standard Deformable Models which are both for different Types of diseases and also different Stages for a particular disease. Then, we would provide the analyst with complete details of the comparison results according to the percentage match with each of those standard models so that the radiologist now could see more clearly the kind of Syndrome and the Stage of the Disease of the patient. This technology could pot en t i a l l y pr ovi de di a gn ost i c information to distinguish different causes of dementia and other forms of neurological illness, rapidly and noninvasively
by: Abhishek Gupta and Ankit Agrawal Compiled

Honor the mentor award

The ACM Chapter would like to congratulate Professor M. Balakrishnan and Professor Anshul Kumar who were felicitated on Tuesday, December 28, 2010 by the Honor the mentor award . This award was started as part of Golden Jubilee Celebration, with the aim of allowing a group of alumini to honor a particular faculty. Details of the award can be found at the following link:http://www.iitdalumni.com/news/ honor-mentor-program "The most profound technologies are those that disappear: they weave themselves into fabric of everyday life until are indistinguishable from it" [Mark Weiser, The Computer for the 21st Century, Scientific American , Sept. 1991]

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Department News Flash

I. Visitors
Dr. Dhruba Borthakur, Open Source Apache Hadoop, 10th November 2010 Youmna Borghol, tional ICT Australia, 7th December 2010 Dr Siddhartha Srinivasa, Intel Pittsburgh, 7th December 2010 Dr. Sebastien Ardon, National ICT Australia, 8th December 2010 Prof. Rabi Mahapatra, Texas A&M University, 8th December 2010 Shivaram Kalyanakrishnan, University of Texas, Austin, 10th December 2010 Dr. Raghav Bhaskar, MSR India, 10th December 2010 Dr. Rashina Hoda, Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand, 13th December 2010 Dr. Charles E. Perkins, WiChorusdivision of Tellabs, 13th December 2010

Dr. Arnab Bhattacharyya, Dept. of EECS, MIT, 19th Jan 2011 Mohit Saxena, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 28th Jan 2011 Dmtr Plvlgyi , ELTE, Budapest,

9th Feb 2011

Prof S V Raghavan, IIT Madras, 10th

Feb 2011
Dr. John Augustine, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, 15th

Rudra Tripathy, Amitabha Bagchi and Sameep Mehta. A study of rumor control strategies on social networks. In Proceedings of 19th ACM Intl. Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM '10), pp 1817-1820, October 2 0 1 0 . doi:10.1145/1871437.1871737 Sunita Tiwari and Saroj Kaushik, A Non Functional Properties Based Web Service Recommender System, Proceedings of International Conference on Computational Intelligence and Software Engineering (CiSE 2010), Wuhan, China, Dec 2010, IEEE Catalog Number : CFP1026 H-CDR, ISBN:978-1-4244-5392-4 Niladri Chatterjee, Saroj Kaushik, Smit Rastogi and Varun Dua., Automatic Email Classification using User Preference Ontology, Proceedings of International Conference on Knowledge Engineering and Ontology Development (KEOD 2010), Valencia, Spain, November 2010, SciTePress, ISBN 978-9898425-29-4, pp 165 170. Saroj Kaushik and Deepak Kollipalli, Multi-agent based Architecture for Querying Disjoint Data Repositories, International Conference on Machine and Web Intelligence (ICMWI2010), Proc of IEEE ICMWI 2010, October 2010, Algiers, Algeria, ISBN 978-1-42448608-3, DOI: 10.1109/ ICMWI.2010.5648048, pp 2834.URL: Sunita Tiwari and Saroj Kaushik, WSS-NFP: Tool for Web Service Selection Based on Non-Functional Properties using Soft Computing, International Conference on Machine and Web Intelligence (ICMWI2010) , Proc of IEEE ICMWI 2010, Oct 2010, Algiers, Algeria, ISBN978-1-4244-8608-3, D O I : 1 0 . 1 1 0 9 / ICMWI.2010.5648127, pp 28-34.

Feb 2011
Prof. John Hopcroft, Cornel University, 21st Feb 2011 Prof. Gerard Huet, INRIA, France,

21st Feb 2011 Prof. Andrew Lim, University of Hong Kong, 9th March 2011
Prof. Umesh Bellur, IIT Bombay, 11th

March 2011
Prof. Sandeep Sen, IIT Delhi, 11th

March 2011 Prof. Simon Kramer, Univ. of Luxembourg, 21th March 2011 Dr. Saurabh Panjwani , MSRI, 13th April 2011

Prof. Gregory Guthrie, Maharishi University of Management, Fairfield, IOWA State, USA, 16th December 2010
Prof. Vineet Bafna, Univ. California, San Diego, 17th December 2010

II. Department Updates Ayesha Chaudhary defended her thesis on 28th March 2011
Smruti Padhy defended her thesis on 6th April 2011

Prof Arun Somani , IIT Delhi( Visiting ), 4th Jan 2011 Prof. Deepak Kapur, University of New Mexico, 7th Jan 2011
Dr. Rik Sarkar, Technische and FreieUniversities in Berlin, 10th Jan 2011

III. Publications O. Turkcu and A. K. Somani, "Efficient Multicasting Approaches Using CollectionDistribution Networks," in Proc. of INFOCOMM 2011, ShanghaiChina, April 2011.
A. K. Somani and A. Gumaste, "Light Trails: Distributed Optical Grooming for Emerging Data Center, Cloud Computing, and Enterprize Applications," in Proc. of OFC, 2011, Invited Paper, March, 7-10, 2011.

Dr. P. A. Subrahmanyam, Stanford University, 11th Jan 2011

Dr. Aviral Shrivastava, Arizona State University, 12th Jan 2011 Dr. Anoop Gupta, Microsoft Research, 17th Jan 2011

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Department News Flash (contd.)

Aditi Kapoor, K. K. Biswas, A case-based reasoning approach for detection of salient regions in images , ICVGIP '10 Proceedings of the Seventh Indian Conference on Computer Vision, Graphics and Image Processing, ACM New York, NY, USA 2010, 48-55 Sonia Khetarpaul, Rashmi Chauhan, S K Gupta, L Venkata Subramaniam, Ullas B Nambiar.Mining GPS Data to Det er min e In t er est in g Locations , In proceedings of 20thinternational WWW2011 conference workshop IIWeb '11, March 28, 2011, Hyderabad, India P Panda, M Balakrishnan and A. Vishnoi, Compressing Cache State for Post-Silicon Processor Debug IEEE Transactions on Computers, Vol. 60,No. 4, April 2011, pp 484-497 R. Devadoss, K. Paul, M. Ba lakri shnan, A Til ed Programmable Fabric using QCA, FPT 2010, Beijing, Dec. 2010, pp. 9-16 IV Awards The ASSISTECH group's paper on a Smartcane for the Visually Impaired has won the best p a p er a wa r d a t t h e 1 2t h International Conference on Mobility and Transport for Elderly and Disabled People (TRANSED Aaditeshwar Seth's project on rural community radio stations won the Juror's distinction at the Manthan Awards.

V. Events
Data Analytics and Operations Research Workshop in Oct 29& 30, 2010 Workshop on Cloud Computing in 1st November 2010 Geometric Computing in Nov 12-14 2010

Visit from Google University relations, in February 11, 2011

Indo-US workshop held on March 9-11 2011

ACES Freshers Welcome

After all, its not just about computers, always! IIT is a dream for many students yet only a selected few make into it, and even fewer into THE Computer Science and Engineering Department. But then, is it all about computers always? Are these Computer Scientists brains only restricted to the zone of academics and technical field? Well, no. And if yes initially, then ACES makes sure that it doesnt remain so in the remaining time they spend in IIT. ACES or the Association of Computer Engineers and Scientists is the cultural body in the department which provides a platform to the students to showcase this talents, to enjoy, to compete and acts as a coolant for the all-timecharged-and-tensed environment of the department. Right from your first year in IIT, till you graduate, ACES makes sure that you have nice things to do apart from the usual academics. leg pulling, comedy group acts, sessions of introduction and interaction, a bit of puzzle solving (to remind them that no matter how much fun you have, at the end its CS&E!), mimicry, a lot of dance and burgers and coke. We had Prof. S. Bansal and Prof. Vinay Rebeiro present who enjoyed as well and enlightened the students. But the fun zone doesnt end here. CSE had the first ever departmental fest of its own, COMPFLUENCE, ranging over two days. The major events were the scrabble, debating, movie screening and quiz. The enthusiasm of the participants turned out to be a major plus point of this fest with a decent participation from all the batches. And so, this ACES initiative was a major success and we hope that COMPLUENCE gets bigger and better in the coming years. PhD interests and queries regarding jobs. This semester was as eventful as the first, with some very popular events being organized. We saw 17 teams in the Tennis Ball Cricket tournament against the Electrical department. Eventually, CSE 4th year ruled the grounds! Still all play and no study can make Jack a dull boy and so Number Games event was organized where students competed over Sudoku and Kakuru. With a massive participation, unlimited refreshments and a competitive-tensed environment, the Counter strike tournament also proved to be an awesome experience for both the organizers as well as the participants. And now, we have the much awaited, our very own, department t-shirt. The year 2010-2011 has been very eventful and now with the new team coming up shortly, the enthusiasm will only increase. Lets all make our time at IIT more multi-dimensional!

Funde are an important part in life at IIT, especially from seniors. We made it a little formal. The summer internshipand-what-to-do funde session for 2nd yearites by the 3rd year seniors was This year started in a rather exciting hugely attended and appreciated; after way. With a new team, a new enthusi- all, all the funde at one place isnt a bad asm, ACES planned the freshers party idea. Not only this, the 3rd and 4th for the 2010 entrants which turned out yearites also had their share of funde Submitted by : Saumya Yadav to be huge success. There was a lot of regarding the opportunities after IIT, Publicity Secretary, ACES

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Personality Profile : Adi Shamir

paper were sent out. The National Security Agency unsuccessfully tried to ban the distribution, considering it as a danger to national security. considered secure, like those used by financial and government systems. It has not been made reality as yet. Shamir has also introduced the successor of TWINKLE named TWIRL (The Weizmann Institute Relation Locator) which is more efficient.

Adi Shamir has received many awards for his extensive contributions. Shamir was co-awarded the 2002 ACM Turing Award, IEEE Koji Kobayashi Computers and Adi Shamir is among the most famous Communications Award and the cryptographers, best known for Secure Computing Lifethe widely-used RSA encryption t i m e A c h i e ve m e n t The major crypto result is that this taught us system. Shamir was born in Tel Award. Shamir has Aviv, Israel, in 1952. He obnearly 100 publications about how to design future hash results to be tained his B.S. degree from Tel stronger. I would say the practical impact [of colli- to his name besides Aviv University in 1973. He was many more prestigious sion attacks] is still not strong. awarded his M.Sc. degree in awards. 1975 and Ph.D. degree in 1977 Shamir has a legendary from Weizmann Institute of Scireputation in the field of ence, Israel. Then, he joined cryptography and secuIn 1980, Shamir started working at Laboratory of Computer Science in Masrity. But, the legend is worried about the Weizmann Institute as a Professachusetts Institute of Technology as an the present state of computer security. sor of Applied Mathematics and instructor. He remarks: "Security wins many batComputer Science. There, he cotles but loses the security war. We are invented the Feige-Fiat-Shamir At MIT, Shamir met Ronald L. Rivest. definitely going backwards in comIdentification Scheme. He also deThey started developing algorithms for puter security. He is also perturbed vised visual cryptosystem, Shamirs public-key cryptography. Leonard Adleabout the individuals security and secret sharing, zero-knowledge and man was brought in to test the systems warns the society: "The government secret dispersion systems. He codevised. The initial systems developed will give you full privacy until they discovered Differential Cryptanalyproved easy to solve but on their 43rd want information about you." The sis. The interesting thing to note is attempt they developed a system based society today needs many more people that it later emerged that differenon prime numbers and one-way functions like Shamir if the privacy of each and tial cryptanalysis was already which was secure enough. It was named every individual is to be preserved. known and kept a secret by the RSA, patented, and the RSA Data Security Incorporated was formed to look IBM and the NSA. Sources: after the system. www.wikipedia.org In 1999, Shamir announced TWIN answers.yahoo.com Shamirs work was often shadowed by KLE (The Weizmann Institute Key www.justice.gov.il Locating Engine). TWINKLE is an officials concerned about national secu www.schneier.co electro-optical device that will exerity. In 1977, Scientific American offered www.zdnet.com a $100 reward to anyone who could cute sieve-based factoring algocrack a message encoded using the key. Readers could request a copy of the scientific paper. Thousands of copies of the rithms much faster than a personal computer. It can be utilized to break computer generated codes
Compiled by : Anant Mittal

We can see the point where the chip is unhappy if a wrong bit is sent and consumes more power from the environment.

A hobby a day keeps the doldrums away. ~ Adi Shamir

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Faculty Profile :Prof. Ragesh Jaiswal

tween post doctoral and Phd is that in the later one, there is always someone to advise you but the idea of postdoctoral is to become independent and solve research problems on your own. You can always work on the problems of your interest. Overall , it was an enriching experience. Q 3. How did you decide to come to IITDelhi as a professor ? but to do non-trivial work in these areas, we have to go back to algorithms. Thus, strong foundation of algorithms is required to do something impactful. Q 6. What are some of the other research areas in which you are working presently ?

Prof. Ragesh Jaiwal joined as an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at IIT Delhi. His areas of interests include Algorithms, Complexity, Theoretical Cryptography, and Machine Learning. Before joining IIT Delhi, he worked as a Postdoctoral Research Scientist at Columbia University, New York.

Q 1. Please walk us through some of the landmarks of your career. Ans 1. I completed my B.Tech from IIT- Kanpur in 2003. After that, I went to University of California, San Diego to pursue the PhD program. Somewhere in the middle of that , I received my M.Phil degree. After defending the thesis in 2008, I worked as Post Doctoral Research Scientist in Columbia University for about two years. Q 2. Tell us something about your student life and postdoctoral Research Scientist and the contrast between the two. Ans 2. Life was amazing in IIT Kanpur . The first three years were very hectic as the course structure was very intense but in the end it was great fun to be there. The major difference be-

Ans 6. Presently , I am focusing a lot on Theoretical Cryptography , especially on Ans 3. I have always wanted to come back topics like Streaming to India and pursue a career in academic Algorithms, Security Networks and Data field. I really like teaching . IIT Delhi is one Privacy. These are new and interesting areas of the best places as the students here are and all these problems are very relevant excellent and it has been a great pleasure to nowadays. I always encourage students to teach them explore these areas. When you explore new areas with students it always takes times but Q 4. Besides academics, what other ac- we are making progress. tivities/hobbies are of major interest to you? Q 7. Any message you would like to give Ans 4. During my life at IIT-Kanpur , I was to students at IIT-Delhi ? a part of hostel band as I used to play Guitar. During my Phd programme I used to do Ans 7. Think positively about academics a lot of driving and hiking but after coming and research. Even if you have family comback to India, I haven't been able mitments and have to work after graduation, to find much time to do these things. think positively about academics on long term. May be as an undergraduate student, Q 5. What made you choose Theoretical you do not get to look at the various reComputer Science as your research search areas , but there are always people in the department who are always ready to area ? help you in doing impactful work. There are lot of excellent students here and we do not Ans 5. During my graduation , I did some want to lose all of them in non-research advanced level courses at IIT K like Adfields. vanced Complexity Theory, etc. This area always fascinated me, so I kept digging in and made some progress on a few important problems. Theoretical computer science is one of the pillars of computer science. Without the formal study of this subject , we can't even think about the advanced levels. Today lot of focus is there in areas like han- Compiled by : Ankit Agrawal, Georgy dling large databases, Cryptography, etc. Sebastian & Nitin Aggarwal

Dont worry if it doesnt work right. If everything did, youd be out of a job.
(Moshers Law of Software Engineering )

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The Power of Gram Vaani

T h e Power of Ideas is an initiative of Econ o m i c Times that p r ovi d e s humble p l a t for m to groom and nurture entrepreneurs by connecting them with relevant mentors and investors. Various associations like Department of Science and Technology (DST), Government of India and Centre for Innovation, Incubation and Entrepreneurship (CIIE),IIM, Ahmedabad are involved in it. This year, over 12,500 business ideas were received and out of those our professor Dr. Aaditeshwar Seth is one among the winners and few selected future Entrepreneurs who are receiving cash grant of Rs5 lakh. The whole ACM team congratulates him for this achievement. His idea of Gram Vaani can be summarized as follows : The product can be plugged to run in rural radio stations, cable TV outlets, and can also be utilized on Android handhelds and netbooks. Various Centralized entities such as governments and companies can always deploy content into this network of radio and television stations, for delivery in different parts of the network. The main goal is to create Bridging the Digital Divide for such a network for coordinated informaGrowth (GRINS is a winner in the tion delivery in remote and rural areas. Manthan Awards), Saabira ChaudThe network is in fact not just a network huri, livemint.com, Dec 21, 2009. in the technical terms, but actually an ecosystem of non-profit agencies, com- Youre listening to laptop radio, panies, governments, local community Arindam Mukherjee, OPEN magagroups, and even individuals, who serve zine, July 25, 2009. to create the necessary people linkages in rural communities and disseminate Gram Vaani devices economical sol uti ons f or CR s, An it a information. Thus, Gram Vaani aims to Iyer, radioandmusic.com, June 29, develop telecommunication and media 2009. solutions to give a greater voice to the people at the grassroots level and enable them to have closer engagement with Keeping the Lines of Communication Open, Jonathan Erickson, Dr. large institutions in the development Dobbs Journal, Oct 29, 2008. sector (governments, NGOs, corporate) and their end-customers. It has been designed keeping in mind the unique Knight News Challenge 2008 Winners Announced Today, John S. and challenges of operating in rural areas of James L. Knight Foundation, May developing countries and builds on an 14, 2008. innovative combination of technology platform coupled with on-the-ground people interfaces. This is the only such Sources: model we have come across for creating a people-cum-technical network for in- http://gramvaani.org/ formation sharing and exchange in rural http://www.ideas.economictimes.com/ areas. Besides being one of the winners in this contest, Gram Vaani has been in Final_CutOff.aspx the news many a times. Some of them are listed below : Radio gaga!, Anika Gupta, Hindustan Times, LiveMint, Aug 19, 2010.

Contributed by :Ankit Agrawal

A talk to remember : Telepresence: from Virtual to Reality

All talks are interesting to an audience working in that area, but once in a while, there comes a talk which enthralls its entire audience irrespective of their field of research. Dr. Anoop Gupta gave one such talk on Telepresence. Dr. Gupta did his B. Tech from IITD receiving the President's Gold Medal in 1980. Since then Dr. Gupta has published more than 100 papers in major conferences and journals, including several that have won awards. He has contributed to more than 75 patand Education Products. He lead the company's efforts in new business modFrom 2007-2009, as corporate vice els and technologies to help close the president (CVP) of Technology Policy digital divide and help bring social and and Strategy at Microsoft, Dr. Anoop economic opportunity. Gupta guided Microsoft's engagement with governments and institutions Dr Gupta is currently a Distinguished around the world regarding Micro- Scientist at Microsoft Research where he soft's vision of upcoming technology helps drive cross-cutting multiinnovations and the combination of disciplinary research projects that have policies and regulations that might potential for large societal and business maximize their benefits for citizens. impact. He reports to Rick Rashid, senDuring this period, he also served as ior vice president and global head of CVP of the Unlimited Potential Group Microsoft Research. ents.

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A talk to remember : Telepresence: from Virtual to Reality (contd.)

A brief abstract of the talk is given below : From Star Trek and Star Wars to The Matrix and Avatar, Hollywood has reflected mans dream of Telepresence. Today Telepresence is embodied in the marketplace by solutions such as HP Halo and Cisco Telepresence, dedicated conference rooms sporting built-in furniture and life-sized high-definition video, costing hundreds of thousands of dollars per room. In the future, Telepresence
systems will be more diverse, enabling connections between not only meeting rooms but also offices, hotel rooms, vehicles, and even large unstructured spaces such as conference halls and stadiums.

mon world, but will also need to empowe the participants in ways that are better than being physically present. In this talk, the speaker explained the various component technologies as well as experiences that are being developed in Mixed virtual and physical reality as well as ubiquitous computing - includ- Microsoft Research for the future of ing robotics will play key roles, be- Telepresence. cause these systems will not only need to immerse the participants in a com- Contributed by : Aditi Kapoor

ACM India Annual Conference

ACMs annual Indian conference was held at Hyderabad on 28th and 29th January with an objective to expand ACMs presence in India. ACM Indias efforts to illuminate the role of computing in driving innovation in a global environment are a high priority. This conference was just a part of such efforts only. The conference provided a forum for presenting and discussing challenges, present and future works in the area of computing. There were four enlightening tutorials on latest technologies from the likes of Microsoft and Google. Day 1 was all about presentations and discussions and the Day 2 was devoted to tutorials. After inauguration ceremony and the welcome address by P J Narayanan, Co-Chair ACM India, the conference started with a keynote address by Charles Thacker on improving the future by examining the past. Next was a presentation by Barbara G. Ryder on harnessing the power of static and dynamic program analysis. Her presentation was followed by a an enriching panel discussion on : The Business Case for Diversity, and the Science Behind the Problems in Realizing Diversity. The panel was moderated by Beryl Nelson from Google and included Nandini Chatterjee, Mani Abrol and Ben Walters. The lunch break was followed by an intriguing session on the past and future of Computing in India. The esteemed speakers included the ones who have seen the journey of computing in India since 1940s till date and have kept a close tab on latest developments. There were Mathai Joseph, Shashi Ullal, Harish Jagtiani and Anand Deshpande who took us en route the mainframe and punching days to virtualization and cloud computing. The days last presentation turned out to be a not just pleasant surprise but also a learning experience for everyone present when Eric Brewer preferred to speak on how computing power can be of help to NGOs in reaching out and helping people in need, instead of the planned presentation on cloud computing. He shared his endeavours with others by collaborating with Indian NGOs and getting cataract eyes operation problems solved in remote villages in Central and North India. The day was concluded with a brief recapitulation of the ACMs efforts in expanding its presence in India. A couple of these efforts include grants for research projects, NGO projects, travel grants meeting certain conditions, starting an ACM chapter in India and so on and so forth. Not many attendees were aware of these facts and found this information helpful. included two separate sessions on Web 2.0 from Adobe and Google respectively. Adobe presented a demo of their integrated runtime environment for developing multiscreen application. The motivation for developing this environment came from the fact that now-a-days, organizations want their applications to be distributed not just on Windows and Apple computers but on mobile phones with varying kind of interfaces and operating system. This environment would reduce the development effort drastically by allowing developers to write code once and get it executed across multi-screen environments and verify the look and feel of application without having to write separate codes for different interfaces. The next session, in particular, was appreciated by many who had been struggling with performance issues in Web Applications. This session was based on Googles project that is working towards increasing the speed of download and display of web-pages.

All in all, it was an enriching and stimulating experience to attend the ACM India Annual Conference which not only contained the recent technical advancements, but also explained their relevance towards the betterment of the society as a whole and Indians scenarios in particuThe Day 2 began with tutorials on Virlar. tualizations in two separate sessions one from Microsoft and the other one from Trillion Technologies. I preferred to attend the tutorials in second half so can share a detailed version of those Submitted by : Richa Sharma only! The second half of the tutorials
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Call for Articles

This is a departmental newsletter. Its there share news, views and information and to instill a sense of awareness and pride in the work undertaken by our fellow students and professors. ACM chapter members are currently a part of the editorial board. We invite contributions for articles and also membership into the ACM student chapter. This paves way to be part of the Editorial Board or in the organization and planning of various activities and contests. Suggestions and viewpoints/comments for the same to enhance it further are also most welcome. Your contributions can be in the form of various articles covering any achievements, interesting projects, publications or fun section contribution in the form of poems, jokes, cartoons, and interesting facts. We also invite you, especially the PG students to join the team and be involved in all the latest happenings of the department. Aditi Kapoor, Chief Editor

ACM : A plethora of activities

looming regional round. This year, we also launched a Lecture series which featured high profile visitors to the campus. Recent lecturers include Dr. Manish Gupta - Director of IBM Research India and Chief Technologist, IBM ; Prof. Arvind - Johnson Professor of Computer Science & EnIn an effort to increase our visibility gineering, CSAIL, MIT ; Prof. Ronald and reach to a mass audience, we have Fagin - ACM SIGMOD Edgar F. Codd embarked upon an extensive publicity Innovations Award Winner and Exponent and networking initiative. This started of Fagins theorem. The series has been with a technical freshers orientation appreciated by students and faculty alike. program but went on to include various workshops, contests and seminars. A sneak glimpse of the collection is availACM@IITD organized the provincial able at our picasa web album. The albums round of ACM-ICPC for the benefit of also contain photographs of some of the the coding community in view of the events that we have organized. With the advent of social media, we as a team have taken an initiative to shift to a variety of social media, and attract more and more interested audience, not limited by the boundaries of our campus or even the country ACM chapters opens up an immense number of opportunities for us to work selflessly for the students and society. The ACM definitely helped all of us provide a valuable platform to reach out to students, professionals, and to influence their lives positively. Through this platform , we would like to invite students, especially the new PG students to join our ACM departmental team

Akash Khandelwal , Chair

Fun Section:
A rose remains so even from a distance You may not be able to feel its fragrance but know you do that it exists Authors of long ago inspire from a distance You can never meet them but know you do that on their words, many souls subsist Loved ones are sometimes apart in physical distance You can't hear all the words, you can't feel the loving touch But know you do that it exists Success sometimes haunts from a distance It may not be yours today But you know come it will someday if you persist

Contributed by : Aditi Kapoor

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B R O U G H T OU T B Y A C M STUDENT CHAPTER
ACM Student Chapter SponsorM Balakrishnan

Newsletter Team Magazine in-charge: Aditi Kapoor (aditi@cse.iitd.ernet.in) Assisted by ACM chapter members Associate Editors Nitin Aggarwal Savin Goyal Ankit Agrawal Chair - Akash Khandelwal ( cs5070208@cse.iitd.ernet.in (Photos in above order left to right)

Did you know how these names originated?

Q1. Apple Computers It was the favorite fruit of founder Steve Jobbs. He was three months late for filing a name for the business, and he threatened to call his company Apple Computers if the other colleagues didn't suggest a better name by 5 o'clock that day. Q2. Cisco It is not an acronym as popularly believed. It is short for San Francisco Q3. Intel Bob Noyce and Gordon Moore wanted to name their new company ' Moore Noyce' but that was already trademarked by a hotel chain so they had to settle for an acronym of INTegrated ELectronics. Q4. Sony It originated from the Latin word 'sonus' meaning sound . grammers drank. Q6. C Dennis Ritchie improved on the B programming language and called it 'New B'.He later called it C. Earlier B was created by Ken Thompson as a revision of the Bon programming language (named after his wife Bonnie). Q7. C++ Bjarne Stroustrup called his new language 'C with Classes' and then 'newC'. Because of which the original C began to be called 'old C' which was considered insulting to the C community. At this time Rick Mascitti suggested the name C++ as a successor to C.
Contributed by : Aditi Kapoor
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Q5. Java Originally called Oak by creator James Gosling, from the tree that stood outside his window, the programming team had to look for a substitute as there was no other language with the same name. Java was selected from a list of suggestions. It came from the name of the coffee that the pro-