 I am Deepak Phatai, the principal investigator of couple of national mission projects which I execute here with the help of a very large team. My colleague Mr. Avinash Haute is a senior advisor to the project and every year it is here his team which handles the entire internship program. You are already familiar with the process through which you have been selected and you have come here. As you know there were several thousand applicants. We applied two criteria for a fairly large number of seats. We went only by the academic performance and the best academic performance in your respective institutions was looked at and a large number of people were selected as per that criteria. As you know creativity and talent need not necessarily reflect into academic performance. You have seen this not only yourselves but for your colleagues also, your friends also. So Mr. Haute thought about this alternate approach several years ago and since then we have been executing a process called software quota or benefit of any other better name. The idea is that a student is talented and creative enough and has the requisite skills and can actually do large scale software development. Then independent of the academic performance of such a person we should admit such a person as an intern and give him or her a chance to prove his or her own mental amongst all others. Accordingly we ran a contest this time and I think how many people? About 30 people have been selected through that process. I specifically refer to this process to indicate that the others who have been selected on the basis of their academic performance alone should take note that eventually all of you will have to contribute to some significant software development in this intention. And therefore if you are academically extremely well talented and high performing but have not yet hundered your skills on developing large software then this is an opportunity for you to do that. We have no doubt about your innate talent, we have no doubt about your innate ability but ability and talent as you know in this campus I have been seeing it for last 47 years. It abounds in all respects and we don't give a damn frankly to what innate talent and innate IQ and innate academic performance that we have. All of you are expected to do well so you do well that's all. What you do with that talent, what you achieve with that talent not alone but indeed is what eventually matters and therefore it is absolutely essential that you, what should I say, buckle up and be ready to do some very very hard work. There are a large number of projects that have been outlined, most of them have been put up on the web I suppose you would have read them. You have read them right? Yes. Well if you haven't you will get a chance to read them, there will be some explanations offered on some of the projects. There are two important things that you should be aware of. Number one, I do not know how many of you are familiar with the open source movement in general. So while you are all aware that the software that you develop or the systems that you develop will all be released in open source. You should also be aware of the process of that open source. The open source process does not just involve a small team in its own cocoon developing something independently and then releasing the final version to open source as if giving a large gift to humanity. The process of open source software development involves being open, being transparent and being observable from day one. So it is the process which is equally important that means you must share your thoughts, you must share your ideas, you must benefit from somebody else's work that is being done in some related domain or even in some unrelated domain where you get an idea where you think that idea could be useful and should be deployed. Consequently your entire developmental effort should be available and observable from day one onwards. Of course you will have, this will be observable within the group here itself. It will not be observable by outsiders. The outsiders will see the proofs of your work only at the end when you polish it up, document it properly, test it properly and announce to the world that yes, this is something that you have done which you are proud of and which people can use. So it is in that context that you should take the open source movement. How many of you are already familiar with open source operating environment such as Ubuntu or Linux? Fairly large number. Almost all but a few of you would have worked on some proprietary environments. Microsoft environment is the most popular. All of you would be familiar with Microsoft I guess. Ubuntu is an operating system that we use heavily here. Similarly you would have done several courses or studied subjects such as databases for example where some of you might have studied Microsoft SQL server or Oracle but we use MySQL and occasionally PostgreSQL. How many of you are familiar with MySQL? Fairly large number. How many of you are aware that database engines do not easily scale up in performance? So have you ever had a chance to test the performance of a system that you have built using Microsoft, using MySQL server for example? So you would have designed a system which is used by users and you might have tested it by putting some sample data in some of the tables and testing whether the transactions work or not. But are you sure that your system will work when instead of say 10 logged in users there are 100 or 1000 or 10,000 users? How will the system perform? What kind of resources do you require? Can you keep on adding machines to a SQL server so that it performs better? Perhaps not. These are some of the issues which have been studied for decades through hard research. We have some of the top database researchers. How many of you have heard of a name called Sudarshan? Well, you might have heard of the name Cort Silver Shard Sudarshan as a textbook on databases. Well, that Sudarshan is a faculty colleague here in the institute and there have been groups which have been working constantly on performance of gradation. The important thing is that most of you will be working on cloud. You will not be working on individual servers. Now cloud is a different animal in some sense where every individual or a group gets a VM or a virtual machine. That virtual machine comes with some default parameters such as so much memory, so much disk, etc. And very soon you will run out of steam when it comes to performance. So we need to worry about how to combine these VMs and how to load balance your entire application such that it can scale up for a large number of users. It is not an easy job. Some applications scale rapidly. Most of you are familiar with web applications, right? So if you look at the web server frontends or app server frontends, they can be scaled horizontally. You can keep on adding machines and the performance will scale up. Same thing does not necessarily happen with conventional relational databases. How many of you are familiar with object databases such as Mongo? You have not used Mongo. One, two, few people. MongoDB is something that is used extensively in most of the modern things because object store is something that is required. The open source cloud management software that we use is called OpenV Storage. The other popular one is OpenStack. We experimented with OpenStack. We have decided to work with OpenV Storage. It gives what is known as a block storage and object storage, but it does not give file storage. File systems have to be sort of implied on top of one of these storage. But I bother you with unnecessary details at this stage which you may not be able to fathom completely. The idea is that you will be learning a whole lot of new terminology and you will be using a whole lot of technology which ordinarily will not get a chance to you. Please make the best use of this opportunity. Please understand how cloud functions in its entirety beginning with of course understanding how to handle an individual VM that will be allocated to you for your work. One more thing I would like to tell you is that while all of you have proven talent in your own academic areas, it is not very clear how good you are in effective communication. You all have some courses in communication in your colleges. Typically an English language course I believe which is useless from the point of your effective communication. Effective communication is much more than that. How many of you have written at least three to four pages of any technical material on your own entirely? One, two. So you see this is a problem not with you. It is a problem with the whole nation. India is very weak in some respects particularly related to communication. We all love to talk. We talk hell of a lot. We occasionally read and we rarely write. Going forward as professionals this will not work because you will be expected to communicate very well not only with people around you but people whom you have never seen people who are somewhere else in the world. They may be clients of the company that you work in. They may be your own clients if you are an entrepreneur or they may just be people whom you want to market your product or your offering. Whatever way you will need to communicate formally and properly with a large number of people whom you have never met or whom you never meet. Which means that every sentence that you write every paragraph that you write has to be read carefully before you hit the return or transmit button. Now this is a discipline which most of our students including many at IIT have not developed. That means you will never ever write and submit a report unless you have read it at least once and unless a peer that is a colleague or a friend has also read it. Which also means that you will not only have to spend time in writing correct communication but you will have to spend time in reading and correcting a friend's communication as well. Because these iterations are what make the communication better. Exactly the same principle which applies to good software. Why are there software reviews? Why are there code reviews? Design document reviews? You would have heard of all of these things in a software engineering code if you have done mine. These reviews are essential to implement these basic principles that I have done something. I believe it is good but a review done by a peer by someone else is likely to find some mistake or some incorrect statement or some incorrect articulation in my report and that is why these reviews are important. So please understand that while we do not explicitly state so in your own groups you must make sure that every activity that you do particularly one which you articulate in words. Whether spoken words or written words it should mostly be written words. They should always be reviewed by someone in your own team. Your final report that you prepare and you will present I think you will have a two day long affair, one day long affair for presentation of different projects. You will get a very short time to make that presentation and that report writing and the presentation should be kept in mind right from day one so that you start compiling towards that. It is impossible to prepare a good report in the last four or five days. Not possible. Same thing will apply to your BTEC projects when you do those later or any other seminars or anything that you prepare so that will be a good habit that you need to calculate. Behind this effort which will continue for next six to eight weeks there has been a large amount of contribution from a number of staff members working in our project. We have several senior managers handling individual activities and they and their teams have actually spent time in formulating projects. We have MTECH RAs so she is one of the representatives of the six MTECH RAs we have. Each one of them will handle a particular project. The project allocation will be done in due course. I would only mention one project which came up yesterday in a Delhi Ministry of Culture meeting. It is a very interesting project. It may not qualify for a full-fledged project but I will still mention it so that if there are two or three interns available at the end of these allocations I would like them to consider doing this. The Ministry of Culture is actually creating using IIT Bombay as a partner and Rahul Reshmukh is creating that app. It is an app which gets downloaded on your mobile as you visit a museum and just like you can rent an audio guide when you visit the museums all over the world and that audio guide whenever you go in front of a particular statue or a particular portrait or something it will tell you more about it when you press that serial number 3758. These are things which are available in all well-known museums all over the world. So here the idea is that there will be a QR code which will be pasted near every museum entity and you just download your app as you enter the museum and then you capture that QR code and through your headphone the app will start telling you about that particular item. So this app has been created. This was launched very recently by the Minister of Culture but jointly there was a program on Swachh Bharat Abhiyan where Ministry of Culture wishes to participate in the endeavours for Cleanup India. And one very interesting thing that came up is that if I could create a local Wi-Fi hotspot without having to worry about the service provider that we have not connected with SMS or any service provider it is a local app. We had used by the way such an app to familiarize village children to internet last year using an opportunity where Nehru Science Centre sends a bus every year to about 25 to 30 villages in Maharashtra telling young children of the village schools on the scientific artefacts and so on. And last year some IIT students from more Indigo and TechFest decided to tip up and they said they would like to expose these students to use of internet. Now they first wanted to have an internet connection on the bus but I knew very well that as bus travels through remote parts of Maharashtra they would not be able to get connected. So what we did is we created an internet cache on a laptop containing all the useful links with the children of Maharashtra villages would find useful including several Marathi links and so on. Then we created a Wi-Fi network using the same laptop around the bus and we gave about 20 Akash tablets and two volunteers who travelled with the bus. At every village school they will get out, they will switch on the Wi-Fi, switch on the cached internet and they will explain to the village students on Akash tablet connected to this Wi-Fi hotspot how to use internet. And whenever they would put in a URL, if that URL is within the cached one they will see the complete details. If it is not there they will say connection not found but 90% of the useful material was cached intelligently and it was augmented as they moved from village to village wherever they could get connected. The point is that you do not require connectivity to provide at least an introduction of certain things to people. Now a same principle can be used and the project that has been suggested is as follows. As you travel to villages or towns or whatever and as you are walking through the street, if you come across a heap of garbage the idea is to create a Wi-Fi access network there without any service provided. So whenever you reach a particular zone you are supposed to get a message saying you are in the structure bar at Wi-Fi zone here. Would you like to click a photograph and upload? So if you see any garbage lying on the road or in the wayside or wherever all that you are required to do is take a photograph and upload it to that link. It will automatically capture the GSM if your machine is capable of doing that. The idea is that you can enrich this app to the extent that you want and you can make it variably applicable. So at the minimum at least a photograph with some connotation of where that heap of garbage is lying. At the maximum you could transmit the entire GPS coordinate that have been given with you with additional command. And this is something which even the Prime Minister believes could spur on two important activities. One, enhancing awareness both among the people who are supposed to manage garbage in villages and cities and among the normal people. Because many times we see things but we neglect. But if there is a possibility that I be recognized because I pointed out let's say seven different garbage heaps in seven different villages or something. I think that could be a contribution to the nation. Now there are a whole lot of technical challenges. This app apparently seems very simple and Secretary of Ministry of Culture has requested me to find out if some experiments could be done in the ensuing month and a half. So this is an additional project that I am throwing up. I will be talking to our networking experts, Wi-Fi networking experts, my colleagues here who will be able to give some more enforcement to them. So on the face of it is a very simple application. It has many challenges and so I am just formally adding that as one more project without any write up. It is not permitted under a strict regime but I am making a personal request. And the fact is that we are friends for 47 years now and therefore I expect that friendship at least to prevail in permitting me to disin one more project. But I don't require too many people and I will not be worried unduly if nobody takes this project. So maybe the group which will be doing those five projects with my mentors can find this as an additional activity. So they can do that. So let's not treat this as a separate project. You have to inform the PCO to create confluence pages for all of these people. So we use a software called confluence and on that confluence we create separate projects in all open source projects that we develop. Progressively they are all available there. In fact I had told one CJ manager to inform everyone that many of the things have not been updated on the confluence. So remind me to do that after I come back from Delhi. So you will be all getting in due course of time in two or three days time a portion of the confluence where you will have your own project page or a group page. Let me just quickly do a sample of where these 50 people are from. 50 plus have come right. So let's look at start from the Himalayas. North India only one, two, three, four, five. Not bad. Western India large number. Any particular part of Western India that whole group is sitting together which likely that they all come from the same issue. Am I right? You have to break these jinx. You work together in your institute anyway. So you should participate amongst all others in this way. Where are you from? Oh, okay. So how many are from Maharashtra colleges and which colleges you are from? Sorry? Oh, Viennati Nagpur. You have been partial to Viennati Avinash for past so many years. This year it is very less. Oh, I see. I am thankful. So this year they have not sort of grouped together and do a lot of things. Okay. Let me go state by state down below. Karnataka, anybody from Karnataka? One, two, three, okay. Andhra Pradesh, quite a few. Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Odisha. Wow. This is a large gang from Odisha which place you are from? All of you from Vurneshwar? Vurneshwar. Oh, wow. Anybody from Odisha who is not from Vurneshwar? Ah, not bad. You are from which place? Vurneshwar. Ah, Vurneshwar. Okay. Assam? Two. Which college? Oh, Vurneshwar. Okay. Okay. Anybody from the northeast states? Sorry? Madhya Pradesh. Oh, I forgot Madhya Pradesh. You are only one from Madhya Pradesh. There were more. Which college you are from? IIT. Oh, IIT. Jagalpur. Which college? Triple IIT. Triple IIT. Triple IIT. Triple IIT. Okay. So, we do have a sort of all-India sample here which is good. This is exactly what IIT Bombay is special about. Unlike most other IITs which have become slightly localized in their get up in terms of both the students and faculty, IIT Bombay still carries micro-India look, both in terms of its faculty, in terms of its students and I am very happy that interns also represent at microcosmos. I believe there are almost 50 more people yet to come, right? And they will come by 15th or 18th, anyway. So please be ready to welcome additional people as they come in, as seniors it will be your responsibility to guide them well and do guide them well and use this opportunity to know as much about IIT Bombay as possible. IIT Bombay is an institution like any other institution. There is absolutely no difference in terms of either the basic infrastructure or the problems of accommodation that you see here, etcetera, etcetera. If IIT Bombay appears to be a leading institution, it is not because of the infrastructure in the campus, it is because of the people. People are of two kinds who make maximum difference to an academic institution. One is students, the other is teachers and supporting technical staff. And these are the people who come from the same stock. So please understand that IIT Bombay people are no different from you, absolutely no them. We have not fallen from sky. We grew up like you did at various places, gravitated to an institution like this, but imbibed the ethos of this place. And the ethos of this place is significantly different. It has been nurtured over the years. It has been monitored by careful peers. As a faculty member, if I do not do my duties properly, I am pulled up routinely by my colleagues, including my junior ones. Students love to participate in an extremely difficult, tight, competitive environment in spite of the fact that they have now understood that competition alone does not lead to anything fruitful in life. So, they all try to find their own bearing. The governing principle of this campus is high energy levels. So, it is not just the academic, but you would have heard of Mood Indigo and Techfest, which are two of the well-known festivals here, or hostel functions or whatever. Every student participates very energetically in these functions. But the basic ethos of academic ethos of this place is perhaps best indicated by a variety of incidences which happen. I am tempted to share with you one incident which happened many years ago. In fact, I had just become a teacher and I used to be the coach of the chess team after I became a teacher. Till then, I used to be a player. Incidentally, Avinash Haute was the national chess champion and was captain of IIT Bombay chess team when we won the Inter-University Chess Tournament. It is the only Inter-University team title won by any IIT in any game so far. So, this incident happened when my colleague, late professor K. C. Mukherjee used to teach an electrical wing subject, electrical wing feed siting and this was electrical machines perhaps yes. So, this was late 70s, I think it was Bora's batch of someone, I do not remember, but someone came to me one day with that question paper, it was a semester end question paper and he gave that paper to me and said, but how do you solve this problem 3? I read that problem immediately understood, I could not solve it. It was actually a mathematical problem related to electrical fields in the electromagnetic and I tried a stunt, I tried to return back that paper to him and told him I am a computer science professor. So he pointed out no, but you have a basic electrical engineering degree, then I had to admit I could not solve that problem, but because I was a teacher now, I said let us go and ask the professor himself. So, both of us walked to the electrical engineering department and as Professor Mukherjee saw from his cabin, two of us walking towards him with that paper dangling in our hand, he started smiling. When we approached his cabin, he asked us to sit down and he looked at me and said, so for that question 3, so I smiled and said, yes sir, we sat and my friend was waiting for him to answer, but he did not, he kept smiling. So that student asked him, sir, what is the answer and he looked at him seriously and he said, I don't know, the student was shocked. I was also slightly taken aback. So he looked at me and said, butter, you know, this is part of an unsolved research problem which people have been struggling for 10 years. But you know, this batch is so smart, I thought somebody will solve it. So it was set as a question in a final exam paper. I had just, I had done my undergraduate studies at a reasonably good college in the city of Indore, but there if such an incident had happened, Vice Chancellor would have been gnawed out by people saying if question is asked in a final exam, it is outside syllabus. So when he said that, I was taken aback, more important to describe how, so you see challenging the minds of people is the main state of the academic process here. Syllabus be damned, syllabus is something that is published which represents what has happened in the past. We are not teaching and learning here or just beating you with whatever has happened in the past. We are teaching you for future and that is the objective of every engineering institution. So as I said, my students in Indore would have get out Vice Chancellor, what happened that evening in hostel, I think it was hostel 4, I still forget the exact hostel, but some of these kids who stayed in that hostel threw a milkshake party. In those days, I am talking about late 70s, so that is about 40 years ago. Milkshake was the costliest fluid that could be bought on campus and the other types of fluids they are not generally talked about formally in any process. But the milkshake party in a hostel would be given only if something fantastic happens in that hostel. Like the hostel wins an inter-hostel hockey tournament or somebody in the hostel gets the best price for oratory or debate competition or something something, somebody gets a high score in something, whatever. So nothing was known to have happened in the general secretary, the hostel happened to walk into the mess and found these kids enjoying a milkshake party and the moment he saw milkshake, he went ahead and said, what has happened? Nobody has told me. He was the general secretary and one of the students said, oh, you don't know? Great Professor K. C. Mukherjee thinks that we can solve, unsolve research problems. So we are celebrating. So you see it is not just the ability and willingness of the faculty to challenge young minds, but the ability and willingness of the students who accept that challenge and that, my dear students, is the ethos. I took some of your time to tell you this incident because such incidences happen and they happen regularly, reflecting again and again and again the commitment of the institution as a whole to maintain these ethos. And nothing less is expected from anybody walking through the portals of the campus. You might not be IIT Bombayites till yesterday, but from now onwards, you belong to IIT Bombay. Please try to imbibe that ethos. Everything is not hunky-dory here. We also have some jokers amongst the entire human population that exists. After all, it is extremely difficult to beat the statistics. Statistically, you will always have a few people here, extremes of either kind. But on an average, this is the ethos. So learn as much about the ethos as possible. Visit various places on the campus. The campus is otherwise enjoyable, although summer is hot. During your stay, Bombay rains will strike. But other than that, imbibe as much as you can from the ethos. The labs have changed till last year. We used to have your labs in the old CS building. Now the new CS building has come up. We have a lab which will accommodate all of you. And I think that permission has been given. And there are people from the Department of CSU who will help you. What is important is you make the best use of this. If I were you, I would divide my time into three distinct epochs, 24 hours in a day. Since you are interns and although you are paying for your own stay and other things, the Institute and the project has spent a sizable amount in paying your fees to the Institute. More importantly, it is dedicating a sizable number of resources from a moment of project staff to mentor you. So you must work honest to God for eight hours a day for the assigned project. Let there be no shortcut in it. We don't run a policing environment. Your own work will reflect on what you do. You can spend of course more. But a minimum eight hours a day honest to God work must be put in for the project. You would require eight more hours for your personal administration. You have to sleep for five to six hours a day. You can definitely afford to sleep and you should sleep well. Your health is of primary importance. You require a couple of more hours to have your quick bites in the morning, whatever whatever. But you still have six to eight hours of day left. And these six to eight hours I would urge you to spend in learning as much more as you can about other things. Some of which may reflect in your own project work that you are doing. Some of which will help you to learn something else which you will not find it easy to learn in your own environment. Use the time appropriately, only 24 hours in a day and you all are destined to be here only for eight weeks or six weeks or whatever. Make every moment count. I have three simple principles for all youngsters including me. I am slightly older young man. I am only 70 years young. You are all 20 years young. But that's all. 50 years is nothing in the history of the universe if you take it that way. The point I make is that as Dr. Abdul Kalam said, you must dream big because small dreams limit your achievements. You may not achieve all your big dreams but dream big. So start dreaming big if you are not already doing that. Second, you must enjoy life. Enjoy every moment of life. Precisely because time is a one-way traffic. So every moment that you spend will never come back in your life. See when I advise my alumni to donate, I often tell them that while you donate, money is useful. This building, for example, does not have a single paisa of government money in it. It was created through contributions from Kanwal Rekhi and Nandan Dileken. Entire building and the entire school of IT. And we are grateful to them. But more important is when these two, along with several others, spend their quality time in advising the institute, in helping us chalk out academic programs, research programs. Because the time that they spend, they will never get back. They have earned much more money than what they have given back. But they cannot earn back that time. And that is what is important. That's why I said manage your 24 hours a day very, very carefully. And learn to enjoy every moment of your life. Don't let any time instance go which you are not enjoying. And finally, work hard because you cannot create history without working hard. I mean all of us are intelligent human beings and therefore specialize in optimizing our activity. Meaning, minimum effort, maximum gains. Unfortunately, people smarter than us have tried for 4,000 years to find a replacement for hard work. None has succeeded. So take it for granted that you will have to work hard, work hard at whatever you do. If you are playing music, you are watching movies, you are fighting with a friend. Work hard at that. Because you must enjoy every moment, as I said, whatever you do. So do that well and do something great here because whatever you do, that contribution will be everlasting. It will be released under Creative Commons for the whole world to view. Thank you so much. All the best.