 Good morning. Welcome everyone to this event where we celebrate Digital India week. I am thankful to Professor Mazumdar, Dean R&D for agreeing to chair this event. I also am thankful to Professor Fartek for being in the city today and also agreeing to be with us. Okay, so what we will do is we will first inaugurate this and we have an electronic way to do it Digital way. Digital is electronics, okay? I invite Professor Madhavan to come and light a lamp. Mr. Arun Kalwankar, please come. Number two. No, no. This is not touchscreen. You have to use the Yeah, please come. Just press the two again. No, it's doing something else. Okay. Thank you. Dr. Saraswati, please come. Thank you. Can we ask one of the students to come? Can you do it with the other students? Please come. Fine. Do it for five. Click that. Okay, I request Professor Fartek to Professor Fartek, please complete it. We have an outside. We have an expert from outside. Please come. Our partner. Thank you. So thank you. I think we can get started. Actually, it's a very brief kind of formal session. We have time till 12 only here. After 12, we go and see the stalls. So I think that gives about 45 minutes. I will give a brief overview of the the plans that we have to celebrate Digital India Week all over the country. More than 100 institutions are participating. I'll give a quick overview. It may take about maybe five to 10 minutes. After that, I will ask each of the PIs to stand in wherever they are and then summarize because we don't have time for this and I would also like to get feedback from some of the partner institutions who might have come from the city, maybe from the school, maybe from colleges. I would want them to share some of their experiences and then we will go to the stalls. Okay, and the stalls we will also have, we have ordered some snacks. So we can eat and watch. Okay. So with that, let me just, so I will first give a brief outline of what we plan to do. Then we will ask Professor Fateh to share his thoughts and then we will ask Professor Mazumdar to give a speech and then we will have a presentation by the PIs. So first of all, I would like to begin by saying that all these things could not have happened, but for the excellent environment given by IIT Bombay. So starting with thanks. I also want to talk about C. Deep. C. Deep had could not be here. So he asked me to speak on his behalf. C. Deep is a nodal agency that's the outreach agency that is coordinating many of our projects and I had the opportunity to be the head of C. Deep some time ago and we will actually see a C. Deep stall. The, I considered C. Deep's mandate to make available whatever knowledge that IIT Bombay creates to the outside world, especially in classrooms. Whatever we do, as a matter of fact, we still do transmission, live transmission of courses. We created more than 100 courses by lecture by faculty members who delivered for their students at IIT Bombay in a studio, but live that people from anywhere in the world could have received that. Okay. So more than 100 such courses, more than 5000 hours were transmitted. It is still being done. Okay. So that is C. Deep. I would also want to mention education technology program that we have at IIT Bombay. It's a unique program. We have lots of new technologies coming into educational field. How relevant are they? How effective are they? Are they useful or not? So education technology is a unique program that has only PhDs. Okay. We have about 25 PhD students and as a matter of fact, we are unable to recruit, unable to admit more PhD students because of shortage of faculty members who will guide them because all education technology faculty members are overloaded and we are on the lookout for outstanding people to join us faculty members in the E.T. program. I'll do some sales speech also. Okay. But this is an amazing program because, you know, when you introduce slides, when you introduce clickers, when you introduce something else, click method, how do you know that it is going to be useful? Are students going to learn it or not? So it is extremely important. We are starting with PhD. Hopefully we'll go to masters. We'll worry about bachelors later. The next program that really helped do many of these things is the National Mission on Education through ICT, which is the mission of MHRD. Many of our projects are funded by this mission. It is in fact, one can say that the funding from this mission and the enthusiastic support given by its, the founder of this mission, Mr. N.K. Sinha gave the impetus to do a lot of the things that we are doing. We have a total of 300 staff members at IIT Bombay who are directly employed by this mission, by the funding by this mission. And of course, thanks to IRCC, thanks to Dean R&D's office, that is able to actually provide the support for all the 300 people. It's a humongous job. It's a huge job. Okay. I wanted to acknowledge this. Then we will get on with a summary of what we expect to organize. This is only a partial list. More people are giving their inputs. So these are the projects. We'll come to them later. T10KT, the event organized by T10KT trained 10,000 teachers. They plan to conduct a two-hour session with some of the 300 remote centers of T10KT, tomorrow 11 to 1. E-Kalpa is organizing an animation workshop by IDC. We have IDC faculty members. Excuse me. Let me just mute it. Yeah, I had no time. You will see why so if you see this slide. Busily preparing this in the morning. Okay. So E-Kalpa is a project that is coordinated by faculty members at IDC. They organize an animation workshop. Is it on 5th? It's tomorrow. On 4th? It's on 5th. Okay. I'll correct this. Similar workshops will be conducted by their partners at IIT Guwahati and NID. E-Antra plans to have an open house during 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. on 4th July, 2015. Events organized by FOSI, a mega hands-on Silab Arduino workshop during 3rd, 4th July, 2015. Is that correct? I think it is correct. 3rd, 4th, that is tomorrow, day after tomorrow. And then there are 150 people who are participating in this workshop where they will work with Arduino boards and Silab and so on. Our partner institution, FOSI at IIT Kharagpur, headed by Professor Raji Mull, head of computer science at IIT Kharagpur, is planning a mega free and open source software tools for software engineering at CV-Raman College of Engineering, Bhubaneswar. A spoken tutorial workshop for KV students of IIT Bombay is organized on 6th July, Monday from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. Now I'm going to give a brief summary of what we have planned for the rest of the country. This is being done by the spoken tutorials project. I am really surprised that they could put it together in a short span of two days. There are totally 85 colleges in 23 states, all confirmed. In fact, we even have the names of the coordinators, their email address, phone number, all that, I don't want to share those details here. They will celebrate Digital India Week in their colleges and then they will publicize it. So this is extremely important, this is something I wanted to say, but maybe I'll leave it to Professor Fatak and Professor Mazumdar to explain why this digital technology and all these things are extremely important. So I will not talk about it. So these are some of the colleges that are doing this. I won't even read them out, but I'll flash them for each slide for about five seconds. Andhra Pradesh, Assam, Bihar, Chhattisgarh, we have many colleges from Chhattisgarh, Delhi, Ujrat, Haryana, Yamachal Pradesh. So in all these colleges, our partner is conducting a workshop. It could be for conducting a workshop that is being planned here on 6th for the KV students, something like that. Or it could be for to explain to people how this methodology works and they will call the nearby colleges and their own students and so on. Jharkhand, Karnataka, Kerala, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra. I'm happy that we are doing something in Maharashtra for some time. I used to think that we should be doing a lot more for Maharashtra being in Maharashtra, but I think now our Maharashtra coordinators are doing well. Rather people in Maharashtra are responding to our coordinators. We also believe, somebody told me that people don't participate because we don't contact the right people. There are people who want to join and we don't contact the right people. So anyway, whatever it is, we have a good number, Maharashtra, Meghalaya, Odisha, Pondicherry, small place, Punjab, Rajasthan, Tamil Nadu, Telangana, Uttar Pradesh, Uttarakhand. Uttarakhand, although it's a small state and in fact ravaged by floods, they have come in a big way. For some of these states that are ecologically fragile, the digital technology is extremely important, extremely useful, can give jobs to the local children without much damage to the environment. So I'm really happy that Uttarakhand has come in a big way and West Bengal. So we have a total of about 23 states. I've included Pondicherry and Delhi also in that and then 86 colleges. This is a confirmed list. We will have a similar list. For example, the remote centers of T-10KT and all these things are going to appear on our website. Not sure whether internet is working, but I'll just show you where it is going to be available. Let me just go to hrdgov.in. So this is the MHRD homepage. And then let's see how do I maximize this. So this is our banner that we created for MHRD. So this is where all the details are there. In this page, we will actually update if you see events, something will come, workshops, something will come and so on and so forth. And if you click any of this, it will further take you to, for example, if I click NPTEL, it will take you to NPTEL page. Now what do I do? F1 again, F11. So one can go to MHRD homepage and then reach that details page. So we will update this list. As I told you, T-10KT is doing it in several places. 300 of the remote centers have been called. After the function is over, we will know exactly how many people are coming. It's actually a very short notice. Number one, number two, it's vacation time. Many people are not around. So we are not able to get the exact numbers. Similarly, virtual labs is doing it in many places and so on. Now I'll request about five-minute summary from the PIs of projects. Now hold on, before we go to that, let's get Professor Fartek's thoughts on the function itself. And then we will ask Professor Mazumdar to talk. And then we will go to that. Thank you, Professor Kannan. Everybody knows how important digital technologies are and how critical in fact they are for the emerging pedagogy of effective education. The Digital India Week actually epitomizes the will and the commitment of the entire nation starting with the honorable prime minister that we have to do something extraordinary over coming decades. Combine this determination with two facts. One, the huge diversity that we have but we have a great digital divide. You people are all fortunate. You live in cities and have had the fortune of studying using English medium much of our education. Which means the plethora of knowledge that is available on internet in English is accessible to all of us. A large number of students across the country who still study in their native languages in the schools and up to their well standard they are denied access to much valuable information. This digital divide has to be praised. Additionally there are still a very large number of children who are not in any education system either in the lower education or after passing out school not in the higher education. The number of people who want to learn not just skills but get proper education etc. too many and therefore education technology as professor Kannan mentioned is going to be critical. Add to it the new onslaught that is happening of massive open online courses which is actually disrupting education system. It has made people to think a lot. I will just leave two thoughts with you. Currently all of us study in a fixed duration syllabus based course or program. What is the sanctity of taking four years to do a b-take? If I am a laggard and a slow learner I want to learn let us say first course in programming over one year and if professor Kavya Ray is teaching that course I go to him and I say Sir please permit me one year. He said no this is a semester course. You can get one year provided you fail in this course and repeat this course next semester. Suppose there is another student who has studied programming in 11th and 12th standard and wishes to say give me these six grades I will do something else. He is told no this is part of the course program you must do it. If I say please take my exam and permit me to skip all the classes. I am told by professor Kavya Ray that 85% attendance is compulsory. Now from such rigid framework of education the education is quickly moving where people are defining smaller conceptual modules. Even in India a professor Uday Desai our colleague as director of IIT Hyderabad has started offering courses which are three credit courses, two credit courses, one credit courses and half credit courses and these could be accumulated either quickly or at your own pace to assemble the requisite knowledge for a certain field. Now if this is going to be the direction where education is moving it is very important that modern education technologies are adopted increasingly by the institutions, by the learners, by everyone. Towards that end I will only mention that the MOOCs which we run from IIT Bombay under IIT Bombay X will actually be offered in a blended MOOCs mode where students of 50 institutions who have joined this program will actually be teaching their students using their local teaching as well as these MOOCs and the marks that these students will be given in that subject will be a combination of marks scored in the local assessment and marks scored on the MOOCs offered by IIT Bombay. This I believe is the first in the world globally where 50 institutions are participating. Such experiments and such initiatives are important. Equally important are the efforts to get affordable technology in place. You might have heard of Aakash project. It was not innovation in great technology but it was innovation in making that technology affordable, more usable by creating a large amount of open source content and applications and such technologies have to become ubiquitous. Network is being built across the country by the government but the devices will probably come either from the institutions or from the commercial markets. Sir Kannan has extended the Aakash by providing a design of a very low cost affordable network computer which I believe will be showcased somewhere here. I am very happy and proud that IIT Bombay thanks to the support that we get from the institute has been able to do a whole lot of things ET being a unique program as you said but a lot more is to be done and I would only suggest that those of you who are sitting here whom as I said are more fortunate have a responsibility to contribute to this effort in whichever way you can. Whether you propose to join the spoken tutorial group, whether you propose to join this activity, whether you propose to popularize any activity, whether you wish to write to your friends in other places to participate but it is very, very important that the Digital India Week is used as a starting point to empower not just one individual or few individuals but the entire 1.2 billion population of this country. Thank you so much. That's all I said. Good morning and welcome. We have gathered here to celebrate this Digital India Week and I thought what better way to celebrate this in IIT Bombay than you know, showcasing our contributions to Digital India through the projects, all the projects of this mission supported by MHRD. I think that is the most ideal way. The education and R&D, these are the 2 major pillars of our activity and our institute's motto says that whatever we do, you know, this is something which makes a difference to whatever, you know, various segments of the society, industry and of course in terms of knowledge generation, the world over. While of course the impact of R&D is something which is usually long term seen maybe significantly later sometimes, sometimes of course immediate but the impact of education is second to second, minute to minute, hour to hour, all the time, you know, there. And I think the kind of impact that we have been, the social impact through this, these mission projects, all of them I think is something which is really extremely noteworthy and I think it is not, I think when the mission was formulated that of course the vision of the government and MHRD and we have, I think, sort of thrown us into it wholeheartedly and I really appreciate the boldness of the entire faculty group to have actually taken up this mantle which is something which is not very easy, not very conventional in what you do and under the strong leadership of both Prasafatak, Maudgaly and all of the other faculty members who are involved here and of course creating this entire, you know, for the last five years this ecosystem for having achieved what we have today through of course the project staff who have worked on it, the students, all other, our external partners and guests who are here today and all of our, you know, various institutions and centers all over here. Yesterday our Prime Minister, Srinarendra Modi had inaugurated the Digital India program as such and as well as the Digital India week. I think his vision for Digital India is a completely, you know, country-wide digital connectivity and the major attributes of this vision are both in terms of digital infrastructure, digital services and governance and more importantly of course empowerment, digital empowerment. And in terms of these attributes, I see our project having contributed and will continue to contribute in the next phases also to all of these. We have created digital infrastructure through, you know, you mentioned Akash and not only that, not only the devices but this entire infrastructure created around the centers around the country to participate in the delivery of these e-services where basically the services are education and the entire management of this complete ecosystem is itself a digital on a digital platform and the digital empowerment is through the e-learning and e-content that we are generating. So I think we have, you know, contributed of course along with other institutions in the country but I am sure as an IIT Bombay person I know that, you know, we have contributed a notch more and I think we have shown some of the leadership, you know, very strong leadership both in defining the program as well as, you know, taking it to the doorstep. And a key again attribute in terms of the stakeholders of Digital India really is as Professor Patak mentioned accessibility being one of the most key things and the other is a kind of doorstep delivery or any time anywhere kind of this thing. And I think in that also we have, you know, that is sort of a base for the work that we are doing here. So I think with these words I am very happy to be here to inaugurate this Digital India Week and I hope we will have more programs both under the NME ICT Projects umbrella and maybe others from the institute. Of course in terms of the, you know, day-to-day our life is almost becoming like e-life of course I hope it doesn't completely encompass us there is much more to life than e. So e-life or e-digital, you know, part of our lives is only something which makes everything very convenient and I think I don't have to say, you know, what that is. We are all enjoying the fruits of that but a huge number of people still are in the old non-digital world. And I come from the, as Professor Madan was also saying that I also from my student days and early, you know, faculty days we've seen only a non-digital world. So we know, you know, what the others will go through. And so it's our mandate that we should work towards, you know, enabling this so that the fruits are with everyone. I think with those words. Okay, as promised, we didn't take more than 15 minutes. That's as per plan. We still have to, so we will have five minutes. I actually forgot to include virtual labs here. Professor Santhosh Narana will hopefully come towards the end. So we'll ask him to present at the time. So what I will ask, what I will ask the PIs to do is to speak briefly. You don't have to stick to the five minutes. It can be shorter than that. You can, because the stalls are there outside and we would actually want to give more time for people. Not everybody is interested in every project. So there will be people who will be interested only in Iyantra, somebody only in NPTEL. So let them go and then spend more time there. That's the idea we'll shorten this. So what I would suggest is we'll still stick to five minutes. But during the five minutes, if each PI can ask their staff members to stand up. So that people can see who they are, even though you will not get a chance to talk. And then if you can also use this opportunity for in case your partners have come from the city, ask them to say one or two sentences. If we have lots of visitors, then it will not fit into five minutes. It will exceed a little bit, but we can accommodate that. So with that, I will ask Professor Phatik as the PI of T10KT to start this. This program is essentially about training teachers on large scale. The name T10KT implies that we can train up to 10,000 teachers simultaneously in a two-week rigorous program. This model has evolved over several years. It has been perfected. It has been found very effective. So basically these 10,000 teachers don't assemble at IIT Bombay. They assemble at one of the 300 remote centers. At each place, about 30-40 teachers come. To all of them, interactive lectures are delivered in the morning sessions from IIT Bombay or IIT Kuru Auro partners. In the afternoon, these assembled teachers are taken through tutorials and lab assignments locally under the supervision of a local workshop coordinator. To ensure that these labs and tutorials are conducted with the same rigor with which we conduct them in IIT, we do one more thing. Before this workshop, two months before, we assemble all the workshop coordinators from remote centers physically at IIT Bombay for one-week exclusive training program. And we make them do the same labs and same tutorials as we do them in IIT. This ensures that the program is run very rigorously at other places. Additionally, we have quizzes and assignments for participating teachers and a team assignment to be completed after this workshop. Only after that, they are given a certificate. We have trained over 1 lakh teachers in last two years under this program. And we have a mandate to train 1,50,000 teachers in three years, which we'll do. We are moving towards a self-sustained mode where the costs are important. The normal cost of training a teacher is about 14,000 rupees per participant for a two-week program. Our costs are 6,200 as approved, but we manage them in 5,000 rupees. And using the digital mechanisms, we are converting this two-week program into part online and part face-to-face for the reducing the cost. We believe that this training program could be used for teachers' training, not only in engineering colleges but in other colleges, high schools, polytechnics, etc. This model will go on. May I request the T10KT staff members our workshop team is led by Dr. Mukta Atre. I thought I saw her somewhere. Mukta is there. Mahendra, all the team members who work on T10KT can stand at their place. We have a large team because, you know, you have to handle 10,000 people at a time. They have done that very effectively. So, thanks to all the staff members. We are now... I mentioned the blended MOOCs course, the MOOCs project, although it's a separate project technically, but it's blended with our T10KT because with every MOOCs that we offer, we offer a blended MOOC workshop for teachers on how to use such MOOCs program. That program is also being led by Dr. Mukta Atre. Unfortunately, that entire team is busy working with summer interns who have come from various institutions and who are building additional systems for us. Aakash project, as I mentioned, has concluded and President Kannan is still taking it forward in the terms of providing low-cost, affordable access to people using that. That's all. Thank you. EKALPA is a digital learning environment for design in India and it's known by... its website is dsauce.in. So, don't look for EKALPA. Please look for dsauce.in. It's in partnership with between IDC at IIT Bombay and Department of Design at IIT Guwahati and NID Bangalore. It's an open access resource that can be accessed via your tablet or mobile and we have courses on... Yes, oh, good. You can see that. So, we have courses, resources, case studies, showcase, gallery and videos. Currently the content is created through expert contributions and also some crowd sourcing and we are really open to having more partnerships and, you know, you can please popularize this, optimize it so that we can have more partners in this effort. We have created so far 100 courses 250 resources and we intend to double this and in addition, we want to... we plan to add workshops, exhibitions, quizzes and competitions in the next few years so that, you know, it becomes more interactive and people can actually see how they have fare in the course and things like that and just to share how we have been using it. So, recently there was a workshop with library educators and they were from small libraries in, you know, schools all over Maharashtra, Gujarat, Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh. This was an event organized by the data trust and Bukhwam Goa. So, we introduced this idea to the two librarians because in the library, they don't only, you know, teach... just show books and things like that, they also do certain activities. So, they were really surprised that such a thing exists, you know, and oh, it is free, we don't have to pay for this. This is something that not many... we are trying to publicize this through social network and things like that, but we are looking for, you know, people to participate. So, please feel free to access. Thank you. Thank you. I just realized, I forgot to mention two things. Although the technical MOOCs team is busy making presentations, I just saw Parak Tiwari who heads the MOOCs content and software kind of thing and also I mentioned MOOCs, but I forgot to mention that MOOCs are also meant for not just higher education courses, but vocational courses and even school education courses. And one of the offerings in the coming semester is a vocational course on blender animation. I realize it when you are speaking. So, Dr. Sabeer Sahasrabudde is here. He is the main teacher. He ditched us and joined us, but we might still want to get him back here anytime. We are working on collaboration that course is launched as we speak among the MOOCs courses. That's all I wanted to add. Can I ask a question? Yes. Please. Not everyone is here. It's just much agitated. Ravi is not here. Ravi is the chief PI. He is not here. Yes, Ravi is not here. So, we will have here. Thanks. This leads to make in India. Who will make in India? Do our students have the practical skills to make in India? So, what Yantra has been doing is this has come out of the teaching of an embedded systems course at IIT Bombay where we had a lot of luck with students. If you gave them a robot and made them program and do things with it, they learnt a lot and learnt very, very fast and were self-motivated. Then we put it out in open source and nothing happens. So, we felt the need to evangelize. So, we are doing that through the Yantra project which is an NME ICT project now. So, what we are doing is that three limbs. We enthused students by letting them participate in a national robotics competition. So, we define problems which they can solve with a homegrown robot and we are happy to say that this is growing at an exponential rate. So, we have got over 1200 students in next year, 6,500 12,500 students in the last year. So, we have got on to a nerve there basically. So, that is one thing. Robotics competition and the winners come to IIT Bombay for internships and we have 32 interns. Are any of them here? A few of them are here but most of them will be around the kiosk that we have here. Then we have something called the ELSI startup initiative which sets up labs in an engineering college. If a college is willing to invest a bit of money volunteer four teachers to be trained. We train the teachers up, set the labs up in about four to five months and that has been working very well. Our target is about 500 labs in the next two years. We have already done 107 all over the country and these will end up being innovation hubs and then we have a symposium which we organize every year where the teachers come and we share with them best practices and stuff like that. So, that is what we do. We are trying to spread this notion of project based learning through a variety of means and through an open source environment with robots. If my colleague here Dr. Saraswati who is managing the project has a word to say about this then I will let her speak about a few stuff that we have here stand up and address you. The only thing I would like to add is we focus on the sustainability aspect of a project. So, it's not enough, we believe that it's not enough to do something you want to measure the impact and you want it to be available used in the long run even after the project closes for instance. So, with that in mind what we have done is to create these ecosystems in the colleges. So, the teachers become the experts, and they can add on to the lab year after year. And also this ENTRA symposium we introduced what is called the ENTRA ideas competition where we are making sure that the labs that are established in the 107 colleges are used for new B projects in the area of embedded systems and robotics. So, that competition involves a team of four students managed, mentored by a teacher. So, we are doing a lot of things that feed into each other and we are hoping that in the long run it gives a sustainable impact and the whole thing is very scalable. Thank you. Yeah, the team please stand up. Any FOSI P.I. is here. Madhu Belur. Okay, now in mind I will talk about FOSI also. I'm the main P.I. of this project is professor Prabhu Ramachandran. But I've been, I'm a co-P.I. of this project. So, FOSI stands for free and open source, yeah, it stands for free and open source software for education. When we started this project we said that a lot of open source software is already available but people don't know how to use them. So, can we spend some time to publicize this, teach people how to use it and so on. We, for that we came up we identified lack of documentation as one reason. So, we came up with an activity called textbook companion in which students from across the country write code, for example, Sylab is an open source software on Sylab for every solved example of a textbook they write the Sylab code. If you do it for the whole book then it becomes a textbook companion. We have done a total of close to about one thousand such textbooks in Sylab, Python and various other open source software systems that we are promoting. We are also promoting, supporting lab migration if any college wants to by the way for the textbook companion for every student who does that we also pay a hondrarium of 10 to, I think 10 to 15,000 rupees depending on the quantum of work and of course all of these are supported by NME ICT. We also have a program called lab migration if a college that uses a commercial software and they want to migrate to an open source equivalent we help them migrate and then of course not many people know about it and I always ask why only 10,000 textbook companions why not 10,000 textbook companions why only some 50 labs have been migrated why not 1,000 labs so we have a long way to go but we are doing these two both of them have some financial hondrarium as a component we also lately started developing new software new open source software one of the benefits of open source software is that it has open API it knows exactly how to communicate with outside world so you can actually put such open source things together and build new ones so we have I don't know whether we have here some of the things are there Sylab, Python, DWCM FreeEDA or ECM it's an electronic design automation tool and so on so this is one area this is open form it's an equivalent of fluent for computational fluid dynamics optimization tools there are many things we have a total of 15 PIs who are partnering this project so I'm only representing one of them of course on third and fourth we have this Sylab-Odino workshop are there FOSSI staff members here if so I would want them to stand we have we have two people we have third person actually I think by the time the software people sleep late and get up late and when they come here they probably found the hall full and they have no space they are all outside so we will move on thank you, we will move on from FOSSI as I mentioned earlier I forgot to include virtual labs in that list and Professor Santosh Narona is here I would want him to briefly talk about virtual labs and if there are partners who have come here so we will ask after you so the virtual labs project is an attempt to improve on the state of lab education in engineering departments in the other colleges around us the context is that many colleges have very poor infrastructure when it comes to labs and conversely the ITs have fairly high tech lab infrastructure which is underutilized so one of the things that the ministry asked us was whether we could work out a paradigm wherein our labs are kept online 24-7 so that people can remote login from various colleges and access and control gadgets on campus here and then execute certain tasks on these towards learning specific concepts so this started as an initiative three to four years ago and we have gone through a variety of phases pilot and later on a roll out phase we have worked out the paradigm by which people engage and connect to us to simulate a based concept learning or the actual control of remote trigger devices so these remote trigger devices range from being small scale gadgets to actual apparatus that people are likely to find on a plant flow later on when they migrate into being full-fledged engineers so in executing this we have had to look at ways of executing large scale software roll out from a cloud so that a large number of students can simultaneously access and learn these concepts we have had to figure out how these interconnect with for example the content developed by the NPTEL program where you get access to video lectures so in effect you see a paradigm where somebody looks at a video lecture for 15 minutes pauses then goes and executes a lab online using the virtual lab paradigm therefore that concept is reinforced immediately and then you go back and resume watching the video lecture so we are utilizing such a scheme in our own lectures on campus itself and as a paradigm we think it works well the phase we are in right now is that of a roll out so we have a large number of colleges whom we have adopted as nodal centers these nodal centers in the longer term are expected to in turn roll out virtual labs to other colleges around them so for example in Maharashtra we have about 25 nodal centers which have picked up content set of 12 institutes which collaborated in setting up content we have order of 100 labs and therefore 1000 experiments across these 100 labs in the various engineering and science disciplines available for learning so it is ultimately a matter of deciding on the basket of labs that they wish to deploy given their particular university syllabus and they end up picking and choosing specific experiments for execution as and when they wish to deploy these in their curriculum for the hardware triggered experiments we have worked out a slot booking scheme so people can actually book well in advance a slot, it could be in the middle of the night where you might want to take an experiment sitting from your hostel room in the middle of the night it's a paradigm which has worked well the nodal centers in turn are steadily being incentivized into not just deploying content but also creating content and that's the next generation of virtual labs which will hopefully roll out in the next few years there are as I said 12 partnering institutes mostly the IIT's which have created content but steadily it's now moving into the domain of other engineering colleges stepping up rolling out content and also creating new content I think about the coordinators Pushpadeep is around so we have a large number of engineering students as well join us in from other colleges as interns either in improving the quality of content already created or assisting in ensuring that everything is ported to a free and open source framework I should also add that one of the FOSI projects is on the development of replacement for a tool called LabU which is used in which is typically required for data acquisition and control purposes so looking therefore at a paradigm wherein both software and ultimately hardware at very low cost is going to be made available as blueprints for other colleges to adopt in terms of ultimately setting up a new infrastructure for labU Thank you