 Good morning everyone. Welcome to this inauguration program. Thank you professor for inviting me. It's a great pleasure and honor to be here to launch this historic event. I will give a brief overview of some of the activities that are happening in the mission and also at IIT Bombay and I would like to explain how some of you can participate. In fact, it will be a dream if all of you can participate in this mission. So the outline of the talk is as follows. I will give a brief overview of C-Deep. The head of C-Deep professor Tembe is not around. So I thought I would give a couple of, show a couple of slides and summarize the activities of C-Deep in a few minutes. But the main focus of my talk is on the National Mission on Education through ICT. I would like to talk about the projects undertaken at IIT Bombay through this mission. I want to spend some time depending on the time available, importance of the open source software for our country and then I would like to include this invitation for proposals as a part of this outline just to emphasize that we are here to also to tell you about the mission and to solicit your proposals for the mission. So these are the objectives to include all of this. The reason why I want to talk about the projects is to tell you what kind of projects are funded by the mission and the open source software is extremely important. I want to spend some time on that. So here is a brief summary of C-Deep, Center for Distance Engineering Education program. Through C-Deep we transmitted 25 to 35 courses every semester during the last four semesters. We covered, we transmitted a total of more than 100 courses in the last two years amounting to about 5000 hours of lectures. More importantly these were transmitted completely free of cost. These were made available through satellite, ADUSAT the same thing that is used just now and also through webcast so that those who do not have access to ADUSAT can also access these courses. This is a view graph showing the statistics. It has taken some time for us to gain experience and in the last two years we transmitted the last semester is not shown here. This is also about 25 courses. A course means a subject in the university lingo. It is a course consists of 40 lectures. It ends at the end of the semester with a final exam. These courses were made available through video and demand to our students, to the students at IAT Bombay and you can see the number of hits versus the month. You can see in November of last year 2008 16,000 hits. This was during the exam time. There were 35 courses transmitted and then we transmitted 25 courses in the next semester and you can see in the month of April 12,000 hits. Now these correspond to the months in which the exam took place. So there were people are looking at these courses, recorded courses during the exam time or just before the exam time repeatedly. And we have similar statistics for November 2009 as well. I have not included it here. We would like to make these courses available through video and demand to the outside people and we are exploring the possibilities of making these courses available for about 200 rupees per course through DVDs. By the way the funding for the entire operation has come through the National Mission on Education through ICT and we are extremely thankful for that. So let me just spend some time on the National Mission on Education through ICT. It is launched by the Ministry of Human Resources Development, Government of India and the objective is to raise the levels of education in India. The outlay for this is rupees 4600 crore out of which 40 percent is reserved for content generation. What is meant by content generation? I will explain in the next couple of slides. 60 percent of the money is reserved for bandwidth to establish the infrastructure, the bandwidth, hardware and so on. The idea is to provide good bandwidth to every one of the colleges around including private colleges, government colleges, university departments, universities and so on. This is the largest and most ambitious plan and it is likely to continue in the next plan period as well. As you all know that we have another two years and four months in the current plan period and then we are doing well in this mission as of now and it is expected to gather further momentum and we hope that it will continue in the next plan period that is another five years after 2012. These are the 18 line items that I mentioned earlier. NPTEL, PG classes, UG classes, digitization, e-books, quality assurance, pedagogical methods, language converter and translation toolkit, virtual labs and then certification, testing modules, virtual technological university. By the way, the ones in blue are the ones IIT Bombay is involved in, low cost access devices. If things go according to the plan within about a year or so, we should be able to see 20-dollar access devices which are almost like laptops that will give connectivity to most of our children including the poor children and also those in rural areas. Talk to a teacher to provide a substitute for coaching for the economically poor students. So, this is the one that has funded C-Deep's activities. This is the one that is also funding Professor Phatek's course, namely the course, the 1000 teacher training program. Read this. Talk to a teacher to provide a substitute for coaching for the economically poor students. So, this is the way it appears in the mission document. So, we cannot be more explicit than this and then robotics and this is also another crucial thing. I want to spend a few minutes on this. Adaptation and deployment of open source simulation packages equivalent to MATLAB, ORCAD, etc. Once again, this is the way it appears in the mission document. ERP system and then teacher training, conversion dubbing and then vocational educational modules. So, these are the 18 line items on which the mission will fund project proposals at the college level from everyone in the country including those who come from private engineering colleges. For that matter, sorry, I mentioned engineering colleges. It is not restricted to engineering alone. It is level arts, sciences, law, medicine, agriculture, everything is included. As a matter of fact, two weeks ago, someone from Trinnel Valley made a presentation on criminology and the Standing Committee was extremely happy to see such a proposal and recommended a pilot. Necessary conditions for a project to be funded by this mission are given here. It should be related to education for research. Other sources are available. It should be inter-institutional. Any material developed through this mission has to be delivered as open source. This is extremely important. Inter-institutional says that for joint projects, the funding chance are higher. It should belong to one of the 18 line items mentioned earlier. No funding will be provided for infrastructure development. For example, you cannot say that I want to put up a building. Please give me money. I want to buy 100 PCs. Give me money. It will always be in the form of clear deliverables. I want to create so many courses. I want to train so many teachers. I want to train so many government officials. I want to train number of students, so on and so forth. At this point, I would also like to mention that the proposal through this, I am not sure whether I have it in the next slide. Let me see it. If so, I have it here. So, the administration of the mission is given here. The mission director is Mr. N. K. Sina, joint secretary distance learning training. We must be the first country to have such a high level position for distance education. He is a great administrator. In fact, I am extremely pleased to be working on this mission. The administrative structure is as follows. There is a project approval board, which is chaired by the secretary of MHRD. The steering committee, sorry, this is actually should be standing committee. There is a standing committee that meets once in two weeks, first Saturday and third Saturday of every month at 11 o'clock in Delhi. And it is chaired by the mission director Mr. N. K. Sina. The recommendation of the projects is done here and the approval is done here. I am a member of this standing committee. And of course, there are many review committees. Most of the transactions are done through internet, project submission, review, etc. happen online. The important website is saksath.ac.in. That is where all the submission takes place. When we evaluate a proposal, the person who has written the proposal has to come to Delhi and make a presentation to the standing committee. And depending on the assessment and the reviews received, the standing committee could recommend a pilot to see whether the person can actually deliver whether the things proposed in the proposal are reasonable, realistic, doable in a reasonable amount of time. And if the pilot phase is successful, then the main project is approved. So, all projects will go through the pilot phase. And we do not reject any proposal. If at the most, we will say that this proposal has to be rewritten. You have asked for infrastructure. Your deliverables are not clearly defined. Please do all of this and come back and make a presentation. The TADA for the visit is given by the ministry. So, as you can see, the objective of this proposal, of this mission, is to reach out to as many colleges as possible and also to raise the levels of education in the country. So, with this, sorry, I have some of those things are summarized here. The procedure to get the funding which I already mentioned, submit the project and also get a pilot for 6 months. It is reviewed. Pilot project is recommended. And the PI may be asked to participate in one of the already approved missions. For example, IIT Bombay will be very keen if the participating colleges, those of you who are listening to me now, can participate directly in some of our mission funded projects. In the worst case, you will be asked to rewrite the proposal. After a successful completion of the pilot project, the project is approved. So, I am glad anyway to repeat this, because this is an important summary of how this mission is administered. So, I told you that I will give you a list of the projects that happen at IIT Bombay, so as to give a flavor of this mission. The first one is empowerment of students and teachers through synchronous education. Recall the line item which said that substitute for coaching for economically poor students. So, this comes under that line item. This supports C-Deep. Empowerment of teachers is what Professor Fatak is going to, for this course, 1000 teacher training program comes under empowerment of teachers project. I will not say much about it, because the next 11 days will be spent on going through this. And Professor Fatak also has a lot of things to say. I also do not want to steal the thunder from him. So, I am going to skip this. I am going to spend some time on these, open source software effort. So, we are at IIT Bombay working on Python, Blender, Latex and Latex for Indian languages and also Sylab, Robotics, Virtual Labs, NPTEL. NPTEL is of course well known. So, I will skip this also. I want to spend some time on IIT Bombay's open source software efforts. This is extremely important given that about 900 college teachers who are going to teach computer programming will be listening to me. And if each one is going to influence 100 students, so we can see that we will be able to reach out to one like 100,000 students in no time. So, let me spend some time on this. Why should I even worry about open source software? Why should the academy worry about it? Even though the commercial software may be expensive, the students have this software access to these softwares at a low cost and sometimes even free of cost. The problem is once they go to industry, they find that some of these software, commercial software packages are not available in the industrial setting. Just to give an example, in this very classroom, I was teaching a course Embedded Systems about six months ago and there were about 25 students, mostly M. Taken PhD students in computer science. I asked the students how many of them had used SILAP and only one of them raised his hand. SILAP as you all know is a open source software package with extraordinary capabilities. They asked him, in fact I scolded him, what made you use SILAP when nobody else has used. So, he told me that he was working for a small embedded systems company that was making microcontrollers, embedded systems for high tech applications like washing machines, air conditioners, ovens, refrigerators, mobile phones and so on and so forth. And it is a small company, high value added, highly profitable, started by technocrats, entrepreneurs but unfortunately the turnover was very small and a copy of the equivalent commercial software would cost that company 2.5 crore, which is of the order of 600,000 dollars. So, that company told him that software is not available and this fellow had two options, one is not to use any software or to use SILAP, which is the open source software, he decided to use the open source software SILAP, he found it to be extremely good. Now, if what happens if somebody uses some software legally, so we have a small story here, I will just briefly mention this, this is also extremely important because I want you to be aware of this, I want you to tell this to your students when you go back to your colleges. So, it is that during a raid one of an Italian company was found in one machine in an Italian company, they found an illegal copy of one famous software company, a commodity software company's product and so the moment it was caught, they had to pay back at penal rates even though it was found on only one machine, they counted the total number of installations, PC installations in that location and all over the world and counter by per cost copy and finally this company ended up paying 20 million dollars as damages. So, in our case, in our embedded systems company example, if this company uses it legally, it could even result in supposing they have 10 PCs in that location, 10 into 2.5, so 225 crore may have to be paid as damages and otherwise they do not pay the CEO, CIO, CTO and so on may have to go to jail, company will close down and so on. So, what happens is reliance on commercial software packages that are extremely expensive, some of these are 100 times expensive or 1000 times expensive, reliance on them makes our SME small and medium enterprises at a great disadvantage. So, there is no alternative to open source software at all if we want to advance our country. So, I want to spend a few minutes on spoken tutorials, the problem with open source software is the documentation is very poor, what I will do is because of lack of time, not sure I probably will run out of time otherwise. I will talk about this open source software with a demo and so on, if I get an opportunity later on in this course, let me just say that spoken tutorial is nothing but a procedure to capture an activity that happens on the screen. So, you can conduct a tutorial and you can give your commentary and you can give the commentary and that commentary can be in any language of your choice. One needs just a PC headphone with audio input which will cost 100 to 200 rupees and the recording can be played back on a PC as a movie. I will give a brief illustration of this. So, here I have So, in this the speaker talks about a product called Cam Studio that can be used to record what happens in on the screen, she has captured a screen of this size. I told you that it can be in any language. In fact, what we did was after creating this spoken tutorial which is which runs for about 10 minutes. In 10 minutes, she explains how to use this Cam Studio using which you can create spoken tutorials on Windows. Then we announced a dubbing competition and got it dubbed. In a matter of three to four days, we dubbed this into several languages. For example, let me just show this. So, Hindi, the important thing to notice is the video is still in English. Only the spoken part is enough. So, from the IIT Bombay, I welcome you to this tutorial. Behind every one of this is a link because of shortage of time. I will not go to that. Let me show you Marathi. You will see that the Marathi voice is probably the best because she also happens to be a dubbing artist. So, there is no need for the dubbing to be so. So, let me just go ahead. So, I was just telling that the dubbed one can even be better than the original because you suppress the audio and redo the entire audio. So, here is one on Tamil. Okay. So, it is, it creates small files. It is inexpensive to create, inexpensive to access and the running commentary as I mentioned can be in any language. All children, poor, rural, etc, can participate. The 80 to 90 percent of the public who are now left out, left out can also start contributing to the IIT movement. The tragedy of the IIT revolution in India is that it has completely bypassed people who do not know English. So, which is about 90 percent of the public. So, I strongly believe that through this technology, we can bring them also into fold and they can also start contributing. The original tutorial can be in Marathi, in Hindi, Bengali, Bhojpuri and so on that can be dubbed into other languages later on. Using English video with local languages, I believe that it will greatly improve the employment opportunities for our children. So, other in about 5 minutes, I will just give a brief summary of the thrust areas, open source software packages. We are also going to take this up in through spoken tutorials. Sylab I had already mentioned. By the way, the French space research CNES which is the equivalent of our ISRO uses Sylab exclusively in one of the talks in which I the talk that I chaired in July this year, French an official of this agency gave a talk. He went on talking about usage of Sylab in their research work and I asked him, is there any application for which they do not use Sylab? Adi's answer was no, they use Sylab for everything. By the way, they launch Ariane satellites, Ariane rockets. They launch some of our satellites in the early part of ISRO. They probably do it even now. So, if they can use Sylab, we can also do this. Latex is another activity we are undertaking. We have also created a DVD which we will be glad to make available to you. Through this, we have created lots of spoken tutorials and we have already assigned the task of dubbing all of this into Hindi and Marathi and Malayalam is in pipeline. We hope to translate dub all of these spoken tutorials in all our Indian languages and we want to extend this activity for several other open source initiatives as well. For example, Linux it can be done. Open source, open office it can be done. Python which is an important activity at IIT Bombay, we would extend it to Python as well and then we are in the process of building a social networking site for spoken tutorials and so, this is some of the procedures. I will skip these. In fact, we have some couple of designs. One of our BTEC students has designed this. We hope to go on stream soon. I would like to conclude this talk with the open source hardware. You can see a picture of this. I also brought one of this here. So, it is actually, it is a very small one. I just lifted it. What does it do? This system can be used to control the temperature of a plant by heating with a current, by cooling with a fan. You can see that there is a fan here. There is a heater here. It has an Atmega 16 microcontroller. The objective of this system is to control a plant. The plant is a small blade that is here. The temperature of this blade is sensed through AD 590, which is a temperature sensor and this microcontroller has analog inputs and outputs and it has a USB interface and also a serial interface and it has power supply. You can see it here. You can see the power supply. So, this is a low cost device with a time constant of the order of 40 seconds. So, it can be used in lots of different courses and the important thing is that it is available for only 2400 rupees and the design is available as open source with bill of material. So, in case your college decides to download and build it yourself, it will cost only 1000 rupees, only 20 dollars. For a limited time, we can make this unit available, make this unit available to you free of cost if you can come up with a project idea on how you will use it. Once again, all the activities that I mentioned here are funded by the National Mission on Education through ICT. One of the reasons for talking about this is to give you a flavor of the projects that are funded by the mission to invite you to write proposals to the mission and also that you will participate directly with IIT Bombay's faculty members. We welcome participation from all of you. By the way, this is part of a bigger initiative called Virtual Labs, the unit that I showed. People can try it remotely and if they are happy with its use, they can acquire sufficient numbers of it for hands-on training. They can build a whole lab using this instrument. We have carried out a large number of experiments using this device and we are in the process of creating about a 250 page manual that will go with this. We have created a Moodle site with a discussion forum where the people who are using this can interact with us and they can also come up with their own experiments. So with this, I come to the end of my brief presentation. The open source efforts are not only idealistic, but make a lot of economic and commercial sense as well. It has a potential to empower all Indian children to collaborate and make us a developed nation. Some of you may think that this is an overstatement that just by software, can we do this? The point is that software is going to drive the future and the problem, the tragedy as I mentioned is that we have left out the 90 percent of our public. We definitely know that if we don't take them along, we will never be a developed nation. So you may consider this as a wishful thinking, that's okay. If you bring them all in, then everybody will have access to this powerful technology, IT. So we are going to use it everywhere to book a ticket, to check the weather, to use mobile, to talk to somebody, all kinds of things you cannot do without IT in the future. I strongly believe that if we empower all our children to use IT, we will definitely become a developed nation. And of course, the National Mission on Education through ICT is based on the open source principle and I am glad to know that this entire course, 1000 teacher training program will be made available as open source. You will be able to download it, you will be able to modify it, you will be able to add your own content to that, you will be able to dub it. Somebody in fact wrote to me last night at 11.45 from Kerala, they would want to replace the sea with python. I said we will be delighted, please dub it, please bring in python and so on, we will be more than happy to include you as our partners. So with this, I would like to conclude my talk and I am really delighted as I mentioned earlier that you are all here. As Professor Fatak mentioned, there are going to be differences in the way we communicate through Edusat. There could be small dealers, I request you to be patient and you may also want, there are also some rules that you may want to follow. It will take some time for you to figure out, but hopefully you will do the one of the things I would want to point out because this is something I noticed during the trial period when Professor Fatak ran trials here. It is a good idea for all the remote centers to keep your mic muted except when you talk. If you keep your mic also on and if it is not properly positioned, then our transmission will pick up your echoed signal. In fact, you will see a big echo and that will affect not only you, but all the centers in the network. So just like we say that please turn off your mobile before talks are given, I request you to turn off your microphones except when you talk. When you talk please turn it on and talk and so that will minimize the echo. So let me conclude this talk. This is my email address. I would welcome your comments on the talk that I presented. If you have questions on the mission, also I will be glad to answer them. So best wishes to all of you. Thank you.