 Good afternoon, everyone. So, welcome to this concluding session. My name is Deepak Phatak. I teach here, I mean, teach in the computer science department. I have been working with IIT Bombay for last 40 years. And I would like to share with you today the journey, a long and arduous journey, which we undertook to reach this stage, where hundreds of my teacher colleagues are participating in a workshop in this format. Let me tell you a few things from very, very old history, very old as in 5000, 8000, 10000, may be 12000 years old. And this relates to the fact that in any life species, it is the knowledge that they have, it is the knowledge that they generate and it is the knowledge that they use, permits them to advance themselves, guaranteeing a better life for that species and guaranteeing progress. And amongst all living species, human species are the only species, which have an institution called a teacher. You would not have seen or heard of a designated teacher in any other species. Obviously, you would think this is nonsense, because other species do not even have languages, which they can use to discuss with each other or to describe their own knowledge in any form. That is true. But what is also true is that human beings realized very early that the knowledge that was growing amongst humans was growing exponentially and therefore, it had no chance of automatically going over to the next generation of the species. As typically happens, after all it is the progeny, which inherits almost all the characteristics of the parents in any species. And in general along with those characteristics, they also inherit an implicit knowledge that is transferred genetically. Since human knowledge grows exponentially, it does not have time to get formatted into the genetic knowledge and then get transferred to the next species. Had it happened, then everybody who is for example, an expert Java programmer today would have children who are expert Java programmers by the time they are one year old. That does not happen and that is why human beings decided that they have to have a completely separate institution, which will take care not only of dissemination of knowledge, but coding the accumulated knowledge and in fact, generating new knowledge. So, that is how human beings install an institution called a teacher. Naturally, these teachers would interact with the young of the species giving them the knowledge and in doing so, they needed support. So, the society constructed support structures for them. Traditionally, the support structures took the form of religious backbone structures such as temples, mass, Gurdwaras, what have you. You will notice that even today in most of these religious structures, some kind of educational activity continues to happen. That is the relic of the past. Of course, India had its own avatar of this kind of support structure in the form of ashrams. You know all heard of ashrams or gurukuls, where one or more gurus would engage with the young of the species who come in their charge and teach them for years together. They probably never had the kind of examination that we have today, but they had their own way of evaluating. More importantly, they had their own way of finding out which of the students at their support structure at their ashram would excel in which particular type of knowledge and that is how they would advise Arjuna to become an archer or Bhima to play with his gada and so on. They could distinguish, they could advise and that advice was actually implemented because they were in charge of the children then. Subsequently, as the numbers increase, the support structures themselves evolved and became more complex. Today, the support structures are called schools, colleges, universities such as the ones in which you yourselves are attending this course such as the one in which I stand here. Unfortunately, what has happened over these thousands of years is that these support structures which we call universities and colleges are actually recognized today as institutions and the teachers who were originally conceived by humanity as the original institution of a teacher, the teachers have become paid employees in these institutions. You might think that it is only a minor subtle difference. Unfortunately, I hold that it is not a minor difference. The reason is that if I am a paid employee and work as a teacher in an institution, my behavior is likely to be determined by the nature of the paid employment depending upon how much I paid, how regularly I am paid, my reaction to the work will be determined. For example, if I am paid much less as compared to others in the society, I would be lukewarm toward my duties which themselves are not being defined by me, but are being assigned by the so called institution. That is what would happen to any paid employee and it is natural. However, if a teacher who regards himself or herself as an institution would never behave in this fashion, he or she would never depend upon anybody else to tell him or her what the duties are. After all, if I believe that I am an institution charged with the responsibility of taking care of the young of the species and this responsibility is given to me by the society at large and I am accountable to that society as large, my behavior will be completely different. Every moment of my life, I would be aware of this responsibility, I would be aware of this accountability, why I would do nothing else in my professional life except to meet the demands of this duty. That is the difference when a teacher is an institution versus when a teacher is a paid employee. Sadly, we cannot change this situation. This will continue to obtain because that is the nature of things as the numbers have increased, as the structures have changed. Why I say all this? I say all this to request you to consider for a moment that independent of how the society has defined these structures, can you and I not rise above it? Can you and I not consider that while I have my concerns as a paid employee, while I am worried about people not being me well as compared to other people of similar caliber who was paid and rewarded by the society differently. I should have my worries, my family would have my worries, but should I not from time to time think that I am a teacher and this is the noble cause that has been given to me by the society. I might incidentally be working as a paid employee of this institute or the other, but intrinsically I am a teacher and therefore my job and my duties go much beyond what the so called college or university or sixth bay commission or whatever, whatever may decide. I must of course fulfill those duties as are chartered to me by the present superstructures, but I must independently define that I am accountable to my students and through them to my society. I do not think many of us have thought in this fashion earlier, because if we had we would discover that there is a great pleasure in thinking like this and there is a great pleasure in attempting to discharge one's duties in this fashion. I have been fortunate, I have worked in an environment in IIT like many of you by the way I also study at very small places. I have the privilege of having studied in 14 different schools of Madhya Pradesh from small villages to small towns. I did my engineering at one of the relatively smaller institutions at SJS ITS Indore. I came here to do my m tech, because my ambition was to become a teacher and I stayed here and I have discovered what a joy it is to teach at IIT. You know why? Although IIT is an institution and we continue to be paid employees of IIT as most of you are employees of some organization or the other, the amount of autonomy that is given to teachers here is immeasurable. When I teach a course, although there is a syllabus defined and approved by the senate, I have full authority to modify that course syllabus as I go along. The students whom I teach are examined by me. I set their examination papers. I design the examination evaluation strategy. If I say there shall be four written exam, there are four written exam. If I say there shall be only one written exam and lots of projects and other assignments, that is how it is. That is the kind of freedom I have. Not only that, when I conduct these examinations and evaluations, at the end I evaluate and award marks to these students and finally I give them a grade, which is not questioned by anybody in the institute. Can you imagine this is the autonomy that I have? And what does the issue expect in turn? The issue expects that I will not only teach what is fundamentally required in the character of that subject being taught, but I will a bore. I will enthuse these students to go beyond whatever is the existing knowledge. That I will teach with not only due diligence, but with greater enthusiasm to find out what are the new things that are happening in the world in that field and incorporate some of those in my teaching appropriate as per the level of the students depending upon whether they are undergraduate students or postgraduate students or research students. That is what is expected of me and I tell you it is such a pleasure to do so. Unfortunately, most of our institutions across the country and I am talking about the large number of 4500 or engineering colleges where all of us teach do not and perhaps cannot in the present circumstances effort to give this kind of autonomy to all their teachers. But here is my question is it entirely impossible to exercise at least some autonomy while remaining definitely within the pressings of the rules and regulations defined by the so called institutions? I believe it is possible. I discovered it myself and I would like to share that discovery with you about 8 years ago I think 2002 it was I took a 1 year sabbatical leave. I was concerned with the growing problems facing the engineering education by that time the number of engineering colleges were increasing exponentially in the country and that was natural that was the demand of the society. However, in the same scale we were not able to set up academic infrastructures in these colleges. Well, wherever there was money at least the buildings were constructed, laboratories were constructed, but in several places labs were in pathetic condition. Most important of all most of the colleges did not have adequate number of qualified and experienced teachers to teach the students. That was natural because if engineering colleges were growing exponentially the number of available teachers would not grow exponentially. What was happening in turn is that people who pass their engineering just like last month would be requested to become teachers in a college. Please understand that traditional expectation of an engineering faculty is that they should hold a PhD. It is not easy to have PhDs in all the subjects that you teach. It was not easy by the way even in IIT when IIT system was set up in late 50s. I remember that in the first decade or so many teachers who joined IIT were m techs and they did their PhD while they were teaching. It was so in the compulsions department particularly which was set up much later there was no compulsions department earlier. I remember in 1971 when I became a young teacher I was only an m tech and in fact the faculty members in other departments more established departments like mechanical engineering, aerospace engineering, electrical engineering, civil engineering they used to laugh at us. In Hindi they would say, because according to them unless you have a PhD how can you be a good teacher and there is some sense in it. However we said look we did not have an opportunity to do PhD. We want to become teachers. Let us start teaching and we will do our PhD we will do our research as we teach this exactly what we did. Why I repeat this? What happened in IIT Bombay 40 years ago 50 years ago is happening has been happening in fact in most of the institutions in the country but is happening to a much greater extent in all our engineering colleges. You would agree that most of you who have joined the teaching would not perhaps have a PhD certainly many of you would not even have an m tech degree you would have a BE degree. However I presume that having chosen to become teachers you would desire to do your masters you would desire to do your PhD. This desire may not be fulfilled because of two reasons one you do not get an opportunity after all if you have to do a PhD you require a capable guide and a guru who will hold your hands and take you some distance. Ultimately in PhD most of the distance has to be travelled by you but to know that you have to travel that distance and how to do that you require a guru initial and there are sadly not many qualified PhD holders who can guide PhDs in this country and therefore we need to do something about it something is happening in that direction. More importantly even for doing ME or MTA the amount of facility the amount of centers that exist which offer masters courses are sadly few. Amongst large number of institutions which have been set up there are only few which actually offer masters program. In such a situation what do teachers do and that is exactly was the concern or question that I had in 2002 when I took my sabbatical. So how do I measure the existing situation in the engineering institutions. I decided that I will take a tour of the country not just an arbitrary tour like a religious tour where you just go visit a temple say namaste to god and come out but I would go to an engineering college interact with the students give a talk to them interact with the teachers and often spend quite some time talking to the final year students of any engineering discipline typically computer science and IT because that is what I understood best and to judge for myself what was the situation. I could not visit too many places because I was also doing several other things during that year but I did visit about 67 colleges in the country I would submit that 67 is statistically not a small number. So, whatever I observed perhaps is relevant and is relevant even today and what I observed was amazing. The less amazing part of course was confirmation of my suspicion that everything is not hunkied there were many colleges which lack some basic facilities. There were colleges which were rich financially and had good facilities but did not have adequate number of teachers. The students who came to these colleges did not come well prepared they are not prepared themselves very thoroughly for engineering education. So, they were struggling but what was amazing is that in every college without exception I found phenomenal talent existing. How did I discover that when I would talk to these students typically final year students or what projects they are doing and so on they would make some presentations. Most of the presentations would be very mundane very ordinary but there would be some group and some students in some groups you will find who have applied their mind they may not be speaking the best of English it did not matter. But they understood what they were trying to do they understood how a particular task was to be achieved they are studied extensively from amongst whatever available literature and more important they had thought very clearly through what are the pros and cons of doing this or doing that or doing that. Second they were not hesitant to experiment they were not hesitant to fail to try again several of such failures were described to me by these students. I would attend very carefully to such submissions and my conclusion was that in every college without exception without exception there would be at least seven to ten students who would stand out as absolutely the best talent compared anywhere in the world. I would love to have them in IIT as my own student and this if I could observe at sixty seven colleges there is no reason to believe that every college in which you teach every college without exception would have ten people eight people five people may be fifteen people may be more may be less but you will have them. Why I mention this because it is these people who are capable of contributing maximally to the change that we expect to make in our society and to our nation. They are likely to contribute far more substantially to well's generation they will not only contribute to themselves their own lives and their family's life but they will contribute to the nation building better than others. Do we do anything special for them? That is the theme of what I wanted to share with you and I will tell you what special was being done by a few teachers whom I found to be exceptional in my visits and again at every college I found at least one some places four or five teachers who would conduct themselves differently. They are the teachers of my dream the institutions in themselves. There are many whom I met but I will give you just a couple of examples. This is one small place I would of course visit the labs and meet with the teachers and I would ask them what do you do and so on so forth and then I would typically ask a question what do you do beyond whatever is the syllabus description because that is what I was interested in finding. So this place I am describing at this one teacher very sheepishly said he was teaching electronics and he said sir I conduct a lab on Sunday. So I said oh what do you do in that Sunday lab he says in a semester I take up a problem to design a complex circuit for solving some problem and we invite the students to come they spend about three hours in the morning every Sunday I said very good. So what happens we say successfully we design it we get it fabricated and at the end we actually make it work and students find it very interesting I said very good. Do all students come he says no sir 15 or 20 students will come and I told him that is okay if you got 20 students who come every Sunday for three hours for doing something which is not defined in the syllabus for which there are not going to be any marks no exam well you are done extraordinary thing because these 15 people are those 15 who will make a difference to themselves and to the world and I said you are doing an extraordinary thing my dear friend you know what he told me that hurt me a bit he said sir you are the first one who is telling me that I am doing something good and something extraordinary many of my colleagues tell me they tell me you are mad why are you trying to waste time teaching something outside the syllabus and I I felt so bad I felt so sad I said let me tell you that I am not the only person who acknowledges that what you are doing is extraordinary but there will be many many in this country in this world who will believe that what you are doing is actually the real thing. Now this is the point I wanted to make I told you about the autonomy in IIT which permits me to teach what is not there in the syllabus why because we understand that syllabus has an extremely limited value in life please understand that when a university defines a syllabus it is a reflection of what knowledge has been accumulated in the past what knowledge has been found useful to solve problems in the past and that is the wisdom which is filtered and put in as a syllabus the problems that are going to be faced by the world tomorrow are not necessarily captured their solutions do not even exist the approaches to those solutions will have to be discovered by the generations which will work on those problems using their scientific and engineering knowledge a syllabus while could be extremely useful as a reflection of what has been known and what has been achieved in the past is likely to be completely useless in facing many of the problems that our students will face in the future. So, what do we ought to teach our students we must teach our students look this is a syllabus you must of course understand this, but this is only the beginning and based on this you must do something more and that is something more usually we try to inculcate amongst our students by giving them problems to solve problems which they have never seen any time in their life different problem and we try to see how they approach those problems. So, we try to teach them problem solving and that is the crux of any engineering education. Sadly, the examination systems prevailing in most of the universities and colleges these systems do not permit such questioning because there are set patterns you must give four mark question on this topic and two mark question on this topic and so on. I was also accustomed to this in 1969 when I came here for M.T.A. and I was shocked to see the kind of examination patterns that different teachers who were teaching me for my M.T.A. came up with there is one teacher who had exactly one problem in that whole paper a mid same paper one problem that is it you solve it you get some marks you do not solve it you get zero and that problem was not seen or heard by me any time in my adult life including the lectures which I had all attend there are another course in which was taught by my subsequent mentor one of the two mentors professor Isaac and his course exam was open book and open time it said two o clock onwards. I was very delighted I took six books to that exam because I thought I do not have to study much most of the time I was reading that book while some people who were accustomed to that style of examination because they were from IIT earlier they finished their exam properly at four o clock five o clock I was there up to six thirty and I was not the last person to there was one more person and most of the time I was reading the book but whenever I will try to write something professor Isaac was invigilating go around and he will slap he had a big hand it would slap very hard I can still remember the slaps on my back he says not that idiot read that book and try to solve this again and then again for half an hour I will struggle those four and half hours I learnt more about that subject than what I had learnt while attending the course that was the kind of examination the fact is that he was permitted to conduct such exams as he liked and that I was delighted as a student to attend that exam because I learnt that I learnt much more in such kind of exam I believe as a teacher that there cannot be any examination five minute exam or a five hour exam in which a student does not does not learn something more than what the student has learnt and the examination itself has to be a learning experience because the whole process of teaching and examination is geared towards learning and if everything does not add to the learning of the student then perhaps we have missed an opportunity but I digress. So, let me come back to my point my point was that while there are such exceptional students and such exceptional teachers around us in all our institutions then why is it that we talk about lack of quality when I talk to my friends in NASCOM the NASCOM leadership right from Ramdurai and Azim Premji and Ajay Choudhury and everyone and when Kiran Karnak came up with the NASCOM report many years ago saying only 25 percent of our students are employable others are not and I had a and he blamed the colleges and in particular the lack of adequately qualified teachers for this mess as he called it internally I agreed that there was some problem after all that is the reason why I had gone around visiting these colleges externally I fought with him giving him his own statistic I said if you say 25 percent people are employable do you know what numbers you are talking about I said in all of 70s and early 80s when there was no computer science the India as a whole would graduate about 5000 teachers in a field called electronics most of whom ultimately become computer science 5000 people per year that was the capacity of the country to graduate assume for the moment that all of those 5000 people were employable 100 percent employability although it is not true I was one of those 5000 so I should know but assume that they were all employable when I was talking Kiran Karnak were graduating more than 2 lakh students every year in computer science IT and electronics and I said if 25 percent of them are employable you are talking about 50,000 employable young Indians today is that not a great achievement they said grudgingly yes and I won that debate but when I came back and I said if 50,000 people are employable and if 1,75,000 students are not employable of our by our industry I think we as teachers have to take the blame and then I started thinking so whenever I went to these colleges and I talked to the teachers I found out that most of the teachers were not able to contribute magnificently to the requirement of teaching and learning for two primary reasons one they were extremely diffident they were diffident about their own ability to deliver I discovered that many of them had not joined teaching as the first choice they had their first choice perhaps as some good job in the industry which is perfectly tellable after all that is what everybody expects but because they did not get it they had some defeatism in their mind somewhere in their heart and that was perhaps reflecting on and second those who wanted to teach was not at all getting any training any mentoring any hand holding nobody was ever willing to spend time with them to tell them what it takes to become a good teacher what it takes to become a good researcher what is it that they must do these two things combined to create a teacher who intrinsically wanted to do well after all forget teachers anybody who is doing any job would that person ever desire that other should laugh at him or her for not doing the job that is one sir everyone would like to be recognized as a good worker everybody would attempt sincerely to approach the problem so that once work is recognized so I do not agree at all with this nonsense that teachers are not interested in doing their job I believe that these teachers are lack both the preparation to do their job and they lack the motivation to do their job and more importantly they lack hand holding and mentoring and that is how when I came back I started a project called Eklavya project in which I said there are too many Eklavyas in this world all these teachers all these students they want to do something well they want to do something extraordinary but they need some support they need some encouragement they need some help that is when I merged the distance education program which I started in the school of IT today it has now emerged as a center for distance engineering education program a major theme that my institution is very proud of we started interacting first with professionals then with teachers of different institutions there is a organization called TIFAC which funded us in our experiments in early experiments we tried to conduct these short workshops and lectures for our teachers and one of the pen chance that we had is that whatever are these interactions will release all of them in open source and that is because the power of the open source not only in terms of making things easily and affordably accessible to everywhere it also tends to create collaborative communities which help in furthering that growth of knowledge. So, we tried to do that subsequently I decided that I must expand this model to include a larger and larger number of teachers because the number of teachers that we have is very very large and that is how I conceived of this particular project teacher thousand teachers very fortunately this institution at that time had a series of other faculty members who thought differently one of them professor Kandan Mawgalyar took the lead he had conceived of similar equivalently important projects for the benefit of teachers we put all these together we put several institutions together to begin with triple IT Allahabad was with us now we have a dial bag institute and amruta university we are a conglomerate and we try to do these all these mission projects together most importantly the government of India through some great leaders that they have I would mention one by name Mr. N. K. Sinha who is there who is the additional secretary there who conceived this national mission on education through ICT and when they heard of a presentation that we plan to engage up to thousand teachers at a time something which was never attempted in this country they said yes go ahead they first asked us to do a pilot and two of us which we did and subsequently we are at this stage where one after another we are conducting the workshop this particular workshop is very special because the first time we are conducting a workshop in a mode where we engage the participating teachers over weekends there is a reason for this not all teachers can be free for a continuous period of two weeks to attend a workshop which is a minimal that is required under the IST norms with whom we have a memorandum of our understanding after all an IST certification of attending a workshop does mean a little bit to the participating teacher who can actually use that certificate to once and once so we are insisting on that but since teachers cannot find 14 days continuously we said let us try this model and thanks to all of you are participating here thanks to the remote central coordinators who agreed to spend their time on successive weekends rather than in one short cohesive period of two weeks and of course equally well thanks to Madhu Belour and Professor Prabhu Ramchandran and his colleagues who have been constantly working week after week after week curiously this is a better model in my opinion because this permits knowledge gathered over the weekend to be assimilated during the week when you think about it when you do some problem after all that is how we teach our students if you recall one full semester course can actually be conducted in one week by giving concentrated doses of all the lectures that is not the best learning that is what we do not do with our students but we teachers who have already taught that course we assume it will be possible to cover the particular material in two weeks this is a model which we hope will be able to carry on further my colleague Kalpana who has given a questionnaire have you circulated a questionnaire to me yeah so we have asked some questions there related to whether how do you find this model and so on but I would once again say that the main objective of these workshops is not for you to earn a certificate and for us to give lectures and conducting them the main objective of this workshop is to imbibe in all the participating teachers an extraordinary sense of both comfort confidence and a desire to do something different to your students when you go back after all we as teachers are still accountable at least to our students when we teach them and when their faces show that they are learn something from us that is still regarded by most of us as the best form of satisfaction and best form of recognition it is towards this end that we have tried to fashion these workshops it is towards this end that we expect these participating teachers to continue to remain engaged with us we will be soon launching a portal which will have various subject headings for all the subjects that which for which we have conducted these workshops one portal will be for this particular program in which we will put all the video recorded lectures as learning teaching material we will put all the questions assignments examples and more importantly we will put any contributions that you would have made provided of course you certify that that contribution is prepared by you or if it is appearing elsewhere and you believe that that material should be shared by our teachers and students you have the requisite permission or it itself should be an open source but will be glad to launch this portal with full permissions of interaction not only to these participating teachers but everybody else in the country and at that time I will be inviting those teachers who are participating in this workshop to come forward and become editors editors who will sort of supervise the new material that will constantly pour in with additional students and teachers contribute we have large dreams friends and we expect you to not only participate in these dreams but to carry them further so that the whole nation can actually move faster to the progress that is the future and the future has to be constructed by you and your students I will I have already taken much more time than what was due I am sorry I got carried away but I I believe in every word that I have said I have lived my life that like that I have seen many of you living your life like that totally committed all that I would suggest is look around you and try to see together in whatever college you work under whatever situation norms and rules that you work my submission which I originally made is that nobody can prevent you from doing additional work that teacher whom I made somewhere in Odisha nobody prevented him from opening a lab on Sunday morning when he himself was personally there nobody prevented the students from working in that lab on Sunday I would submit that nobody will prevent you from working on weekends nobody will prevent you and your students from working over after the office hours in the night provided you take the lead provided you decide to do something special and in doing so please look at the top performers of your classes we generally are required to attend to each and every student and that is correct we also specially look after some students were not doing so well we call them weak student that is also correct but what we sometimes do not do is we do not cater to the best performers thinking that they are good anyway they will carry on I will conclude by telling you why it is important to cater to the best performers by telling you a story of the old times you would have heard of the great Tata who funded the establishment of Indian Institute of Science I hope all of you know about IISC Bangalore even today it is still recognized as the major engineering research institution not even IITs are considered on par with IISC as far as research is concerned when that institute was being set up Tata help financially and when this news was known there were people from Parsi Panchayat who approached him and said why are you wasting your money in setting up an institution which will be only for the top talented students to do their research and all don't you think you should be spending your money for the welfare of the community and they reply that Tata gave was absolutely amazing I would like all of you to remember he said that while it is absolutely important to take care of all the needy in one's community it is more important to take care of the more talented amongst us why because the future of the society the progress of the society and wealth generation of the society in future will be governed by what these talented people are able to do so in fact he says when I am helping them I am ensuring that your children and grandchildren will perpetually never require help because this this society will become so rich and strong because of these people who will be well generating engines of tomorrow that my dear friends is something all of us would like to remember please do well please become great teachers and great contributors thank you very much God bless you good afternoon everyone hello again as many of you know there is a conference coming up tomorrow called sci-pi India third edition of the conference and as the organizer I have been rather busy preoccupied but you did get to see me again this morning when we had the trouble with the exam so I first would like to apologize to all of you for all the problems that you must have faced and I understand that it must have been a little harrowing facing an end semester examination and getting server errors and all kinds of problems on your screens but thankfully thanks to support from some of the Fossey staff notably Mrs. Parth and he was responding instrumental in getting the app running today without any errors all of you have seen Srikanth tirelessly working I think it is important to acknowledge his so let us give them both a round of applause no really I must appreciate both of their inputs in this and it is important because the end semester exam would have been completely a failure if they had been stepped in and helped out at many times and time and again Srikanth has stepped up to the plate to help with this entire program so it is important to remember their inputs however it has been a lot of fun and I have learned a lot during this process some of you may not be aware but the truth is the application that you use to submit the examination today was actually written in Python and it was written by me which is the reason you had a lot of these problems primarily because I have been extremely busy I have another job as well as various other things at the Institute and there are certain aspects of Python that even I am not very knowledgeable about there are certain things I have not done before with Python and as I have told you about in the past during the course there are so many things you can do with Python that it is not surprising that even me with ten years of experience with Python don't know many things that could be done and I would require the help of a young person like Parth to help me out when I get in a little bit of trouble although bulk of the application itself I wrote completely by myself but it goes to show that the open-source community the tool set that we actually tried to teach you is actually extremely useful to all of us even to run something like this like a course and you can imagine the difficulties associated with running an exam online which is automatically corrected for 600 people hammering on one server on a single machine that again thankfully Professor Fartex team provided again I think I should we should thank Abhilash right okay so Ranjith and Abhilash gave us essentially they said here's a server we were struggling to find a machine to run this thing on and we tried to host it on our own server which is located in Panama and that completely failed for various reasons so they very kindly gave us a server here and we were we spent one day after the class we spent I think two to three hours sitting in the lab with Abhilash giving us full access and permissions to do whatever we wanted to set up the entire machine along with our system administrator Mr. Lee who is also with us here who has helped us with the deployment of the application and all of this all of the work towards that so as a result it was a fair bit of teamwork and it also shows you that with teamwork knowledge base the internet the tool sets that we have and what we have taught you it is possible to do a lot more and that even we can use these tools to do useful things and at the end the final phase I believe no one had any problems right there were no complaints about server errors or this or that it turned out to be a database issue that was resolved and as soon as that was fixed everything went through no problems and the database we use happened to be my sequel which again fix the problem so I hope that towards the end you felt that the interface I understand initially it was bad but towards the end that you felt ok we redeemed ourselves at the end by making sure that the last one hour was relatively painless for everyone that said I really appreciate the fact that many of you I know how difficult it is as a as any one of you who works to take off weekend after weekend for five weeks in a row to participate to learn and we did hammer you with a lot of assignments we did leave you alone during the weeks so we gave you all all kinds of problems to solve all of you sincerely did attempted many of these problems prepared for the exams we gave you routinely tests and sometimes difficult tests which you may not have ever been accustomed to taking in the past these are not multiple choice questions all of you had to submit programming assignments online get feedback and sometimes very cryptic feedback it would not be a full trace back you just get one single line saying this is the error and all of you handle that extremely well and it was very fulfilling I will say to be able to see 635 people who took the exam today and I think we should give all of you around of applause that you survived five weeks of our training you put up with all of our crazy interface problems the internet problem network problem database problem whatever put up with all of that and at the end of the day managed to submit 635 answer papers we do not have the results yet but the very fact that so many of you took it did it consecutively on five weekends and managed to get here is itself very commendable thank you so much this has been a wonderful learning experience for all of us and it has also been rather inspiring the fact that we can sit in Bombay deliver a course to 650 people and I do not even remember the names of the centers all it is all over India there is somebody in Kashmir there is someone down south way down south Gauhati so all over India I mean such a reach cannot be imagined and it is extremely satisfying to know that the weekends that we put in the amount of hard work that we put in to get these things running has actually reached out that far and this is a completely new platform for us so I am really grateful to Prasar Fartak and his entire team to Prasar Kannan and to Kalpana and Mukta for actually suggesting this entire program we were at a point when we wanted to run this course in a two week fashion and everything was booked and we wanted to know if we could do it in a weekend I think Prasar Kannan and his Kalpana went up spoke to Prasar Fartak and before I could even leave the auditorium they call me saying Prasar Fartak wants to talk to you we would like to give this a shot and I was not prepared for it at the time and unsuspecting I said yes and it was an amazing experience so I am really grateful that they were enabling enough to make it happen for all of us and it has really been a wonderful experience and I am hoping to talk about this entire experience the application and all of this during sci-fi and I will not bore you any further I hope you enjoyed the course and next time we will try our best to make it even smoother and maybe change the manner in which the teaching is done by using these tools more interact more interactive tools so that the learning experience for you is a lot better so hope to hear from us again we will try to make an off fresh offering of this course in the future please tell your colleagues hopefully you had a positive enough experience that you will suggest this course to other people as well and we hope most of all that the material that you have learnt you are able to carry on give it to all of your colleagues and share all of this information with that I will hand it back to just a few words more so somebody has written on chat that producer is a very good teacher so incidentally he is also got a best teachers award here in IIT but that we all know many of you would not know that he is also single one of the single largest contributors from India to the open source community in the world and we are all honored to be part of this project with him let me also tell just one more experience of mine so while I was teaching this bash there were we I have been using this Linux tools since at least batch since more than 15 years and some of us think that only view only we know very well yeah and because we were exposed to Linux from so many years so some bash things that I had got stuck during the answers came from Srinagar, Guwahati, Kella, specifically Mofakamja college where somebody asked how to set the permissions by default and I was thinking which is this comment starts with you is it you name you name minus say we hear often for knowing the name of the Linux then some then suddenly there was this answer from Mofakamja saying you mask yeah and it is it is an eye opener to know that so many people across India also know about these really subtle commands that that we do not use so often it was an eye opener indeed okay let me before I give Professor Kannan to speak a few words so contributions about this project the entire Fawcett team has been extremely actively supporting the various activities so when all of you submit all the answers are uploadable on Moodle now thanks to Scripps written by Prashant the way here also together with Harish Badrinath here so each one of you each one of the people in the Fawcett team has contributed extremely and let me quickly spend a minute to introduce everybody there's Manas there please show your hand then there's Yogesh there's Primal yeah it's a pleasure that you're here today there's Kiran there is Sushma there's Priya there's Anand there's Jovina and Bella there are more people here there's Shrikanth of course yeah important phase there's Lee there's Parth yeah I will not be able to there are many others also in the TTT project whose names I know but then we will have a few words from Professor Kannan about the course and the project Good afternoon everyone I don't want to bore you with too much more so I have not written any notes so so that I may forget a few and make my talk shorter so I want to talk about the importance of open source software I think that is open source software has been the basis of this entire mission that supports this activity the national mission on education through ICT insists that whatever material released through this is also released as open content open educational resource and also the use of open source software in fact I am a member of the standing committee I have held many meetings also and then we always ask all the people who propose in the for the mission whether they use any commercial software and we say we try to find open source equivalent and tell them to switch over to that as a matter of fact part I talked about Mr. N. K. Sinha who is the mission director and additional secretary he sent a letter to all the vice chancellors and a CTE chairman saying that please explore open source software for academic financial and administrative purposes before exploring any before resorting to any commercial software I think that is a very important statement from the government so this material that you have gone through is extremely useful and there will be some pressures to use commercial software often in the university system apparently there are explicit mentions of commercial software to be used in curriculum through this mission we have been trying to inform all the vice chancellors that to include a phrase especially when they specify some software they should say are an equivalent and of course we are telling them not to specify the name explicitly but in case they have to state it for whatever reason we tell them are an equivalent open source equivalent so this is something that everybody is agree able to everybody every vice chancellor I have made talk to they say it is easy to incorporate it is important for you to follow it up to ensure that it gets included so that it allows the faculty members who are innovative who are enter pricing who are willing to dirty their hands by trying out open source system to have that freedom to do what they want otherwise it is not that the university may not want to do it but it may take time to get permissions and so on and the delay could kill enthusiasm and initiative so it is important to get this thing included and most vice chancellors are receptive to this and we need your support to go and talk to them or help us find people whom we should talk to so that we get this class included in your syllabus. I want to tell one or two stories to tell you why it is extremely important that we work on this open source software why this free and open source software is important to our country we have in fact I am going to specify some names because it is these are all stories one of my colleagues in fact he is a professor in computer science professor Kavya Arya he has a project manager by name Raman Naidu he had a startup and their product was to identify video clips based on emotions and apparently some professor agreed to develop this algorithm and it involved some Fourier transforms fast Fourier transform and signal processing and you know things like that and once they were ready apparently they came up with that product they were ready to go they were ready to launch it and then these this business team asked the professor tell us what to do so that we can release executables so that people can download install and then use that in their search apparently that professor said oh for that you need a official copy of matlab and to do all this they found out that it would cost 1.5 crore to get the copy with all the permissions required to implement this it is almost 300 000 dollars 1.5 crore so it was a serious problem because these people did not have the money and the professor thought that the 10 crore venture funds that they had received could possibly be used to buy a copy of matlab little knowing for what purpose this project money was intended. As a result these people had to start all over unfortunately within two months apparently google came up with a similar search facility and these people they had to close the company because that was their only product and so it is something that academic community does not realize that the thing that you may do at within the four walls of your campus is not at all acceptable outside and there are stories of punitive measures taken on commercial enterprises for violating or pirating software licenses in industrial establishments that may not happen in academic community but it is something that we have to keep in mind the commercial software most often for most of our students is like a book that they cannot take outside our college premises. So, if we if you do most of our small and medium scale enterprises in India do not use any software because the commercial software is very expensive and the equivalent open source software is not taught to the students by us and the academic community should not take the responsibility for this. So, this is something I came to know recently through a student about matlab and Sylab. In fact, in this very hall I was teaching embedded systems course and out of 25 students there was only one student who had used Sylab before coming to IIT because he had worked in industry he was working in an embedded system company he explained the difficulties in using commercial software especially matlab from that day I insisted that people should submit their assignments only in Sylab otherwise they would get zero marks. I enforced it my students do not like that but I think that in the larger interest of the society I thought I still think that it is the right thing to do with I would like to conclude with one last comment it is about in fact, we saw that here Prabhu Ramachandran who has many years of experience with Python has no difficulty in admitting the help of somebody much junior and with possibly less number of years of experience we should as teachers especially people who are into software should acknowledge that most of the time our students know lot better than us. So, there is nothing there is no shame at all in admitting this as a matter of fact your five year old daughter would pick up a software lot more quickly than you can. So, just remember this in mind I love your students to flourish let them do better does not matter I remember this story about Mahatma Gandhi apparently somebody asked him once, do not you worry somebody asked Mahatma Gandhi, do not you worry Mr. Nehru and Patel are getting stronger every day do not you worry. So, Mahatma Gandhi apparently said so why should I worry they consider me as their leader as their leader they tell everybody that I am their leader. So, I am their leader I am bigger than them. So, I will let them grow. So, remember this I love your students to flourish give them all the opportunities and especially in software they will do sitting level. So, with that I would like to one last point interestingly all the people who are here except Professor Fartag are faculty members of not computer science other departments that is another thing it turns out that somebody remarked yesterday I was in J.I. Engineering College yesterday I gave a talk on spoken tutorials our project and it was a holiday like Professor Fartag said there were more than 50 students who had come to listen to me. And in fact they waited for a for an hour for me to come because I did not realize that this college was 40 kilometers away from Chennai. And this person Professor Kumaran who had organized it who is apparently in the audience from Anna University center there he remarked that three active people in IIT Bombay are not from computer science. So, I just want to also want to make this additional comment that you need not be a computer science person to actively participate in this no matter who you are. In fact not only for engineers also as people in liberal arts and so on and so far it is exceedingly important that we all do that. I will end with one last statistic the there is one estimate of the cost involved in providing windows operating system and office to all our schools in India is of the order of rupees 100,000 crore. So, it is a huge amount and so here we are not talking about engineers we are not talking about computer scientists we are talking about the whole community. So, please do participate and it is extremely important it is vital to our to our future. So, with that I would like to congratulate you for having successfully completed this course thank you. Before I make concluding remarks we are some honored guests great contributors from the global open source community. I am fortunate because the conference that is going to take place tomorrow they are all here. I would request Mr. Prabhu to briefly introduce them. So, that all the 835 participating teachers can actually just say hello to them from remote distance. Hello. So, we are honored to have several of our three of our guests from all over the world join us for the sci-pi.in 2011 conference. They have fortunately for us they are available today and they happen to come here thanks to my wife. I would first like to introduce Gail Vahoku. He is a primary contributor to the sci-kit learn which is machine learning in python. It is a open source available what is called a sci-kit which is a addendum to the sci-pi set of libraries that you have already come across in the course. He is also right now the lead or the main maintainer of Mayavi. So, he and I are I am now kind of in retirement I have not been doing too much on the Mayavi side, but he is done a lot of the work on Mayavi recently most all of the documentation recently is been completely his effort and he is a huge proponent with an enormous amount of energy. We are really happy to have him here Gail Vahoku. I will I will I will introduce them all and then pass the mic around for them to share a few of their thoughts with us. Accompanying with Gail is Emmanuel who is a researcher in Sangoban which is a the glass company you must have seen these interesting advertisements from France. She uses python extensively and is also a major contributor to the sci-kit image image processing library and both of them will be giving tutorials at the sci-pi.in conference each at least two hours long along with invited talks of course. We also have with us Matthew Paparowski who is from Poland and he is a he is a contributor to sci-pi which is a symbolic manipulation symbolic computation library in python S Y M P Y and I will now hand them the mic so they can share a few words with us. Well this is unexpected for me so I don't have deep thoughts to share. I'm very happy to be to be here. I'm also extremely happy to have seen the effort invested by the Indian government and by the team that Krabu and others have set up on open source software education for science and engineering. I agree with the previous speakers and think it's extremely important for India as for all other countries and all other education systems so it's a huge pleasure to see this effort. Thank you Krabu. Good afternoon. This is also quite unexpected for me but it's also a great great pleasure for me to be here and I would like to thank the organizers very much for allowing us to be here. So as Krabu said I'm working for a private company in an academic environment and therefore I completely agree with what I heard previously about the fact that companies can afford can't afford paying for a lot of commercial softwares in particular when there are good open source equivalents. So for example my IT manager in my company often comes to me and say can't you convince more people to use Python. I'm willing to pay for support for Python but I just don't want to pay for more MATLAB licenses it kills my budget. So it's very interesting to see that some issues are found in many countries and it's really a system that is like that. So during the conference I will talk mostly on image processing which is how I use Python for my research the most and I'll try also to describe and emphasize a little bit how someone without any computer science background like me because I'm a physicist by training I never had a single course on computer science or programming can develop skills in programming open source softwares and finally ending up contributing to open source softwares because it's really how the ecosystem of open source software can work. You start using it and then you are well it's almost natural to end up contributing even if it might seem a big barrier very far from being able to contribute it's possible. So I'll talk about this in a few days and I hope we can talk with everybody here during the conference and I'm very excited also about the conference because Gael and I have been with other people of course have been organizing the last two Euro SciPy conferences which is the SciPy conference but in Europe so it's extremely exciting to attend another SciPy conference in another part of the world and once again I'd like to thank a lot the organizers. So my name is Mateusz Paprowski and as previous speakers I would like to thank very much organizers of SciPy India for inviting me to Mumbai and this is for me a great honor because this is first invitation to event of this kind and just continuing a little bit what previous speakers said I just I wish that in my country there were events like this and the discussion about using open source software in academia and other would be so open and would exist at all so it's very nice to see this. Thank you. Okay, thank you. I wanted to also introduce and thank my own team but before that I'll make three quick comments. One comment to respond to Professor Kanan's observation that almost all the people talking about open source software here are not compressors. So this reminds me of my age old belief that the silos that we have built ourselves around knowledge like mechanical engineering, civil engineering, mathematics, physics etc. have been built primarily to cater to the large growing body of knowledge and that it is impossible to cover all the knowledge for everyone. However, knowledge and its usage for solving problems cannot be determined by the fields under the tag of which some individuals have developed expertise and to prove my point I'll give an example of a professor who happens to be a chemical engineer who happens to be a professor of chemical engineering and yet writes books on digital control systems for example. His name is Professor Kanan Mott-Galya incidentally. So this happens although not yet come across a computer science professor who designs aeroplane structures etc. but that might happen I would not mind that. So that's okay. Second point I wanted to make is the observation that Prabhu said that 635 people if we were to conduct workshops in the traditional sense in which government sponsors these workshops, two week workshops for 30 people each. If we were to do one workshop per year it would take 20 years to reach out to 635 people. So that's the power that the technology permits and that's the power that the open source technology permits. Incidentally the portal that we are going to build all the servers that we use for this project all use open source software only. So we have for example Jumla as the framework for building things we use Moodle, we use MySQL and just to tell you about a very exciting commercial utilization a corporation Life Insurance Corporation of India whom I advise as a right-year advisor they used to use COBOL for their front-end systems they have recently migrated they handled by the way at 200 million plus customers and policies. It is the largest number of insurance policies ever issued by any company in the world and they have recently shifted from COBOL to a database and the database they use is MySQL and the intermediate app layer they use is called Glassfish which was till recently an open source middleware. So open source is not only powerful it is also inexpensive and that's the point that we are trying to prove. Finally I would like to just reiterate I think I had mentioned this during the inaugural event and all the people who taught this course and their colleagues have acknowledged that they were helped significantly by the team that has been put in place. Some of the team members you already seen but I would like to very quickly just say hello to those friends who are physically here. I think from the system side a Bilash was not here you have seen Ranjit but I think Ranjit did not raise his hand or he was not there. So Ranjit is our srisad man who handles all the issues related to this or where is the next? Ah yes ok forgot. In fact why don't you just zoom around because they are all members of the team doing something or the other. I would like now to go over to the video team led by Sajjan. Sajjan can you raise your hands? He is actually a very senior manager but he makes it a point to personally sit over the audio video controls whenever important events are going on. Although he has lot of colleagues who can do that but that is his passion and I thank him and his team for that. So there are other members of the team one, two, there is one more he has three. They are all there and in fact we now have the capability to conduct two simultaneous workshops from IIT. Sajjan has built both the team and the equipment will be doing that. You would also agree that at the back end apart from the technical and the video team you would all have a whole lot of administrative activities and financial activities that are going on. And finally the content related activities where we have to put these contents together and release them again in open source. So we have senior managers helping us Dr Mukta Atre. Mukta can you just raise your hand? Many of you would be familiar with her particularly the remote center coordinators who have to constantly interact with her. Kalpana who is our manager in charge of all contents. So immediately after this workshop she will be collecting everything putting that together. We have Satyajit Gopi who is a senior manager in charge of all of our technical staff. He is people are also busy in developing certain interesting things like the clicker devices which are interactive classroom response systems which will be releasing in open source. And also a tool called proximity which will permit editing of audio video lectures and make them in form of interactive e-learning material. So these are the activities that are going on here. I have here Nagesh Karmari he is the senior research associate along with Thiruza is not here. They would also be in charge of the content editing whenever the contents get in there. One important Mahendra Parmar is the junior manager in the admin team. I hope all the participating teachers can understand that when 600, 800, 1000 people have to register have to come together at 30 remote centers have to be paid money for their expenses. The whole lot of activities that are required is assisted by another important person particularly handling all the finance matters I call her my finance minister Mrs. Jaya Gayatunde she is not here today but it is thanks to her that we had absolutely smooth operations because lot of money has to be actually sent as advance accounts have to be settled and you know how the government machinery work every paisa that is spent has to be accounted for properly and in a timely fashion. She helps us in of course all of our remote center coordinators help us by settling these matters in time. So, that is all I had to say finally. So, may I request Mr. Kannan Mavgalya to come here you are the coordinator of all the national mission projects here the creator of everything. Thank you so much. Mr. Prabhu thank you so much for doing a good job. Thank you Mr. Madhu Belur. They said they are not in the computer science department but I have an open offer for them whenever they wish to join computer science department they are welcome. Thank you so much and we will meet soon again for some other workshops. Thank you and goodbye.