 Good morning and welcome back to the first session. Let me go on with the topic for the first session. First of all, let me tell you about the Akash project itself. Akash is the name of a tablet. This is the tablet. I have connected it to demonstrate subsequently the desktop of this tablet. At the back, you will find a small logo which we have pasted on the top is a serial number. This is the serial number which identifies each tablet individually. The last four digits of the number is a serial number at a center. The first four digits represent the code of your remote center. As you know, there are more than 250 remote centers and these first four digits will identify your remote center and the last four digits will identify a serial number of the tablet within your remote center. These tablets, I will mention more details about it. These tablets, so let me very briefly recount the history of the tablets. All of you are familiar with PCs, desktop computers which you use extensively and all of you would be familiar with cell phones. This is a cell phone for example. It also runs Android today, but original cell phones ran specific operating systems pertaining to their manufacturers. The desktop computers as you know will typically run a version of the standard operating system such as Microsoft Windows or Linux operating system or Apple OS and such operating system. Now the evolution of tablet is really a representative of the confluence of these two completely independent technology. The telephone technology which has evolved into cell phones and the computer technology which has evolved first into desktop PCs and then into laptops and then into net box. It is very important to understand a desktop and a phone. The objective of these two things are completely different. A desktop or a computer is used primarily for information processing. So all the programs that our students and other professionals write they work either on these desktops or on the back end servers to which these desktops are connected by the network and you can do variety of things. Individually you can do work processing on such desktop, but collectively with the back end servers you can actually carry out a whole lot of distributed transactions. For example, it is possible to do a railway reservation, it is possible to do a banking transaction, it is possible to purchase books, it is possible to do so many business transactions using the PCs which are networked together. On the other hand the primary purpose of the telephone was to talk to people. So voice communication was the major aspect of a telephone. Now what happened is that the telephones were necessarily connected by the way whereas a computer is useful even without any network connection the telephone does not work without a connection and that is why voice communication automatically entails what is traditionally known as a voice network. Now as you know the telephones became digital first the networks also permitted accessing variety of other functions. So these resulted into what we call smartphones. So the smartphones cannot only be used for voice communication, but they can also be used for surfing nets, you can do chat and you can additionally do some limited information processing such as creating notes, exchanging notes etcetera etcetera and of course the SMS which is the text best messaging. The SMS actually happened somewhere here itself right at the beginning. So this is how the phone world has evolved. On the other hand the desktop world which is connected at the back end through a network to large servers these have now evolved into what we call laptops and these have now evolved into networks. So basically what has been happening is that the computers have been becoming smaller and smaller and smaller in size quite powerful though, but these have become mobile. So using for example a 2G or a 3G dongle is called a dongle but it is a 2G 3G connection which is which makes it possible for your network to connect to the rest of the world. As a result whether it is surfing the net whether it is chatting or whether it is exchanging any information and in fact doing all the other tasks which this computer was traditionally doing is now possible on these. And in my opinion it is the confluence of this and this which has resulted into the world of tablets. This is one of the reasons that not only I but many many other experts across the world believe that in tomorrow's time increasingly people will use tablets both in leave of a conventional desktop and in leave of the conventional phone. You will notice that throughout the globe the sale of PCs is dwindling and the sale of tablets has been increasing. The sale of cell phones has not decreased of course because that proliferation is still happening but increasingly people are buying tablets with smartphone capabilities. The first major tablet announcement was done by Apple when it introduced their iPad. You will remember that iPad was introduced just in 2010. Immediately this was followed by announcement of many many tablets and our tablet Akash is one of such developments. Let me very briefly tell you about Akash before I proceed further. In October 2011 government of India launched Akash one. The project was initiated several months earlier and the purpose was to provide an affordable tablet to people. It was actually called L CAD. The word L CAD has a very interesting expansion. It is low cost excess cum computing device. It is a very complicated word low cost excess cum computing device. This is to emphasize that it is not merely a device which can access internet and can show contents but it is a full-fledged computer. This at that time was priced around US dollars 49.5. In October 2011 this was the lowest price tablet available in the world and we called it as the Indian innovative solution to permit affordable computers in the hands of our students. When the project came to IIT Bombay in April 2012 we renegotiated the specifications of this tablet and what you have today in your hands is called Akash too. These tablets are being procured by IIT Bombay at a price of rupees 2263. Of course this is not the market price. I would also like to mention that many people confuse these Akash two tablets with the subsidized tablets which the government of India is going to offer to the students. Akash two tablets do not fall under that category. Akash two tablets are being procured by IIT Bombay. We have a mandate of procuring 100,000 tablets and these are for use in engineering education. The entire cost of these tablets is being paid for by the government of India. We have received those grants. That means the tablets which are procured under this project shall perpetually remain the property of IIT Bombay on behalf of the government of India. The tablets which are being issued to the colleges which are partnering with us and through them to their students and teachers will only be issued for the duration of the project. So these are not for permanent distribution to any individual. In your colleges these tablets will be forming something equivalent to a book bank just as books from your library are issued to you and whenever the objective of the usage of the book ends you return the back. Similarly the tablets will be issued to teachers and students and at the end of the project they will have to be returned back to the college. It is possible that teachers whom we have promised that they will all be given individual tablet at the end of successful completion of this workshop as long as they continue to serve in that college the tablet shall remain with them. But if for any reason they leave the institute to go and join some other institute they must return this tablet to that college and then only leave. We are imposing a charge of rupees 5000 for any tablet that is lost by anyone. An appropriate formal letter will go to all the remote center coordinators. Frankly we are not interested in recovering any money but this is must to ensure something like a deterrent for people to be careful about the tablets which are issued to them. Now let me tell you about this project. The project itself envisages that IIT Bombay attempts to incorporate the AKASH tablets in engineering education. Now you will all agree that while we continue to do research on the educational usage of AKASH the actual field deployment is only the real test of how these tablets will shape up. For this purpose what we have decided is that we will select certain partner colleges and will enthuse them to use these tablets both in the classroom environment for actual teaching of a course and also for encouraging their final year BE and ME students to work on developmental projects which will enhance the capability of AKASH tablets further. After this ambition we started asking all our remote centers as many of you would be aware IIT Bombay has been running 10,000 teacher program which is morphed into 10,000 teacher program. Now we had been increasing the number of remote centers. A total of 360 remote centers are identified with some of whom we are still carrying out our tests and so on. So we sent a request for partnering with us on AKASH project and about 250 centers 248 to be precise have agreed to be our partners. So these 248 colleges are now special institutions. These are our partners in the AKASH R&D project. This project will go on for two years. Each college will provide the following development and testing facilities. Number one they will teach one course, one subject every semester which means that from amongst the teachers who are attending this workshop we seek volunteers who are willing to use these tablets in their classroom starting next semester. Of course we will be able to provide the number of tablets for students of only one class. We are making a tentative provision of about 60 tablets for this purpose. So 60 AKASH tablets will be available with your remote centers to be issued to the 60 students who are learning a subject. When this course is taught the course will be taught in the normal fashion ordinarily but we would expect the volunteering teacher to try and use these tablets more effectively by putting a whole lot of contents including open source contents such as video lectures etcetera etcetera which are available. They will be installed on a server located in your college which can be accessed by these 60 students using Wi-Fi. Additionally as we will demonstrate later teachers will be able to conduct online quizzes. We have tried these clicker devices earlier in IIT and in every lecture of one hour we are able to conduct two or three quizzes so that the teacher knows immediately whether students have understood something or not. So this is the this is one of the objective. The second objective as I said is R and D projects. Now the word R and D might be a heavy word but effectively what we mean is final year projects of B and M tech students. Although we are a bit late I have been advised by many center coordinators that several of their final year students have actually started working on android related development and they can easily adapt their projects which is current which are currently going on with Aakash. Additionally I would expect the present third year students to undertake major projects in their next year the final year of their being told. We propose to make about 20 tablets available for this purpose. These are approximate numbers if a particular college tells us that they have 65 students in a division or a class or 70 students we will see whether we can accommodate that request. In general as a principal we propose to supply about 100 tablets to each partner college. You will ask me why 100 because the 60 and 20 add up to only 80. The objective is that there might be a few more students doing their final year projects or there might be few more students in a class. But additionally at least 10 tablets must be preserved as spare at any point in time and I will tell you the objective. The contract that we have with the supplier measures data when is that we have a one year warranty on these tablets. Please note that tablets like any other tablets that you purchase from market or force that you purchase from market come with a limited support warranty. If there is something wrong you have to take a device back to the supplier or a mechanic and get it repaired. On the other hand if our students are using them for regular classes and so on there cannot be any disruption in their activity. So what we are saying is that in case a tablet goes bad for some reason it should be returned to the coordinator and the coordinator should be able to immediately replace it by a working tablet. That is the reason why initially we are keeping a lot of 10 tablets as spare tablets in the hands of the Akash coordinator. The other tablets the remaining 10 tablets are to be used for compensating for additional numbers in these first two categories. So this is about the logistics. Now we will of course elaborate more on how these tablets are to be used and what are the kind of projects that can be done on these. But please note that these tablets currently run an operating system called android. We will talk more about it on how to use the android operating system effectively its version is called 4.0. Just for the benefit of those teachers who are attending who are learning about these tablet computers for the first time the Akash has a processor which runs at 1 gigahertz. It has 512 megabytes of RAM and it has a 7 inch capacitive touch screen. It has a battery which should last for about 3 hours. It has an SD card slot and it has a USB connector. You can connect an external keyboard on this USB connector. You can connect a external mouse. I will show you the purposes for which such mouse and keyboard can be used when we exploit Akash not as an excess device but as a computer device. The configuration which I just mentioned is adequate to run most of your normal needs on the tablet computers reasonably well. You will notice that we are justified in calling this particular Akash 2 version as the world's most affordable tablet in its class. Over the next two years we will constantly be in touch with you teachers through the Akash coordinator at your college and we will request the teachers to think about additional innovative ways of incorporating Akash into the educational framework. Let me mention something about this workshop itself. This workshop is the first of a series of such workshops which will be conducted. The present workshop is meant for teachers from 248 Akash project centers. The name Akash project center is a name that we have coined to represent those of our remote centers which have agreed to participate in Akash project. You will realize that there are about 4000 engineering colleges and students and teachers of those colleges may also wish to participate in some Akash related activity but we have a limited stock of tablets and therefore we have decided to start operations from these 248 Akash project centers. Over the next three months we propose to increase this number to about 400 by incorporating more remote centers and those of those additional remote centers which wish to become Akash project centers they are welcome to do that. As I said each of these colleges will get about 100 tablets for the work that I mentioned. There are some institutions which will be evolving as nodal centers in our workshop practice. There will be 10 such remote centers. We propose to put a relatively larger number of tablets to experiment what happens for example if an entire first year course for 600 or 800 students for BTEC or 400 students for ME is taught using these tablets. There will be 10 such nodal institutions. The identification process has begun. These will necessarily be government institutions because of a larger outlay in investment being made by the government in these remote centers but that is part of the another workshop project not related to Akash. However since Akash project is riding on the larger workshop project this is the arrangement we are doing. Now additionally we propose as follows and this is an information that I would like you to communicate to your colleagues and friends from other engineering colleges which are not part of this Akash project at the moment. We will be releasing an advertisement in newspapers asking for project proposals from individual student teams and teachers from all colleges. The letters will go to almost all 4000 colleges engineering colleges in the country. It is possible that a few students from these colleges might want to work on specific projects depending upon how good the proposal is and if the proposal is accepted each project team in any one of the college would be given up to 5 tablets. Now we have to handle the logistics of issuing these tablets so what we will do is once the project teams are selected from these colleges you can see that a total of 20,000 tablets in this fashion will reach out to students across almost all the engineering colleges that we have. However to coordinate these activities we will be requesting our existing Akash project centers to handle the liaison with the colleges selected in their region. I will mention much more about this in coming months and years but to begin with I am announcing that we are holding a 2 day workshop sorry it will be a 3 day workshop in the month of December on Android application development. This is meant for students, this is meant for technical staff and of course this is meant for those faculty members who are interested in Android related development. More such workshops will be in offering. We will continue to work on the Moodle site as well as an additional collaborative site which we are setting up through which interaction will continue between all the teachers amongst themselves, the students who will join this project eventually and of course the faculty and technical team at IIT Bombay. This then was the brief about the Akash project to conclude the Akash project is of 2 years duration out of which we have already spent first 6 months in ensuring that the tablets are specified to an acceptable level of technical capabilities which I just described that is the present capability by the way which was reached in our negotiations with the supplier on 14th August. That is one of the reasons why the deliveries have been delayed because we wanted the best tablets to reach in the hands of students. We have started receiving these tablets. I actually had desired that all the teachers who are participating in this workshop should have a tablet each in their hands. Unfortunately two things have happened instead of receiving 20,000 tablets which were planned we have just received about 10,000 or 15,000 and many of them are still in transit. The second thing which is a good problem to have is instead of having up to 10,000 teachers participating in this workshop we have more than 17,000 teachers participating. So what we have decided is for this workshop we will have limited tablets with each remote center probably 20 in some cases 40. I have requested the coordinators to issue these tablets strictly in the order of serial number of the enrollment number of the participants who have registered. These will be for the purpose of demonstration only for the next 2 days and those few faculty members at each center who receive these tablets are requested to share them with their colleagues who are participating in this workshop. All these tablets are required to be written to the Akash coordinator immediately after the workshop. The tablets which we have decided to give to every eligible participant and the eligible participant is simply defined as one who attends this workshop on both the days who completes the Moodle feedback come quiz which will be conducted tomorrow afternoon and who participates in successful completion of a team assignment which I shall describe later. The team assignment is to be submitted by designated teams which you yourself will form at your remote centers within 2 weeks after completion of the workshop. This is the standard practice in all our workshops only those faculty members who participate in the team assignment and complete the assignment successfully within 2 weeks of the completion of the workshop are given the IST certificate and all those faculty members who are eligible for getting an IST certificate are also eligible to be issued a tablet. Let me now come over to the demonstration of Akash educational applications. There are multiple sessions in this short session. I will just show you some very basic preliminary things that we have enabled the Akash tablet with. What I have done now is I have this Akash tablet. So, basically I wanted to show you the various controls available in the Akash tablet. As I told you the right hand side these white dots are the menu. Then when I press here I will be able to see all the applications application icons that are available. This is the back button. When I press this back button here I will go to the previous menu. So, just to tell you for example, this is how you press the buttons. You can go to any one of those applications that you see here. I will very briefly tell you about the applications that we have built. We will later on have enough time to discuss some of these applications in greater details. What we have done is we have captured the desktop on the Akash tablet onto a laptop machine. So, what you see is actually the screen that you will see in on the Akash tablets in your hands. So, this is the Akash application logo. This will show you Akash applications 1.0. This is a demonstration of the Akash applications and these are the main applications that we have developed here. 1 is called proximity for which a demonstration will be given in tomorrow's session by my colleague Parak Tivari who led the effort. This is a tool actually which we have been developing over last two and half years which permits creation of interactive lessons from conventional video recorded lectures. These interactive lessons then can be individually used by the teachers by loading them onto an Akash tablet. The clicker is the name of the application that I mentioned which permits you to conduct online real time quizzes. Again we propose to demonstrate this in greater detail subsequent. The robo application illustrates that the Akash can be used to control variety of instruments and gadgets through electronic means. This particular application was developed primarily by eight interns summer interns. These are students from colleges such as yours who had come over here in the summer and during the summer they developed this. This application has subsequently been refined by our team and presently it permits you to control the movement of a robo. The robo has a Wi-Fi camera on top of it and the camera captures the video stream which can be seen on your Akash tablet. We have demonstrated this robo control because the control signals move on network and internet is ubiquitous is available all over the world. A robo in our lab can be controlled from anybody in your college. We have shown this demonstration by controlling a robo in IIT lab from United States and Canada. It really does not matter where the Akash tablet is because the control comes out of the network. Proximity Wi-Fi is the same version as proximity as I mentioned the usage of interactive lessons. The difference is that the interactive lessons can be located on a common server in a college which can be accessed using Wi-Fi by a large number of students simultaneously. There is another project going on in IIT which is on creating educational animation. The software tool that is used nowadays is an open source tool called blender although the educational animations have been created by using flash and several other such technologies. All the educational animations are available under a repository called OSCAR. OSCAR is a project which is led by my colleague Professor Sridhar Iyer and over the last two years he has built a collaborative community across the country of students and teachers who have been contributing by making such animation for various levels of school and college education. All that we have done is we take that animation and make it available on the Akash tablet which means that you can actually take any animation educational animation from the OSCAR site or for that matter from any other place load it on to Akash and use it for your own educational purposes. Last but not the least we intend to compile a whole lot of educational contents and make it available on the Akash tablet. During one of these sessions I will tell you how it is simple to compile such contents provided either they are licensed for use on Akash tablet or they are in open source. Naturally at IIT Bombay our emphasis is on creating and collating all the open source contents which are available. The educational contents which can display not only text files but can actually display html contents and can even play video resources so we have the video contents, the html contents and the pdf contents. PDF is something that all of you would be familiar with what we have done as a demonstration we have created some pdf files which we have located which we have loaded already installed on these. When you click on a pdf file it will ask you what do you want to open it with adobe reader as you know is a standard tool which is used to read pdf files and you will see the pdf contents coming up on your screen. So for example what you are seeing is the capability of the capacitive touch screen where the entire lesson in pdf file is available you will see that this creates a fantastic possibility not only for engineering college students but students of all schools and high schools and other colleges. Consider for example that the Baal Bharati book in Telgo, Tamil, Hindi, Marathi, Gujarati instead of being carried in print a student will be able to carry it on the Akash tablet itself and SD card of even 2 GB capacity can actually contain pdf books for the entire education of the student from first standard to 11th standard. Now with this you open up tremendous possibilities of using Akash to display educational contents. PDF is only one way, IIT Bombay is also working on creating HTML contents and we are seeking partnerships with others. One important aspect which I did not stress in my earlier portion of the talk is that I would expect some of your students and some of the teachers to concentrate on creating useful applications educational applications and contents in Indian languages. There is a very specific reason to request this initiative. As you all know the knowledge contents which are available in internet for Indian students are mostly in English. There are hardly any contents in Indian languages. You will also agree that most of our talented young students study their primary school at least in their native language and many study in their native language even their middle and high school. It is therefore very very important that to all these students we make available Indian language contents. There are two shortfalls in this effort. One of course is the absence of contents in Indian languages. The second is the non-availability of good Indic fonts. We have some fonts which CDAC etc have developed but unfortunately they are not as per the standards that are required. We have recently discussed the possibility of contributions in this area and I am glad to mention that Google India has agreed to invest a lot of funds in developing multiple good quality fonts in Indian languages so that they will all work in Android tablets. They are not going to charge anything for it. Like us they have also agreed to release these fonts in open source under the Creative Commons license. I expect therefore that in coming months and years larger and larger contents in Indian languages would be available and we can make Aakash. I am pressing the back button by the way which you see at the bottom left here. So these were some of the applications. Thank you so much over and out.