 day here and along with me is Professor Santosh Narona and one or two others will join as the time proceeds. And even if they are not there, whatever justice we can do to any question here whether the topic was covered by Professor Narona or not, for example I have not talked about anything else, I have been more or less a pure coordinator but I would like to handle the topics if it is possible. So the first center we are visiting is 1034, the question is about whether if a research topic is new or that if no existing literature can be quickly determined for that topic and therefore it is not feasible to identify a gap in that topic, does one go ahead to doing work on that topic? The answer is if you have done a systematic literature search to the best of your ability and the result of that search is that there is indeed a gap in what is available in terms of a theory in that particular domain, then yes you can proceed to start doing research on that topic but of course you ought to be cautious in the sense that a literature search is not done once at the outset and then you work for a few years on that topic. You constantly update yourself in terms of repeating the research, repeating the literature search, many of the search engines for example Science Direct and several other publishers allow you to keep track of new articles published in a particular domain based on keywords. So what you ought to do is to set up all these alerts so that as and when publications come about in your area, you are able to quickly evaluate whether they infringe on your idea or whether it is a wide open gap still as far as what you are doing and therefore what you are concerned with. So in short it should be possible to proceed with the topic the moment you spot a gap. Okay, given to you one question from our center it is regarding how to get access to paid research paper. Okay, let me answer that I did not see it here in the how to sort out the problem of accessing a paid published journal paper. This is something which you have to take up with your management, we cannot help you in that and if there are a number of researchers in your place they come together and talk to the management then through the library you should be able to subscribe to a set of e-journals. I am told there is a your librarian will know about this there is also an e-consortium of libraries in India who have come together and subscribe to a set that is known as INDEST so please check that up your librarian should definitely know about this otherwise ask your librarian to contact the IIT Bombay Central Library librarian and they will get the information and if you search for in-desk on Google I think you will get some information okay. The place which I am trying to read the question from is 1047 that is SDM College of Engineering and Technology Darwat 1047. First question one question is is it compulsory that every teacher should do research some may be good teacher may not be a researcher. Now in an academic institution particularly reasonably higher level academic institution you will do both teaching as well as research and if our qualifications for some reason say that if not at the first level from the second level onwards every engineering college teacher should have a PhD and a PhD you know by very nature is thirsty for research program research work so it is expected that every teacher should do some research of course that does not mean it should be 50-50 those who are excellent in cheating and have their heart in it may spend more time on teaching less on research younger ones who are blue blooded should spend much more time on research than on teaching and this happens everywhere any comment. Yeah so I will add to that that the process of doing research usually makes you aware of advances in a field and that normally feeds back into your teaching anyway. So it is a good idea to keep track of the research literature so that you can improve the quality of your teaching and so invariably you will find that the best researchers also do good teaching and in turn that feeds into a cycle where you attract students to do good research because they are available to your college as students of your courses. Then the another question is guide without PhD qualifications but having vast teaching experience can guide the PhD student this used to happen may be half a century ago so nowadays it does not happen because vast teaching experience does not necessarily mean that you have relevant research experience or even the background to do good research projects and unless you have a background to do good research you should not be guiding research that is not a good idea. Then another question was that there is a huge gap with the ratio of aspirants outstripping the available guides. I think this is the situation today but then it is a question of slowly scaling up there was a time when perhaps PhD guides were available only in IITs and that to not all faculty members in IITs were PhDs but now I think all faculty members in IITs have PhDs there are guides with PhDs available, qualified people as guides available in many other places and I think if you chase your nearby professors enough you are likely to get a good guide comment. So I agree with that and increasing it is a question of not sticking to your narrow locality and looking further afield to try to see whether you can get opportunities in distant universities and distant IITs. So by and large the situation is improving and the idea is that with the next generation of faculty entering into your colleges with PhDs that will in turn increase the pool of recognized PhD holders who can then act as guides in your local universities. Let me take care of two more questions, these pertain to plagiarism, there are two questions on plagiarism and the first one is how do you make your thesis free from plagiarism. The best way to start with making something free from plagiarism is that when you did your initial literature search itself that you avoided plagiarizing contents out of papers in creating your initial report of an idea because invariably what happens is that that initial work makes its way into your progress reports and it persists and it finally becomes the main chapter, introductory chapter in your thesis and that is usually where the plagiarism happens. So plagiarism of course is of two types, one is where you take ideas as text and you lift it out of papers because that turns out to be the motivation for doing a particular kind of work and the second type of plagiarism is where you lift data sets from different papers, publications and then pretend that that's your own work. So I'm referring really to the first situation where you're looking at lifting some concepts or themes from reviews let's say of the available literature at the point at which you started your thesis work and then these in turn because you don't go back to reading the original write-up end up remaining throughout the course of your thesis and end up forming a plagiarized piece of description of the motivation for your work. The follow-up question to this is is it necessary that your research papers also be free from plagiarism and the answer is obviously yes and you're not going to get a paper to remain in a journal if it's plagiarized in fact several papers are removed or retracted from journals the editors will force you to withdraw your paper from a journal if it is recognized that you're plagiarized even the introductory content of your paper leave alone the data in your paper. So the easiest way to therefore avoid temptation is not to start thinking of plagiarizing anything even if it's in the context of the motivating idea in your work and usually it starts with people saying that the idea is so well written up in a review paper that let me retain that in my initial report so avoid that temptation and the best thing to do is to read a review paper and immediately rewrite the basic ideas in your own words and make that the first motivating chapter in your progress reports. So we'll go over to SDM college Darwad do you have any follow-up comments. Sir I want to ask one more question it is very nice to be in the teaching profession and nice to be a teacher and a researcher and go to the elevation of the administrator but normally in the research line after we get some the qualification we'll be asked to take up the administration but whereas our academic activity will be hampered so is it right to shift to the administration line or to continue in the research line. I'll answer that because I have seen this happening and I think one of the reasons why this is happening in India today is that a large number of faculty members in engineering colleges have joined without a PhD qualification started working and have obtained their PhD qualification in their middle ages and that is the time when the administrators look for picking up a few from the teaching faculty into academic administration so I think it is just a accident that you complete your PhD and after a few years you are picked up by the management to do some administration. I think as many of us will start doing their PhDs at the beginning of their career this will not happen, every person, every teacher will get about 10-15 years of teaching come research only before any academic administrative duties are offered to him and her over 1063 Divya Patil College. I have picked up three questions from your question set is being a PhD holder important for doing a research. The question is I think as Professor Karmalkar has made it clear PhD is some sort of a qualification or a license to guide other people and once you do your PhD, you know you do PhD as a one man show but after that when you continue doing research that one man show is not sufficient you will not be satisfied by just working on your own and hence you need people to work with you on your research and the best people to work with you on your research are your students. So that is how all of us end up being guiding guides for PhD students okay and hence for a PhD holder it is important to do continue doing research otherwise you get a qualification which you will not really putting into use. Another question which I have picked up is do you think open source software just like Sylab and Linux should be compulsorily adopted by all Indian technical universities. I would say I would agree with you compulsorily, fully provided you adopt the word compulsorily adopted. I am fully agree and I think Professor Narona will also agree that open source software like Sylab, Linus, Lattec, there are many many we are just exposed to these recently should be adopted by all Indian technical universities it should be adopted by all forget even Indian technical universities okay. The adoption will take time because the proprietary software has already found its way everybody has made themselves comfortable with it and hence it takes some time for the open source software to gain mileage. The third one is why do the big Indian industries do not focus much on research work. I think it is a commercial techno-economical problem so I will try and add to what Professor Gaitunde just said about big Indian industries they actually do research work but not of the style that you and I are probably thinking about their research has to do with increasing the quality of their product marginally improving the efficiency of their production processes. So that kind of research is not necessarily towards a fundamental understanding of what governs the production process or what governs the science behind that particular process. So they are not trying to investigate at that level they are probably doing in some sense statistical optimization to try and improve the profit making that they are primarily interested in. So they are not driven necessarily by the need to understand or know what is behind what is behind in terms of physics chemistry or chemistry of a particular process. And in the sense that the big Indian industry is also competing these days with multinationals and the multinationals tend to have much deeper pockets to do fundamental research. If the big Indian industry is to stand out and survive then it has got to primarily spend its research funds on optimizing existing processes rather than inventing new ones. So we therefore have a practical scenario where most of the inventions still come from abroad but once they are invented and once processes come up we tend to innovate better in the sense of making more efficient processes and therefore taking over the manufacturing loads. So you will see that if you think of the pharma industry for example. Most drugs are discovered abroad but increasingly the manufacturing of these drugs happens in India and China. But that is not to say that the pharma companies here are not doing research, they are doing research but they are looking at improved and optimal manufacturing as opposed to inventing new things. 1064 is Dina Bandu Kothuram University of Science and Technology at Sonipath. There is only one question and related to a question which came up earlier and I just want to comment on it. The question is latech in bracket open source software with portability feature bracket close is not user friendly as MS office. Is there any effort going on to make it user friendly? Now I think my idea of user friendliness and other people's idea of user friendliness will differ. I get a feeling that many people think MS office is user friendly because they are already used to it. People who grow up in a particular language find that language even you know human language I am not talking of a language for making documentation. If they are used to it they will find that is user friendly and anything else is not user friendly. There are people who have grown in latech and they find latech to be pretty user friendly and they find MS office and other such stuff to be absolutely horrible to work with. So that is my comment and if you really want something where you want the visivic that is what you see is what you get type of feel then latech itself as a still front end a user friendly front end. Maybe it is user friendly for you called licks lyx and on any machine on which latech is installed it is easy to install licks. So why do not you try it out? It is the Trinathaji Institute. We will take two of your questions up. One is on whether there are limitations to the testing of a hypothesis and the answer is yes because that discussion I had about confidence intervals and the choice of critical level for confidence implies that any time you evaluate a hypothesis you expect that your measurements come close to some value of some parameter in your model and how close it is that you will tolerate for the hypothesis to be true is a function of that critical level alpha. So the procedure for testing a hypothesis basically if you remember involved choosing a value alpha that in turn limits your precision or effectively that in turn influences the significance of a hypothesis test. Now that is in the context of a hypothesis test being performed assuming that all else is fine which includes your choice of a hypothesis in the first place. Your second question has to do with what is the difference between a review paper, a conference paper and a journal article. So I am going to presume that by review paper you mean a review paper to a journal. So in a review paper to a journal you are basically reviewing the state of the art as carried out by other research groups in terms of novelty in a particular domain. So you are going to pick up a topic of interest and then you are going to systematically evaluate the research done by several other researchers and you will summarize it and the reason you are doing this is so that subsequent audiences for that work will have one convenient place to refer and cite when it comes to understanding the current state of the art and then therefore figuring out the gaps in the work which allows them to plan further research. The journal paper which is actually a research article has to do with you proposing a new idea typically and presenting evidence to confirm that new idea. So it is limited in scope to a small scientific topic and you take that up, present the data that you have collected and present a proof of that particular idea relative to what is already out there in the literature. On the other hand the conference paper is probably a work in progress and you are indicating to the world out there that there is an interesting idea to be worked upon and there is a certain solution strategy for it and you are presenting the initial evidence that you have available with you to prove or disprove that particular idea and so invariably the way to look at the conference paper is that it is the first time you are advertising your new idea out there to the public and based on invariably on the feedback that you will get at the conference you will likely be able to modify the hypothesis that you started off with, improve upon it or add additional experimental data and then end up getting a journal publication out of it. So in other words the conference paper should be thought of as a first step towards a much better systematic journal publication whereas the review paper has something else totally in mind which is to obtain an overview of the state of the art in a particular domain. So those were the two questions. So we will go over now to St. Francis Institute of Technology, Borivli. There is only one question which I have picked up from you or this thing. Research is an endless process but if we are doing PhD then how will we decide that this is the right time to submit the thesis. This actually is a decision jointly taken by the student as well as the teacher. Essentially it is a decision prompted by the student but essentially decided by the guide and depending on the type of work remember that some original idea, some new ground broken that is what is required for a PhD thesis and the guide has definitely a higher level of experience in deciding this. So essentially it is a call by the guide. Once it is sufficient then doing too much more is actually no good, your PhD thesis will become more and more stronger, thicker and thicker, heavier and heavier with more papers to back it up. But finally you will get just one PhD not two PhDs and even the guide will see that look after doing all this, his bio data gets increased just by one PhD. So from a guides point of view look at it like this if I have a big problem and I can chop it up into say three PhDs why not get then I will get credit for three PhDs. So I agree that research is an endless process but PhD is one small step in that long chain of endless process. I think that satisfies you. Any comment on this particular question? Suppose I want to publish one paper what if good journal are taking long time for publication and during it may happen that my original work suppose I have mentioned future work in previous paper based on that if somebody else is referring my papers and if I am putting my journal for publication in some other high impact journal and during that period if somebody else is publishing that work or related to that same idea then in that case what one should do or what will be the author's responsibility. I think your question is that should you wait a long time to get your work published in a very high impact journal but which requires a long waiting time. There are journals which have a total of three or four years of waiting time or you should publish it in a low impact journal which reviews it well but publishes it quickly. My personal thing is if the journal is a journal of repute do not go purely by the impact factor. In your field if it is a journal of repute and you will find that and if you find that many of your references for your paper are from that journal then do publish it in that journal. It is just no point making a prestige issue and trying to aim at absolutely unique journals. Of course if you really have a groundbreaking work well it will eventually get published in a unique journal. I would agree with that if there is the intention to be in the domain for a long time it is to your advantage to be known for having published in a good journal in which case you may have to have the patience and the nerves to wait it out till you finally get your publication out but there is a risk of somebody else picking up your ideas and working on it is not necessarily restricted to getting hints from a publication. It is possible that other people and there are large numbers of researchers out there so it is possible that regardless of seeing the idea from your publication that somebody else may end up publishing in the meantime. So when it comes to doing your work you have no choice but to presume that somebody or the other out there will end up scooping you with your work and so you have always got to feel the pressure of doing the work fast and getting it out in terms of a publication quickly. This is regarding ACAST, this is regarding ACAST Tablet. So in future everyone will have ACAST Tablet as per the vision of IIT and MHRD and my question is related to electronic waste. How the government or IITs are going to manage the electronic waste that will be generated after the successful mass production of ACAST Tablet? I will quickly answer this question but I will comment that this has nothing to do with research methodology and the problem of electronic waste is not just because of ACAST Tablets so I will leave it at that and I will go to the next center which is only one question but it seems to be an interesting question which I have picked up. The center is 1096 Mahakal Institute of Technology Ujjain, they have a huge list of questions but I think I have picked up just one. Can at any point productivity and productivity approaches contradict each other? I think productivity is understood by reproductivity I think you mean reproducibility contradict each other and if I understand your question right you are putting productivity that means the final outcome or completion of research and reproducibility that means good research, good experiment which can be reproduced not only by you but by others they whether these things contradict each other. I think no I get a feeling that productivity is not that important as is reproducibility because reproducibility gives you the basis for your research. If your work is not reproducible then it is not good research work at all. I agree if you remember in the morning session I talked about problems with published research with several research works not being reproducible and this is despite the best intentions of the investigator. So in a sense the onus is on us as researchers to repeat the work and to make sure that the work can be independently reproduced by independent investigators and therefore the concepts that are being created out of your piece of work are indeed generic insights into a new domain 1097 Maharaja Institute of Technology Mysore the question which I have picked up is the following the university says that you need to define the problem initially but research is all about searching and researching with an initial assumption. I think what you mean is that maybe the university expects you to define the problem initially but it is a theme of the problem, it is a statement of the problem, it does not expect you to obtain the solution to begin with, the solution to that problem is obtained as you you know continue with the research and when you obtain a solution and demonstrate that it is a proper solution, I will not use the word the solution is the complete solution or even a feasible solution, it is a proper solution, well your PhD is over, what you have to define initially is state the problem and state the theme for your problem. So I agree with that and I will add to that that the trick usually is that you define a very generic statement in a field of interest as your initial problem and of course that will probably satisfy your administrators in terms of the need to define a problem but invariably as you point out as you go along you will understand insights and of course new insights will come along the way in terms of other publications which may force you to modify your plan of research and consequently it is possible at the end of the work that you may end up presenting a thesis which is unrelated to what your initial idea was as to how things would work out and on the one hand you have got to be acknowledging the need for a problem to be defined which justifies a university investing in you as a student engaging in a research problem but on the other hand you want the flexibility of being able to modify this, so it comes down almost to the writing of a thesis topic. So how do you define the topic? Keep two very general terms. For example if I am going to talk about coming up with a specific vaccine for malaria I will say that at the outside of my PhD thesis that I am going to try and develop the focus of my work will be on developing a vaccine for malaria. Now what exactly a vaccine for malaria means need not bother administrators. To figure out what this vaccine is you are going to have to do a great deal of reading and figure out specifically which kind of protein you will end up making as a vaccine for malaria and for that you need a lot of domain knowledge. So in other words define the problem broadly in the beginning and then as a part of your work you will end up having to define it and maybe redefine it as a field advances. So I do not see that it is necessarily a problem it usually comes down to how you cautiously draft the framing of your problem. Any comments? Regarding the second question sir industry does not consider the PhD as a requirement or what could be the reason for this sir? This is related to the kind of research that industry does. I will take one example for example Pharma again closer to what I work with and it will turn out that if Pharma company wants to recruit scientists that they probably are interested in a younger set of people who will learn some skills along the way which would be different than the skills gained by a PhD student. So where the PhD candidate learns to do independent research to formulate a problem to take on a methodology and then end up at a solution the industry employee instead picks up knowledge about the day to day practices in the industry what it takes to abide by government regulations, how to read the patent literature which is the sort of thing university researcher pays less attention to and so on. So the objectives are different the objectives between the two opportunities are different. So industry is focused more on profitability and they will train people in terms of reproducible manufacturing and these are skills which you do not necessarily gain in the university. So the mindset is that it is easier inherently to recruit fresh undergraduates out of a college and then give them this training in the industry itself as a kind of finishing school because this kind of training is not what the university will spend time on because university is focused on training minds in the sense of open thinking open ended thinking towards solving open ended problems whereas industry is not really too keen on solving highly open ended problems. Okay sir thank you sir. I am now going to 1107 Ullima group of institutions by 4. There are a few questions here. The first two questions pertain to mathematics. What concept of mathematics does a doctoral scholar needs to begin with? Is it necessary to include mathematical model in the doctoral thesis? Now remember for any purpose research or otherwise mathematics is a tool unless of course you are a mathematician in which case developing those tools and associated analysis is part of your job. If you are not a mathematician, if you are an engineer or any other type of scientist then for them and for us mathematics is a tool and depending on the type of research problem you have at your hand. Maybe sometimes elementary school mathematics will do otherwise at some level very esoteric mathematics may be needed and you may have to get the help of a mathematician to develop even appropriate tools for you. And similarly the second question is it necessary to include the mathematical model in the doctoral thesis? If it is a routine mathematical set of tools that you are using there is no need to include it but you have modified something or if you have combined tools in a novel way then it may be appropriate to include it. You and your thesis supervisor should decide whether what you have done with the mathematical tools is reasonably original or unique enough to be included in the doctoral thesis because what goes in the doctoral thesis apart from the review of literature is something for which you claim academic credit. So if you have used mathematical tools in a way that you would, they are something different, they are novel, they are unique and you want to claim academic credit for it then do include them otherwise there is no need to include them just refer to them. The third question whether experimental research or theoretical research which is more important as far as doctoral research work is concerned and what is the percentage weightage? There is no such thing as more important for experimental work or more important for theoretical research. It all depends on the problems and you go from 0% of 1 to 0% of other the whole spectrum exists. Let me look at all four and then I will give it to Professor Narona. What should be the depth of work at PG and PhD level? Any demarcation to stop the work? By PG level I think you mean the M-tech or M-fill level. Well that is M-tech and M-fill level is further learning and exposure to research methodology. You do a small project but you do not do a complete thesis. Whereas PhD means almost full time for 3 to 4 years you are engaged in research and nothing else. You essentially take some NASA from the other aspects of your life. The demarcation to stop the work I think that has been discussed earlier. Now I will pass on to Professor Narona. I will just add on to what Professor Gaitonde said with an analogy. Think that you are making a movie. If you are making a movie the question basically now is how many fight scenes will you have in that movie and is it necessary to make a movie by having at least one fight scene? The answer is no. So when you ask is it necessary to have a mathematical model in a thesis or the compulsory part of a thesis? The answer is no. It comes down to the story that you are trying to convey and it may turn out that you have got a perfectly good story to say without using mathematics in there at all. And as far as weightage is concerned there is no formula for how much of a fight scene or how much of a song and dance scene you need per movie. So in the same way it depends on whatever story you say and therefore it will turn out that finally to make one sensible story that you may need a certain proportion of mathematical modeling of experimental work and finally some discussion around both to be able to ultimately shed light on a particular problem. Now I am at R C Patel Kirtpur and I have picked up just one of your questions. Can any patent be treated as PhD work? The simple answer to this is no. Patent is an entirely different track. PhD is an entirely different track. It is only rarely that you will find that work which goes into a PhD thesis is essentially the same thing that goes into a patent application. This is definitely true in almost all branches of engineering. Definitely in mechanical engineering my field but I will ask Professor Narona to comment on it from the IO point of view. So I agree with that and remember I think when you talk about patents you are probably implying that you have applied for a patent and therefore you feel it is a measure of productivity. But just remember that anybody can apply for a patent. Just because you have applied for a patent doesn't imply that that patent will be granted and of course granting a patent is going to take a lot of time in terms of reviewing the work done in the patent and reviewing the novelty of the idea and the contribution you have created. So while a patent once granted is a sign of contribution to the field it does not necessarily mean basically my response. The discussion was about whether patents could be treated as PhD work and the quick answer is no and the reason it cannot be treated as an immediate contribution towards a PhD is because a patent application can be filed by anybody on any idea without necessarily technical merit. So in other words a patent application takes a while to be examined and finally for a patent to be awarded. So until it goes through that process there is no evidence that it is a systematic piece of work. So a second issue with patents is that the moment you get a preliminary feel for a particular topic you are now in a position that you can go out and apply for a patent. Whereas in a PhD it's usually a requirement that you systematically analyze that particular domain and come up with explanations for the observation that you are seeing. So in a patent you have no requirement to necessarily explain every single thing that you see. Instead the focus is on identifying what is novel and immediately asking for patent protection for that novelty. In a thesis you will be asked to provide more explanations in detail. So invariably a PhD thesis is at a much further detail level than any patent proposal would be. I have now picked up the question here from 1125, Turbo Machinery Institute of Technology and Science, Patancheru, Hyderabad. The one question which I have picked up, which caught my eye, is there any possibility of doing research without a guide? The possibility exists. But that's like an athlete training without a coach. The athlete doesn't know whether he's taking the proper steps and moving the muscles in appropriate order, in appropriate directions. So maybe in the early days when doing PhD in a particular field was a very, very rare thing, many, many of them would have done PhD without a guide. But those were sort of trail brazers. Now that everything is more or less formalized at all places. It's always good to do research with a guide. Other than guide you should say a supervisor or even a mentor who will see to it that you are not going off at a tangent at any level. Now the next two questions which have turned up have nothing to do with research as such. But they are something to do with the administration of academic institutions and management. But let's take a few of them, good as a distraction. So I'm going to 1131, Valchand Institute of Technology, Solapur. The question is whether it is good to have a common technical university for a state and a common technical university for the nation. Here see, it's like at what level are we talking about? If you say that if we need a common standard examination for evaluating 12 standard students, I think the answer may be yes. But when it comes to a technical university for a state, I get a feeling that some variation from place to place is necessary. So technical university for the nation is definitely a no-no. Technical university for a state at least in my personal opinion is not recommended. But that doesn't mean that you should not have a standard format. I mean everybody agrees that we should have a four-year BTEC or a BE program. Each year should have two semesters and each semester should have maybe five lecture courses and four or five labs. And we should have so much of mathematics, so much of basic science, so much of engineering science, so much of applied science and so much of creative stuff like seminars, review papers and projects and such stuff. But a common technical university which would paint each and every engineering college with the same paint and the same brush and the same color, I don't think that is really recommended. Naron has taken this. So I agree with that and I think it's a bad idea for academic institutes to all conform to a common framework, whether it's a syllabus or whether it's even administration. In fact academia is where you want as much diversity in opinion and belief systems because that's what academia fundamentally is. You have different types of people coming in and their ideas compete and in doing so new theories and science happens. So the moment you kind of constrain it to happen in a certain fashion, you're limiting the quality of whatever comes out of that particular university. So that's one reason why it's not a good idea. A second reason why it's not a good idea is because any time you have one single framework for everything to happen, it becomes very sluggish. So if for instance a new field suddenly comes up and it's an important domain and it's important for universities to adapt to doing work in this domain, it's very difficult for one common university to quickly arise at a particular consensus on how to do this across the entire country. So it's good to leave it to individual universities to figure out what's best for them in terms of the local population, in terms of local interests, in terms of academics. And if there is enough of a quality issue, sooner or later the students will flock towards a good university and then there's pressure on the other universities to standardize their syllabus and come up to the level of the good universities anyway. So in that sense that conformity should happen by competition rather than it being enforced by administrative will power. Some sort of natural selection survival of the fittest and extinction of the weakest or improper. That should happen. Any follow-up? But it is already implemented in some of the states like Karnataka. They are maintaining the standards. What I mean to say the other side of the particularly for smaller universities or particularly universities for single or two districts, even though they are new and they are maintaining the standard for their education but they are not very well accepted nationwide. And only the traditional universities like Pune, Mumbai and other university students are getting the jobs. And this difference can be eliminated only and only when the common university will be there at least for the state. And it will be ideal if it will be go for the zone may be south, north, east, west and it will be very ideal if it goes to the nation itself. So please comment on the same why it is differentiate difference one to implement the common university for Karnataka state and other state and it is not going to be implemented for some of the states whether it is politically motivated and if it is so why it is not to be implemented for elsewhere. Thank you Sir. Over and out. Before going out I will just say that we are now entering the domain of political discussions. So I will not comment on it. Thank you anyway. Government engineering college, Udupi. I have picked up your first question. This is not a question. This is a statement that you have made. In fact you have made a number of statements. The first statement I am converting into a discussion point. Clustering of faculty, students, departments in various institutions in particular area of research in order to produce better output. This is a very good idea particularly if you are from a small place where only a small set of researchers or faculty students work on a particular problem then you are in a sort of a cloistered thing. It is good to have your ideas sounded with other people. So there is absolutely no reason why you should not cluster yourself together along with a few like-minded people nearby. And I am sure this is happening in many, many fields. I agree and if it is not happening it is a matter of holding workshops and conferences in these domains and automatically researchers in a neighborhood will be able to come together to discuss those particular topics and in doing so there will be some cross-pollination of ideas which will result. Is there a follow-up comment? Actually our suggestion is whether IIT Mumbai, IIT Bombay can take the lead role in clustering this. Well IIT Bombay cannot, I cannot say what IIT Bombay will do but you can use the open forum in the moodle on this to start a small cluster yourself. It is necessary that the cluster be such. It need not be physically near each other but at least you should be from a communication point of view be quick in communicating with each other. Special interest groups can be formed and there are such special interest groups already on the Indian scene. There are but they could be better publicized. 1169, this is Cape Institute of Technology, Tirunelveli. Well you have about two dozen questions. I have picked up just one. Others are more nitty-gritty about Sylab, Latek and things like that. One question is, is there any standard for placing diagrams in PPT? You mean, is there any standard for placing diagrams on a slide? The answer is well, there is no standard as such unless you create your own. But there are some good practices. For example, when you put diagrams on a slide, unless it is a very simple sketch like that of CH4 molecule and C2H6 molecule or something like that, you should have just one figure on a slide and it should be very clear because although something which is printed in front of us is clear to us, something which is projected on a screen or as in case of this workshop transmitted across thousands of kilometers may not be at sharp and clear. So the figure should be simple, figure should be uncluttered and just the amount of graphical information that is needed to make the point. I am taking the question from the audience. V. I. N. I. T. Nakpur, any question? Quick. What are the steps to be followed by pursuing postdoctoral course in their specific research methodology? Yeah, so the question was about what is involved in doing a postdoctoral piece of work relative to a PhD thesis. The expectation in general in a postdoctoral fellowship is that you are already trained in a certain area and that therefore you are very quickly going to get down to figuring out the cause of a particular phenomenon or you are very quickly going to implement something that you have picked up during your PhD in terms of generating a new technology. So it comes down to essentially implementation at a very high speed relative to the rate at which you implemented or learned something during the PhD. So in the PhD invariably there is a tolerance by the supervisor for that learning curve that a PhD candidate would go through. So the initial years of a PhD go into understanding the basics of research methodology in that particular area. With the postdoc there is no such expectation. You are expected to be reasonably productive right from the beginning because you have already been trained in that area and therefore the expectation is that you will do about do more or less in one year what you would have done in 4 to 5 years of a PhD. So it comes down to having understood what it takes to start a problem and quickly implement a solution and that can only happen if you have been trained in a PhD. The question is why all the sessions the very important ingredients in research which is a mathematical modeling at least in engineering domain that is missed. Yeah so the first there were a couple of comments in there which I will repeat. The first had to do with the need for mathematical modeling in research methodology and we have answered that in a response to a different question a little earlier which is that not every thesis needs to have a mathematical model in it. It really depends on the domain, it depends on the question being asked and it depends on what level of insight is desired to be gained. In engineering thesis for the most part a mathematical model or at least acknowledgement of mathematical models may turn out to be necessary but in general I do not think it is mandatory that you have a mathematical model. Now that said the need for mathematical modeling and the approach to mathematical modeling is something that any good engineering PhD student must gain. So if that was your comment we are in agreement with you. How can the results expressed theoretically can be verified? Well you need to do an experiment for that and of course the nature of that experiment is a function of that domain you are in and the theory that you are proposing. So the first thing to do is that if you have got some theory which you have set up then you have got to be asking what does the theory predict under different circumstances with different assumptions. So the hallmark of a good theory is that it is able to predict several different circumstances several different results as a function of different starting experimental conditions and once you have a collection of such predictions you then try to aim to do such experiments in a real lab and then of course you enter into an iterative process where you ask whether your experimental results match with your theory and if they work well and good if they do not you need to go back and revise your theory and improve the assumptions that go into the forming of your theory. So the first step is that you have got to make predictions of a certain sort with a certain theory. Sir actually by heat and trial we also get the results out right? Yeah so if you are now asking of doing research in a very stochastic mode as it is called so where you try randomly to evaluate different experimental circumstances then yes but once again there the objective is not necessarily to simply look at things in a random context because remember the highlight of my sessions has been that you might see certain outcomes as a function of chance okay. So if you wish to say in a robust sense that what you are seeing is a reproducible phenomena chances are that you need to repeat those specific experiments and reproduce those specific results before claiming that they are the outcome of some rigorous experimentation. I have got a theoretical formula wherein I have got this by I don't know how by opportunity or by heat and trial method I have got that as organizational performance OP is equal to TRIKS so this is something which is a theoretical result. So what your basic implied is that you have inspected a lot of data and you have mined out of that data a relationship between a pair of variables that's good for you but if you think that's a relationship that holds and it's for you to try to prove that theory by asking how it predicts different situations. Yes the question was what is the difference between citation index and H index and there are a couple of questions along these lines from other centers as well so the citation index first and that's basically a measure of how popular a particular article is in the context of other follow-up pieces of work citing an original article. So the citation index ultimately is a measure of how many times a particular article is cited so indirectly is a reflection of the importance of that particular piece of work. The H index on the other hand talks about the popularity of a set of works done by a particular researcher so the H index for a particular researcher offer that matter for a particular institute or department reflects the number of popular articles which have been cited by other researchers coming out of that particular researcher. So the H index takes on a value H if there have been H citations being made to H articles each. So take H articles by a particular researcher and each of those H articles in turn has been cited H time. So that is the H index so basically it implies that a large if H is large it implies that a large number of articles are being cited multiple times each and therefore is a reflection of the fact that good work is coming out of that particular lab. So the citation index refers to one particular article the H index is a measure of how many good articles have come out which have been cited several times across different journal articles. So Rajaram Bhappi Institute of Technology Islampur. Good evening sir my question is how short length papers are different from full length paper in publication. See there is a paper is a paper there is no such thing as a short length paper or a long length paper. However many feeds and many journals which have you know quick for dissemination of quick developments do allow publications of short communications or quick papers. They go through a quick review and they are published. So this is when you have something very significant but significant enough so that you do not want to publish in a conference or you do not want to wait for a conference but you want to see it in print in a reasonably reputed journal. So quite often these are the short papers. Otherwise there is nothing special about a short paper. Usually most of the papers which we refer to are full length papers which are typically 8 to 10 pages in a printed journal. Of course there are other things like communications or letters to the editor or comments on papers. Those are also short papers but those are of a different kind. Over. One more question is there which is the best method for citing the references in technical papers because many journals have their own guidelines for citing the references but still I would like to know which is the best which should be there used in a particular thesis, a PhD thesis etc. You see there is no such thing as a best method of citation. The requirement is that a citation should be complete. Complete in the sense that the name of the author, the title of the paper, the if it is a journal paper, the name of the journal, volume number, if volume number, page number and if the page numbers are not unique across volume numbers they differ from volume, issue to issue then volume number, issue number, page number. Year of publication. This is reasonably complete for a journal paper. For a conference paper there will be a slightly different format. Now each and every journal and each and every conference and even each and every publication. Suppose you have a review paper which goes in a proceedings or a book form. They will have their own method of citation which the editorial board will decide. Sometimes it will be alphabetically by author and to be here to be referred to as Karmalkar 1997 for example. Otherwise it will be by the first reference should be cited as reference 1, the second reference should be reference 2 and then you put it in that order. You have to follow that. I know there are some journals which just for the sake of compactness do not even allow the title of the paper to be put in. Because that you know if you are referring to 20 papers, if you remove titles you are saving may be some 10 column centimeters of real estate for that conference or the journal. Over. In page it says, is it necessary to write the future scope for the study undertaken? See the any research work and the PhD thesis is demonstration of a research work. It is never complete as in movies say even at the end of the movie picture abhi baaki hai. So the future work indicates that look I have not closed my thinking process, stopped my thinking process here. What I have provided is reasonably complete for the purpose of obtaining a PhD degree and defending my thesis. But I know that there are some you know interesting side issues or interesting further insights which could be gained and those are listed out. And usually when that happens the professor or the supervisor with whom you are working already had some PhD or M. Tech student exploring those things. So it is just a tradition that scope of future work is included in any thesis. Thank you.