 Good morning. I am Deepak Phatak, a teacher here at IIT Bombay and the coordinator of the Akash project. I am also the coordinator of a project called trained 10,000 teachers as a time. I welcome all the student participants to this workshop, ordinarily we hold these training workshops for the benefit of teachers. But knowing the importance of the Akash related developmental activities we decided that we will conduct workshop for students who are studying at one of the designated Akash project centers. I was quite surprised when I found out that almost 30,000 students have registered for this course. It was very obvious that all 30,000 students could not have belonged to these 250 colleges and therefore several students from other colleges would have registered. Since we had announced that this workshop is meant only for the students from designated colleges, we had to refuse admission to several students of other colleges as also to some students of these colleges because of the capacity constraint that we had. However, I am announcing now that we will be holding another workshop in which we will accommodate all the students who have registered for this workshop but could not be registered or could not be accommodated. We will conduct another workshop sometime in March, we will make an announcement, individual emails will go to all the students who had enrolled for this workshop so that if they wish they can attend. I am actually delighted to see tremendous interest. Nowhere I am aware of that more than 30,000 students registered for or enrolled for learning more on the android program development particularly for development of educational applications and contents for Akash. This is a unique workshop from another angle, ordinarily in any course of workshop teachers teach and participants who are either students or teachers learn. In this particular case the workshop teachers so to say are not faculty members from IIT Bomb. In fact, I will be the only faculty member that you will see occasionally during the workshop. All the other people who are conducting sessions in this workshop are people like you. Some are M. Tech students, many are project engineers who have participated in the development and therefore, they understand the integrity of development much better than many of us. So, this is a unique experiment I am doing. Please bear with us in the sense that since the people who will be talking to you about various subjects and topics are not accomplished teachers themselves but they are people who are experts in their own field who have done a lot of work on the specific topic that they will be discussing. I am sure you will enjoy it because I think you can relate more easily to these speakers because they are as I said like you and we would expect you to become like them and better in the coming days, months and years. I wanted to use these 10 minutes to share with you some of my thoughts, my vision and my concerns in the coming years about using information technology in the sphere of education. All of you would be aware of Akash project. In fact, most of the remote centers have somewhere between 40, 60, 80 tablets with them. Although at each remote center, I have noticed that there are more students than the tablets. Unfortunately, the tablet deliveries have been delayed. We will get the bulk of deliveries in the month of March which will be distributed to these colleges and to some other people. However, you will get a glimpse of what already works on Akash. The teams at IIT Bombay have developed a large number of educational applications and contents. They are all described on the web and they will be alluded to when my colleagues speak to you about these programs or these developed contents and applications. What is the idea in conducting this workshop for students? Well, we know that a majority of our students who are interested in android development are capable of contributing significantly to more educational applications and contents. In order to make sure that these applications and contents reach all the students independent of which level of education they are undergoing, we have decided that all applications developed through this project will be released in open source. Most of you would be familiar with open source. The particular type of open source license that we use is called creative commons license by attribution or CCBY. Under this license, if I develop a code, if I develop an application and release it, then the entire documentation of the application, the code that I have written and everything else around that including settings, etcetera, etcetera, will all release and is available freely for anybody in the world to download and start using. We believe that this kind of open sourcing would be a great initiator of large scale usage of these tablets in the education. There is one more thing that I would like to share with you and that is about the need for any technology that is used in education to be ubiquitous. This word ubiquitous may not be very well understood by many who have not come across it. So, let me describe it in simpler English. A ubiquitous technology means a technology which is always available anywhere, anytime and is always working and is guaranteed to work. A simple example of ubiquitous technology is the water supply piping that runs in our houses, in our institutions. When you open a tap, you expect water to flow out of it. Similarly, you consider electric wiring which connects fans, lights and everything to the source of electric power. Anytime you switch on a fan, the fan actually starts working. We depend on such things. We depend on such technology. We believe that technology is simple to use and whenever we wish to use it, it will work almost instantly and automatically. Why I say this is because the Akash tablet today or for that matter, any tablet like a computer is driven mostly by the software which is written for that tablet and that software often requires setting. For example, for the Akash tablet, you need to do the setting for Wi-Fi connectivity. You need to do the setting for language choice. You need to do the setting for graphics. You need to attach devices through USB, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. People like you are participating in this workshop who probably understand computers much better than most other would not mind doing so. In fact, that would be a very natural thing for most of you to do so. I would like you to realize that when you build applications, when you build contents, it is likely to be used by other students who are not as technology savvy as you are. Consequently, unless you make your application so easy to use, so automatic to launch, that the moment a student launches an application, it starts working. No matter whether it requires Wi-Fi connectivity, no matter whether it requires SD card or something, all of that is assumed to be made available as part of your application launch whenever a student gets an Akash tablet. The easier said than done, the Akash tablet as we claim very proudly that is the world's lowest priced tablet. We are paying 2263 rupees for that tablet. Unlike some of you might believe that these tablets are being given at 50 percent concession, etcetera. Let me hasten to add that the one lakh tablets that IIT Bombay is procuring are all paid for by the government. These are not to be given to students and teachers permanently. However, they will be issued much like books are issued from a book bank. So, a student who is doing for example, studying a course or a subject in a semester say there are 60 students in my class, all 60 would be given these tablets during the semester. At the end of the semester, they have to return back these tablets to the college and the college will use it for another subject in another semester and so on. The purpose of this experiment of one lakh tablets is to try and see whether we can use the very strong technical power that is represented by you, the students as well as the teaching community to develop additional useful applications which could be used by the larger body of students. And when I say that, I am not restricting myself to the engineering education. You would have your own colleagues from other disciplines such as civil engineering or chemical engineering, perhaps not all very savvy in writing programs in Java or JavaScript or not very well used to Android development, but they could be beneficiaries of the contents and applications that you develop. But do not forget also that there are a larger body of student, there is a larger body of student studying in other colleges such as arts, commerce and science colleges and they could also benefit tremendously from the educational applications and content. Additionally, there is a much larger body of students studying in high school, studying in middle school, studying in primary schools. Many of them study in Indian languages using their own native language. We desperately need applications and contents which are meaningful to these students. So for example, a fifth standard student in Andhra Pradesh should be able to study arithmetic in Telugu. A ninth standard student of science in Gujarat should be able to study science in Gujarati. A second standard student getting to know the Hindi alphabet in Uttar Pradesh should be able to study not necessarily only using books and notebooks and the slate and so on, but also using aakash where the way to write correctly, the way to read etcetera is emphasized using this tablet. As all of you know, the cell of PCs all over the world are dwindling and the tablet cells are picking up. It is a clear indication that globally tablets are going to be adopted by the entire society over the coming years. It does not mean that PCs will vanish just as the advent of PCs did not mean that servers vanish. If anything you require more servers and powerful servers to drive the back end applications, but the front end PC which used to work in our labs, which used to work in corporate offices is definitely going to give way to the use of tablets and its beginning will be with common people, common students and common business workers. It is towards this end that this workshop means a lot. You are actually spearheading a national attempt. I am sure that thousands of more students and developers will start working. Once the tablets become ubiquitous in the hands of students, a large number of commercial organizations and companies will jump into the fray. They will offer some very good products which may be priced, but they will add value to the education as well as to the usage of the tablets. While I have spoken about education, I must also tell you that these tablets can be used as front end devices in the hands of actual workers in other domains not necessarily students. We have for example successfully implemented Aadhaar authentication using Aakash tablets and the chairman of the national authority of unique identification, Mr. Nandan Nilekini has put several Aakash tablets in front of his office. All his staff actually give their fingerprints on a device attached to Aakash tablet and a daily attendance is recorded using the Aadhaar and authentication is done. We are also working on implementing some simple financial products such as banking software and so on and we are working closely with the financial sector people. There are several other applications which are possible, imagination is the limit. Indeed one of the objectives of this workshop is to kindle the imagination in you. I will be speaking to you often on for two or three minutes every day, but I will be making a major announcement on the last day of this workshop which I believe is the third of March. I just wanted to give you an introduction to that announcement. That announcement relates to a coding competition. All the participants of this workshop are eligible to participate in that coding competition. Within one month at the conclusion of this workshop teams of students, the teams could be a single percent team or up to four people. They have to form the teams during this workshop and that is why I am saying this now so that you can start formulating your teams. These teams will prepare one particular application of their choice, code it completely, document it properly, test it properly and submit it for evaluation. The top three submissions from each remote center will be given encouragement cash award of 5000 rupees, 3000 rupees and 2000 rupees each. Additionally we will collect all these three top entries from all 250 remote centers and collectively decide the top 50 entries in the country. Each of those will be additionally given an encouragement award of 10,000 rupees. I know money is not very important for people like you who are keen to do some creative work using coding, but I believe that this small gesture from IIT Bombay will act as an incentive for many of you to work harder and turn in the best possible applications. I think I will close now because it is 9.45. Incidentally IIT Bombay believes in executing events exactly as per the time schedule. You notice that the event started at 9.30 today. It will always start at 9.30 on all the days. It will hopefully end at 5.30 as we have missed. I am now glad to hand over the control of this workshop to my team. Can we just have a pan to the team members here? As you can see most of them wearing specially made aakash t-shirts. I have requested that I could also be given one. Can you open source the design so that the participating students can make these for themselves in the workshop where they are attending? We have the privilege of having Professor Kannan Mokgalya here. Professor Kannan Mokgalya by the way is the coordinator of all national vision projects on ICT and he also happens to be the main principal investigator of all the projects including the aakash project and the talk to a teacher workshop. So thank you Professor Kannan for being here. Thank you so much and all the best for this workshop.