 I would like to basically share my experiences in trying to spread SyLab within engineering curricula, within my own limited experience. This has brought up some questions which I would like to throw open to you. And what I speak of is mainly applicable to majority of the engineering colleges in India. It means it won't be applicable to institutions like IITs and IITs who are autonomous. One of the questions basically I would like to ask is can we make free, mature and versatile software tools such as SyLab, an integral part of the engineering curriculum. We have seen the presentations by the India team. We know what its capabilities are, but of course each person is looking for a different thing when he looks at SyLab. My view is entirely on teaching and my question is can we make it a part of the curriculum. We have gone through the basic presentations today, but at the cost of repetition, let me say these things again, is free of cost, high quality numerical algorithms and a built-in programming language, integrated graphics and graph plotting, a host of toolboxes to meet a host of needs, SyCos and the recent SyLab LabView integration, ability to integrate SyC and Fortran code into SyLab and most important of all, the access to the source code, which I think is very necessary for teachers and researchers. Again this is common knowledge where can SyLab be used and I look from a very selfish point of view, pedagogical tool, benefits of SyLab as a pedagogical tool may vary. The engineering curriculum, you may not be able to apply SyLab to every subject that you teach. But there are a large number of subjects where SyLab can make a huge impact, huge. And there may be others where it can only be a supplementing kind of thing. And of course there are many subjects where it may never be useful at all. But from a teaching point of view, its interactive mode will be very useful to the novice and the programmable mode will be able to satisfy the experienced user. And the ability of integrating Sy and Fortran code makes it the ideal tool for the researcher. So you have everything that you need as far as teaching and research is concerned. I just thought, let me make a small list of subjects where SyLab can make a huge impact again from my own limited experience civil engineering. I teach structural engineering. Matrix structural analysis is a standard subject in the undergraduate curriculum, numerical methods of course and the finite element method. And if you look at the postgraduate structural engineering curriculum, structural dynamics, optimization. And there are many streams outside my own view where I am sure it will make a huge impact you already see in the list of the streams. Let me give a few numbers, static sticks. India has about 1346 EICT recognized colleges. But 4.4 lakh students study in these colleges. This is the data taken from the AICT website. I understand it is as of 2005, so I think the numbers would have gone up by now. And these colleges contribute the bulk of the technical workforce of the country. But unfortunately, most of them work under the affiliating university model, wherein a central university decides the curriculum, conducts the examinations. And because of this, the teachers have a limited control over the content of the curriculum because it is prescribed by somebody else. You do not have freedom to introduce new things into it because it may not come into the exam system. Another examiner examining the student may not himself know what you have introduced. So there are many issues which are peculiar to the central affiliating system. I would also like to list why possibly Sylab or even MATLAB are not widely used in engineering colleges. One main obvious reason of course is it is not a part of the curriculum, it is not specified. And when it is not specified, possibly a teacher may not think of supplementing his teaching with this particular tool. And possibly one reason which inhibits use of MATLAB is the exorbitant cost, even when it is highly discounted for academic institutions. And as a result of this, either Sylab or MATLAB is mainly restricted to undergraduate student projects, postgraduate dissertations and possibly validation programs conducted within colleges. But if you look at the opportunities that are emerging and possibly that is one new thing that has to be grabbed, the engineering education scenario is changing rapidly. Most colleges and management are recognizing the need for bringing autonomy into the teaching. And therefore many of the universities are already planning, in fact many of them are already underway of granting academic autonomy to colleges. And it is intended that within five years most of these colleges would become autonomous working on their own. And here I think is the opportunity for bringing in tools like Sylab into teaching. Just to give an example, the Viseceraya Technological University, the central technical university in Karnataka, has about 130 engineering colleges. Recently it passed a statute wherein it will grant academic autonomy to its constituent colleges. The first phase of evaluating the colleges to find out whether they are fit for autonomy or not is already through. And possibly a few colleges will go into the autonomy mode starting from the coming academic year in 2007-08. So here is the opportunity. Question is how well prepared are we for this? So that means the faculty of these colleges will become autonomous, now will start designing their own curriculum. And here is an opportunity where people can bring in Sylab into their curriculum. But question is will they develop their own study material if it is to be a part of the curriculum? How will they do it? Will the students need an initial training before they can become effective in using Sylab? These are some of the questions that the teacher will have to answer. If you look at the Sylab website today and look at the contributed download section, the amount of material is huge. There are well over 15 categories for the documentation contributed by others. After the Sylab website was recently revamped, the link on the main page to the contributed downloads has vanished. So it becomes difficult for the people to look for the contributed downloads. And another problem that people who download these materials will face is that there is a consistency in the presentation of the documents. That is quite natural because the contributions come from all over the world. Maybe people speaking French, writing, trying to write in English. So there are all sorts of issues. But the amount of documentation is certainly appreciable. So going to the next question, then what do we need to do, where do we get started? Now if it is necessary for us to bring this into the curriculum, we have to convince the universities and the college management to adopt Sylab and not just Sylab but also the free and open source software technologies into their curriculum. What do we need to do for this? Do we need to have a national level pressure group who will take the lead? If you approach this university or the college, how do you convince this person? What is your unique selling proposition? How do you convince all the skeptics who feel that anything free really doesn't work and we should be looking at are there any precedents? I am aware that Anna University has a new initiative where they have brought in open source technologies into the curriculum but unfortunately I am not very well aware of their details. So I have a few propositions. It is already the engineering curriculum includes one subject in the first year where they are taught a C programming language and numerical methods. This I think is the ideal place where you can replace the C programming language with Sylab. But if you want to really convince the colleges regarding adopting Sylab as a part of the curriculum, then you need to have very good study materials already ready so that it eases the adoption into the curriculum. Let me go into the details of each one of the points. The first thing I think is to look at a list of the subjects where Sylab can make a huge impact, huge. Once such a list of subjects is identified arguably the best way to do it is to write a book but possibly we need not have to start there. We can adopt an existing textbook which is already familiar to the students as well as the teachers and possibly supplement that book with Sylab functions, documentation and so on. Second is to identify the subjects where possibly it does not make a direct impact but where Sylab can make a substantial helping hand. It can give a substantial helping hand. Possibly this is the area where you could write documents which the students or the teachers can study on their own which may not be a part of the direct part of the curriculum. But when it comes to the self-study, all experiments in distance education or self-study have not always been successful. So we need to do something more about that. So one way we can overcome the problem where you need to motivate the students or the faculty to learn on their own is to make the study material available in an effective way. There are a huge number of learning management systems, all of them in fact everything that I mentioned here except MATLAB are all free and open source software. Moodle, A-Tutor, Clarionline in fact the problem is to decide which one to choose. Based on pedagogical principles, all the LMSs are based on sound pedagogical principles. They are not some free tools somebody is throwing away. Where you can have self-paced learning, you can have continuous evaluation, you can have a complete activity report, the teacher can see exactly what student has seen what and there is a chance where you can have a collective learning, VIKI's and forums are building into such a software and you can even finish off with an online printed certificate. Another way in which you can distribute the materials is through institutional repositories and document management systems. The advantage they offer is that all the material that you put on these is searchable. That means the software basically looks at the content, indexes the content, not just the titles or the keywords that the author gives, the entire contents are indexed so that searching and identifying the documents that you are interested in is much more easy. Now the internet has brought in brand new ways of distributing materials. One example of course is lulu.com is an online printing and distribution service. You can distribute a material either in electronic form or print form. You can decide whether you want to give it a free, whether you want to charge for it, all your copyrights are protected. Now everything that I said is based on our own experience at our college. I just like to list this. We started off in 2004 writing a small tutorial. The purpose was to get the people going in the shortest amount of time. So this particular tutorial just contains mine tutorials over 11 pages, just a simple download and on lulu.com since November 2006 it has 3100 hits and 50 downloads. You will notice that most people visiting lulu are not interested in technical documents but still is a very good way of distribution. And this document is also available on the Saira website, the reason why I am here actually. And there was a small tutorial on matrix structural analysis of plane frame buildings. It used a available textbook as its base so that I need not write anything on the notations or the derivations, nothing to be done there. This is a Moodle in action where every teacher can construct his own course. This is the lulu web front and this is the wiki. So I would like to close what I have been saying. If Saira is to become more visible, more useful and a part of engineering curriculum, then we need to market it as well or better than the math works team. We need to build a community of Saira users that will help each other. That is the way the open source free and open source software has been snow-balling. We need to standardize on the materials, study materials that you distribute. It will have a better acceptability if there is a consistency in the materials that you put for others to download. If there is a heterogeneity in the material that you put out, it becomes difficult. We need to standardize on the online courses. If there are people who can contribute the online courses, possibly IIT Bombay or possibly Falaab itself will be able to put this on a learning management system on the internet so that those who are interested will learn with assistance. See, when you put information on the material for free download, how many of them will pursue it once they download is the question which we will never be able to answer. For example, if there are 350 downloads of my document, how many of them really read it? How many of them really made solid use of it? I will never know. But if you put this information on an LMS, it is possible to mentor, it is possible to follow up on everything that goes on. It is not that we need to control what the user does, but we need to ensure that every download really makes an impact. We need to train the faculty of the engineering colleges if it is to be adopted as a part of the curriculum. And wherever there are success stories, we need to share them and we need to spread the word. In fact, that is what exactly I am trying to do here. I would also like to mention some of the Indian initiatives in open source and free software that I know of that have made an impact. The Indian Tech User Group headed by C.V. Radhakrishnan, they have a latex primer available, they even conducted a latex and free mathematical software workshop jointly organized by Prasgarachyata Pradishanapune and Department of Mathematics, University of Pune. Manjusha and Katriya are both here, I am glad to see them. Sarawar.org is a source like project management system where free and open source software and documents can be distributed. And I know of a small company in Bangalore who has an open source entire operating system which is distributed under the GNU GPL. Thank you.