 Let me now talk about products that you and I are familiar with ubiquitous products. Look at the list that I have here in front of you. Shoes, how many of you are familiar with the research issues in shoes? How many of you have considered that a mundane thing like a shoe could actually have research issues. But then traditionally shoes means leather processing. Leather processing at best is chemical industry. I am a computer science teacher or I am an electronics teacher therefore, I shall have nothing with shoes and therefore, I shall never worry about the research issues in shoes that unfortunately is our mindset. My ambition in telling you all this is to shake you out of this mindset. In fact when you see the exercise for the afternoon, you will realize what I am trying to talk about. Take bicycle for example. Bicycle is a mechanical gadget. Do you think bicycle has only production problems? Is bicycle such a mundane product that you and I do not envisage any possible research in it? How many of you are aware about the total amount of money that is being spent every year on the research related to bicycle across the world? Are you familiar with any research on bicycles that happened in let us say typical well known bicycle companies in India? Are you aware that bicycle manufacturing is being done affordably and of high quality in India itself? These are some of the things that actually we should start looking at. If we just we keep our eyes open, but we do not keep our minds open. So go back to this list. Look at television. Look at mobile phone. Look at PCN modems. Look at tablets. I will speak more about tablets, but you can all add to this list at least 50 different products which are ubiquitous, which you and I use in everyday life. Take a fountain pen for example. Take any furniture item that you have. Take water supply system. Any product or any gadget that you use. Consider that behind these ubiquitous products there has to be a whole lot of continuous R and D that must be going on somewhere. Why not you and I participate in this kind of R and D? It is in this context that I would like to conclude my lecture today by listing some of the issues, research issues that would be of relevance not only to IIT Bombay, but to entire educational infrastructure in the country and I will describe the Akash project at IIT Bombay. All the participants would have seen during the inaugural function. I showed a small film. We will upload the link eventually when we edit that film further, but you are all familiar with what a tablet is. Most of you would have seen or used a tablet. Akash is a low cost tablet. It is called low cost excess computing device. It was launched in October 2011. IIT Bombay was given the product responsibility, project responsibility for last three months. Now a tablet is actually a combination of the communication and computing technology. So typically you take modern phones. They have computing capabilities. So they are almost like tablets and you take conventional tablet computers. They will have some communication element. Typically the communication element in a tablet is through a Wi-Fi connectivity. Sometimes there is a provision for SIM card where you have a 2G or 3G connectivity, but the tablet is still mostly about data and data handling and information handling. Whereas the phone which has marked into a tablet kind of computer, the primary objective is still making phone calls. But eventually you can see that this convergence of communication and computing is getting into tablets and they are likely to become a ubiquitous product very shortly. There are reasons for such a belief outside one's own imagination. For example, in the entire developed world the sale of PCs is stagnating and the sale of tablets has been increasing very rapidly. The objective of the Indian project Aakash is to create a low cost excess computing device. As I said we got the project responsibility just about three months ago. So what we have done is we have negotiated a upgraded version of the tablet. So we have a higher faster processor and we have a capacitive touch screen. But what we are concentrating on is that there have to be useful contents and applications on this tablet particularly from the view point of educational usage and therefore we are putting all our focus in such development. As you would have heard during the inaugural talk and you would have seen some demo film that we have developed interactive video lessons which have been ported on to Aakash. We have developed the clicker application for quiz conduct which has been ported on Aakash. We have developed a programming environment for C C plus plus python and silab on top of Aakash and we have a robo control. All of these would be in open source. Now look at the research for this development. One does not do research in three months. So what did we do in last three months? What we did was to build upon the lot of research that was happening within IIT which was being spearheaded by colleagues in their lab with their Ph.D. and M.Tech students. There has been a lot of activity in C plus plus and silab kind of thing. We have a GCC almost an expertise center led by Professor Uday Khedkar. The people under Professor Kandan have been working on python porting on to android operating system for quite some time. You already heard Professor Kavi Arya. The robo control that we devastated using the Aakash tab was developed in three months because for three years a large number of students including research students under Professor Kavi Arya have been working on one hand developing this robo. On the other hand enriching that robo with a whole lot of programming paradigms and a whole lot of application. In fact the six students that you saw during the inauguration they are not even IIT student who built a robo control application. They were summer intense here and we just said can you do it? To them we gave the basis as a whole lot of open source code which already existed in the E. Antra RTL lab. So Professor Kavi Arya helped us by giving some guidance from one of his research associates and we use the code which was developed earlier by those students and these six or eight students studied that code and in one month working day and night practically they could do a miraculous job. Is that research? Well yes and no. Is that development? Certainly. Are there research issues that they encountered? Most certainly. How will those research issues be solved? Why continuously working on those research issues through M. Tech students through PhD students and through faculty research? The point is that any time you do any development any development if your eyes ears and mind are open then you can always identify research problems which need to be solved. You of course innovate around find some roundabout way and solve the present problem and go ahead and continue your development. So your applications work properly your product may be alright but while doing so you recognize that if this hard problem is solved somewhere else then this product will enhance its capability. If that hard problem is solved I might make that product more affordable etcetera. Research problems during and after the product development are not as apparent as when one is concentrating on developing the very product but they exist they must be identified and they must be isolated. Let me show you some of the problems which we have isolated which will require harder research with respect to this tablet company. Consider the architecture development future architectures will involve faster processors. Will there be any change in the architecture that I require? We already know that faster processors have multiple cores. Can I have multiple processors? Can I have very large memory? I mentioned that today's tablet is much superior in computing capabilities to the earlier PCs but tomorrow's tablets could very well be supercomputers in themselves as we know supercomputers today. What are the issues that need to be researched there? Power consumption issue how do you enhance the battery life? You cannot enhance the battery life that requires research in battery and that is an independent area of research but you do require research in reducing the power consumption of the different components which constitute the tablet. And the power consumption issues is something which an electronic engineer occasionally looks at and a computer scientist never looks at. Heat dissipation is considered a problem reserved for mechanical engineer but if that heat dissipation does not happen inside an electronic gadget the electronic designer or the computer scientist better take the responsibility work jointly with the mechanical engineer who is an expert in heat transfer such thing and solve the problem. Well that is research. You need to build how will you charge the batteries? How will you charge the batteries in India particularly in villages where electric power supply does not exist for as many as 16 hours in a day? Necessity is the mother of invention. We found this necessary and we have started working jointly with our colleagues in the photovoltaic cell led by Professor Chetan Solanki. So we are building solar charges for schools. These charges will remain on the roof top and the school children can charge these their Akash tablets using these solar charges and then use them. The need for such innovation and the need for corresponding research is far greater in India. The developer does not face these problems. If we face these problems we must solve them and if necessary we must do hard research to solve hard research problem. Continuing with the Akash related research issues we need to develop interfaces to devices keyboards, mouse, printers. This will involve what we call writing device drivers. We need to port new versions of the basic operating system. Currently it works on android 2.2. The manufacturer may give us subsequent versions but we must constantly work on additional reference designs of these tablets and additional software issues to be resolved. Eventually we envisage that the tablets will have a full fledged operating system. Once they evolve it to have larger processing power, much larger memory and much larger internal storage. For example, I would expect a Akash tablet say sometime next year to have a 4 core processor giving you a total capability of 1 gigahertz into 4 time of computing power, at least 1 gigabytes of main memory, at least 32 gigabytes of internal storage and all of this available for something like 3000, 4000 rupees. What are we going to do with those devices there? The usage must be anticipated and the R and D must be started today which is the ambition. So, there would be Linux ports and there will be software development tools which will be required. Another research issue for Akash is automatic testing. You have 2 tablets, you test them individually. You have 200 tablets, you have to put 20 people to test them. You have 20,000 tablets. You have put 10,000 people to test them. You have 1 million tablets. Now, this testing is well known in the industry, but should we not consider what are the issues in such automatic testing? Particularly on software testing, particularly on software installation, these are not trivial problems although these may not be hard research problem. They are performance issues, performance improvement would come by tweaking the software as well as hardware. Use of tablets in control applications, what we showed the other day was a very simple demonstration of how a robo can be remotely controlled, but does the matter end there? Not at all. It just starts there. There are huge potential to deploy Akash tablets for signal processing work for other specialized area. In fact, the competition that Kavyaariya mentioned, I would be delighted if some of you are willing to work or participate in that competition. Incorporating Akash tablet as a component is somewhere in your application development. Studies on Wi-Fi connectivity. Remember, I mentioned that we used clicker application for conducting quizzes. We have put in the application successfully on Akash. You saw the demonstration. We conducted an experiment with those 100 odd workshop coordinators who had come to IIT for their orientation program in their second batch. We put together some 30 or 40 tablets and we conducted this experiment. Only about 25 people were able to connect. At that time, we presumed that there was some problem in the usage because people were not familiar with it. Later on, my team conducted rigorous experiment and guess what they found out? Using Wi-Fi, connecting to a Wi-Fi access point, the moment you have more than 25 to 28 or 30 devices, suddenly all health breaks loose. Now, this is not something new. Another colleague of mine, Professor Prashottam Kukarni, who had warned us that the conventional access points, the connectivity that they provide through the software stack that they have, the software stack gets overloaded. The moment the number of wireless devices connected to that single access point becomes larger than so many and that number he had hinted would be somewhere between 20 to 40. The solution that he had suggested is to have multiple access points. The research issue that now we are working on is, can we have a single Dabba, which has possibly multiple access points but which can isolate different Akash tablets to be connected to them? Solving these problems of Wi-Fi connectivity and solving the optimal usage of bandwidth are issues for which some research is required. Consider content synchronization. Open source contents are created in IIT Chennai, let us say. Those contents are available but how do you get them to your college where your students are studying? Remember what I said we will be establishing a server in each of these colleges but how does that server automatically synchronize with the backend server in IIT Chennai, IIT Madras. So, if IIT Madras something gets loaded onto the new server immediately and automatically those contents should get synchronized with hundreds of servers in different colleges. We speak of national knowledge network. The national knowledge network bandwidth has to be utilized for such purposes. We need to build systems. Are these systems purely a development effort? I would submit that these development of such systems will also give rise to a research problem. These research problems need not be very basic and fundamental research problems which must be solved by 10 PhD students but very good ME level research projects can be identified, can be stipulated and can be solved. Look at further issues, content rendering. How do you render Indian language scripts and contents onto these tablets? How do you make these tablets run animations effectively and efficiently? There have to be usability studies. New user interfaces will have to be developed. Luckily, we have our industrial design center where Professor Ravi Pohia and other people are already looking at such issues. There are pedagogical studies that need to be conducted. How effective an Aakash tablet can be in the educational framework? Do we need to change the educational mechanism which is what is pedagogy or which is called what is methodology? Look at this workshop itself. It is a pedagogical change. This pedagogical change attempts to build something similar to our conventional classroom but we use the information technology to scale up the process. What would be the impact of using Aakash in educational processes from an individual to a small team to a classroom and to a nationwide network? How effectively can you deploy the Aakash tablets who require pedagogical studies as well? I will conclude by saying that we have identified so many issues which need to be resolved. There is no way a single institution can ever resolve these issues. That is the first realization we had even before we started this course. That is one of the reasons why we are proposing to build strong collaborative teams. So, this is some offer that we have already made to all the remote centers. If the remote centers are interested and by the way all the remote centers have indicated that they will be interested in joint collaborative R and E work with IIT Bombay on Aakash Related Activity. Soon we will be circulating a scheme where even other colleges which are not remote centers could participate in some way or the other. But the collaboration must be organized. The collaboration must be driven by a particular individual or a group institutions and we hope to build such collaborative research community. Thank you very much over and out.