 Good afternoon and welcome to this function. I apologize for the small delay, but we'll get on very quickly. We have all the student participants here. Can you please raise your hands for the panel? Oh, not bad. Even the student in this semester, thank you very much for coming here. I also have my teams who actually work on the Akash Project and other associated people in this project. So, for the benefit of others, simple here, a friend, Ram Mehta, an Avalanma Sothi Institute, had announced a prize competition for developing Akash applications. Some 300 people participated. They were given training. Then they found the work was very hard. So, some dropped out, but some persisted. And we now have the final winners. So, I thought it was most appropriate that when non-words remain, along with something different from Cooper Union, another event will be secured. They could organize a small event for the prize distribution and also to honor the participants, to spend a lot of their time in the team. I'm very pleased to request our guests to come and sit on the dials. May I request my colleagues, Dean and Associate Dean of R&D, Prasad Manjumdar, Prasad Kalyaptan, and Dean of KCR Prasad Rami Sinha. Oh, I'd like to invite our guests So, Prasad Jamshi, Prasad is the President of Cooper Union in Seattle with us. Along with him is director of the PDU. And Professor, sorry, I forgot the name. Sir, hello. Yes, Sir, hello. May I request all of them to come here? Good luck, please. I would like to request a friend, Ram Mehta, to come here. Let's give him a big hand. Thank you for giving me a short leave-in. But before I invite the winning participants to receive their prizes and certificates, I would like Ron to speak a few words and share his thoughts on these and other activities in the ground for them. Thank you very much, Professor Pahadev. It's a... I have a feeling of just unbelievable joy that I'm back in my alma mater, where I spent the five years, the five most lovely years of my life, from 1965 to 19. He did not fail. He took programmers five right out. He did make five years to complete a four-year program. In my time, it was a five-year program. And I am a hostile five guy. These are the best I've graduated in chemical engineering in 1970. And unfortunately, in my time, the opportunities in India did not exist to a great degree. So like most of my classmates, I went to the U.S. studying there and then started working and so on. But I've never forgotten IIT Bombay. It's in my heart. And if you ask my wife or my two grown-up sons who are all physicians, they'll say that as a chip on his shoulder because he thinks if you didn't graduate from IIT, then you must be a dummy. So with that in mind, one thing we believe as alums of one of the best institutes, probably the number one institute in India, it is our duty almost to give back. And in any small way that you can, it's a bit worth it. So with that in mind, when I was here in August with Professor Phatak, we worked out a program that his team had done a marvelous job in developing and managing the project, the Akash Tablet Project, which received a lot of negatives in the beginning, but has turned out to be truly the world's cheapest tablet. But what can we do? A tablet is as good as the apps that you develop. Now I'm a computer dinosaur. The amount of computers that I use is basically to look at my emails. I know how to use Excel. I use Excel. I use Word. I do some internet Google search. Now I can do a search on the Akash and I guess that's to the extent of it. So we decided that I'll take 25 and we'll open up three prizes. The best app developed on the Akash will get a prize of $1,250. The second one was $750 and I believe the third one was $500. Professor Phatak tells me that the actual money, the teams that win will be on the date on which the dollars are transferred, whatever the exchange rate is. So don't vote me to exactly how many rupees you'll get. But I can guarantee you that the teams that won and the teams that participated have all need to be congratulated for a job done wonderfully. I would like to read out the names of participants or should we first do the winners? The problem is that they have actually segregated the participants certificates as winners certificates and participants certificates. All the participants, they don't know who the winners are. As you know, there were three prizes. The evaluation was recurrence. But what I would like to tell you is that the winning entries, the three winning entries, produced applications which were not only useful applications, but that were written very professionally and these compare favorably on our data. There is a similar national contest that we have run on. That means the work done by our students is actually compared. As you all know, we release all apps and content in open source. So have we got a letter from them that they agree to? I hope you all agree that all your submissions can be released in open source. Is there somebody who is trying to start a startup using that idea? Could be. That fellow looks confused. He wants to make money on that. We will discuss this offline. So let me read out the winners. The third prize goes to the Project Constitutional Manager, the Fantastic Four. The three members are Puskara, Siddharth, Nair, Jodha, Siddharth and Ajit Kasimkar. I request them to come and see them. Why don't you come up here, Ram? Sure. Puskara, Siddharth and Ajit Kasimkar. Let me call the manager. The second prize goes to a project called Plan K. I don't know why they don't believe in Plan B or Plan C. There are two members of the team. Vijay Singh Kocher and he, Sai Saket Ramya Siddharth. The team members are Aditya Sambar. Nothing else. You are open to anything you can open. I will just read out the list of participants. I request them to collect their certificates from my office later for the want of time. But when I read out the names, they should please stand up so that they can move the camera to their room. Just place the cameras when you are required. Preetesh Sankavkar, Manoj, Nilesh Namdev, Mamdure. Put the camera on my staff. You are also an index rule. Amaradheek Chowk, Nabil Nagir, Nirvika Pushwan, Ajay Kumar Jha, Demian Spodia, Vishal Chawraseen. There are several participants. I am actually pleasantly surprised that IITS gave up halfway through. They found running to her perhaps. Nevertheless, thank you so much for your participation. Before I go through this function, I would like to request one of our guests, Prasadamshi Tarantya, with the president of Cooper Union. So I would not know whether I mentioned, but there is a student exchange program. An agreement was signed last year. I was lucky to be present on that occasion. And this entire initiative of Cooper Union and IIT Bombay coming together was initiated by Ram Mehta. And approved by our DMSCR and Dean Ayat. So thank you, Ravi. And thank you, Prasad Baruchcha and your colleagues for joining us here. I request you to share your thoughts for a few minutes from this. Thank you, Professor. I didn't come with any prepared remarks, but this is so heartwarming. And first of all, thank you, Ram Mehta, Royington Mehta, for doing this and congratulations to all the participants and the winners. We got a little preview just a few minutes ago of some of these apps. And I can't wait to get my hands on, in our gosh, and use some of these apps. We represent Cooper Union, which is a small university in New York City, Manhattan. And I want to introduce my colleagues. Theresa Doggwork is the Dean of Engineering and the Chief Academic Officer of Computer Engineering herself. Professor Prasad Baruchcha-Savallas, to her right, is a professor in Civil Engineering. And we are here to cement this student exchange program. Where initially two students from IIT would go to New York City to be at Cooper Union for a semester. And then two students will come here. And I think you can get all the information that's on our website. The first, I think the applications will do at the end of March. But my hope is that this will expand to other areas as well. And that you'll learn more about Cooper Union. It's an astonishing place. It's very much like IIT. It's very high level, very rigorous, very highly selective. You may not have heard that much about it. But it has engineering, architecture, and art. It's right in the heart of Manhattan. And it's an institution that's completely devoted to the intellectual development of its students as is IIT. Let me just end with some personal reflections. I was, I did not go to IIT. I went, I grew up in Mumbai, Bombay. And went to America for college. But my father was an engineer. And he used to come to IIT to serve on some thesis committees. And so I would sometimes tag along. This was a long time ago. Before you all were born. And he was the first structural engineer that we know of in India who used computers in design. He used to use the TIFR computer. There were three computers in Bombay in the early-mid 1970s. Early 1970s. One was at TIFR. One was at Mava Atomic Research Center. And one was at Bombay University. I don't know if I, even IIT had a computer. You had a Russian clunker. Okay. And so I was very fortunate then to learn programming from my father when I was a kid. Fortran. And I used to, he used to take me to TIFR. We'd punch out the cards and so on. And to see how far India has come in being the global leader in software development is just astonishing. So we are so delighted and I'm personally so moved to see all of you, all of this talent here. You are the next generation of software leaders in the world. And leaders of all kinds. Congratulations and thank you for your hospitality. Thank you very much. I should have actually figured out that our guests would be interested in playing with our class targets. I acknowledged it. I also noticed that our guests are going to be here even tomorrow morning. Yes. So is there anybody from our class logistic team here? Okay. So let me first thank two people whose teams actually have worked on the Akhash project for application content development. One is led by Rajesh Khushaker. Rajesh here. So Rajesh's team works on hardware extensions and hardware attachments to be added. So they do the robo-control stuff and the robo-sensor and other things. So would somebody ensure that our senior manager logistic, Shaukat Ali, is informed that three tablets should be made ready and should be set to the main building at the appropriate place where our guests will be coming tomorrow and they are under robo-control. Should we have a pleasure, sir? And please make sure that the partnership is standard applications. The three winning acts are also oriented. Yes. I would like to thank all the people who helped me put up this event at a very short notice. So my events team, two of them, Vaishali and Kip for getting his name. Yes. Varda is what I call his full name is Varad Raja. So thank you very much. But the last person I would like to acknowledge before we break off for lunch, it's certainly the lunch for all the invitees is served with the fire here. It's unfortunately a packed lunch, but it is a decent lunch. And I think hostelites would prefer that anyway. Yes. So the last person I would like to acknowledge is my colleague Krishnan Maokanya, who is actually the president of the country. So his name plate was discreetly removed when it was noticed that he was missing. But anyway, what I would like to mention is that the Akash project as you know is part of a larger activity being conducted under national mission for education using ICD. And there are some 10 or 12 projects that are going on in the institute. And Krishnan Maokanya is the single point coordinator for all those projects. Krishnan Maokanya and Prashant Mazumdar know the kind of efforts that he's putting in and the kind of money that he's got. In fact, he has contributed to my team being the richest team in India for doing these R&D projects. So some contribution comes from that. And this particular, he has been single-mindedly following up on Akash right from the beginning, right from 2010-200. So thank you very much for him. And so thank you one and all. Please do have your lunch, enjoy your lunch. And as I said, the certificates would be collected later by you. I have a small task my event team has reminded me. There's a small memento. You see, we have stopped giving flowers to dignitaries because some of our colleagues pointed out that we should not destroy trees, flowers, etc. So instead, we have some small mementos on behalf of the project which I would like to give to our guests. Prescription for which I... More internal than most. Actually, he's the one who created this memento. We'll pass. Thank you so much. Thank you very much.