 So, the Akash project as you know is actually called a affordable tablet computer and we have been working on the affordable solutions as I have mentioned to you. We have a lab called affordable solutions lab which I set up about 10 years ago. We have worked on thin clients, we have worked on smart card readers and we have worked on clicker devices. So, this is one device for example, which is a modified version of an earlier one. As I briefly mentioned when we enquired in the market the clicker devices were available for about 2500 rupees each which is actually more than the price at which we are able to get a complete Akash tablet. So, we redesigned that the earlier version of the clicker was a simpler version which cost us about 650 rupees. This device which was designed by our team. In fact, Rajesh is here somewhere. So, Rajesh Kusalkar released the team about 12 to 15 engineers at various times we have worked. So, this is the Konbananga Karolpathikind device. So, you can see some A, B, C, D etcetera and when a quiz comes you can press an answer and the answer is captured back through a small radio transmitter which is there. We used to use a simple polling algorithm. So, if there are 100 students in the class 100 devices would be polled we would collect back the results. Subsequently, when the Akash tablet project was to come to us we decided to stop further development of this device because Akash itself can be used not only to run simple quizzes, but in fact our people have actually ported the backend where a 20 minute quiz can be given on Akash. The multiple choice answers for different times and whenever they finish all the answers can be uploaded. So, that you know instantly what are the answers by different it helps tremendously in handling logistics of conducting. So, the official name for this is low cost excess come computing device or L-CAR. This was termed Akash when it was launched in October 2011. It was the first version which was launched. There were some problems with that first version and there were some other issues. The original institution which was running this project requested MHRD to take it back and give it to someone else. So, in the month of March it was decided that IIT Bombay will carry on with this project now. Since then we have developed several applications and we have planned for deployment. The objective of this phase of the project and I repeat this you must note is not for general distribution to school and college students at all. The objective is actually empowerment of engineering college teachers. There is the specific objective of this phase of the project which we are undertaking. Our proposal is for a two year duration. The first part is of course to acquire these tablets. The second part is to test them in the labs for which we have a partner which is SEALAC and the third part which is where you would be concerned is to jointly test these tablets for the effectiveness of use of these tablets in educational process. So, I will explain how we propose to do that here. Roughly or a tentative plan right now is to select certain engineering colleges which are willing to work closely with IIT Bombay for this project and deploy about 100 tablets in each college. And this is something I want to know from you. What is the size of an average class say a second year, a third year level elective course or course? 72. 72. 72. 72. 72. 72. 75. 75. Sorry 90 to 100. My God. So, either we will have to exclude you from this experiment or you will have to choose an elective course where a reasonable number of students are present. Reasonable only in the sense of availability of these tablets, nothing. This project has nothing to do with IIT. Achacha, up to 100 is it. Let us not discuss on how the classes are organized under IIT norms. All that I am interested in is whether you will be able to find a class, whether you will be able to enthuse a teacher teaching that class to use Akash tablets and whether the size of that class could be around 60. I would not like to refer to sanction strength because we run the project with ground reality not with what is on paper. And the ground reality is that in your opinion the best subject for which this should be tested because of the best teacher is enthusiastically interested and if that class has 70, then be it. That is the point. I think the way we should look at it, our main objective is to get a feedback on the usefulness of the tablet. It is not number and unless a complete class is empowered, even if you leave out two students that will not be good. That is the point. So, that is okay. I will take an average number as 70. Again, again these different colleges will have a different thing. Alright. Let us put it this way. We will put this as 75 as an average number to be deployed in the class. These numbers are important because I have to divide available things amongst different. So, I will make that as 75 for use in a specific class per semester. If after identification of a subject, if somebody says that I have only 60 students who will request you to keep these 15 tablets with you, because this is not a one semester thing. The engagement will be for two years, by the way. And you will be expected to use these tablets for that subject during the semester and use the same tablets for the workshops that you conduct for teachers during the workshop. So, if a workshop falls on a weekend, for example, during the semester, the students will have to submit back their tablets for that one day usage and then take it back. These logistics will have to be handled. So, as I said, for conducting positions and assignments, that is a very mundane role. But more important, access to video contents, access to notes, possible access to Moodal if people use Moodal, etcetera, etcetera. That is the objective. We also propose to provide additional 25 tablets for use by final year UGPG students for doing their research work related to new development, which could be either for applications or for contents or for both. So, do you think this 25 number will be good enough, because there will be teams of students doing the project. To each team of four people or so, you may allocate two tablets for use. And so, that way you can have 6 to 8, not all students will be working only on Akash projects, obviously. Second, I would like to emphasize that these projects need not necessarily be only CS or IT projects. These projects could have teams composing of different people from different streams, if they are interested in doing this. For example, the work that is being done here comes out of aerospace engineering, chemical engineering, mechanical engineering, electrical engineering. That the nomenclature of the field is of no consequence, as long as somebody is interested in making this content. So, you are sure you will be able to identify such people. I have listed various R and D areas. Some of them are hard problems and basic problems. Some of them are not so hard, but difficult problems. And many of them require interdisciplinary activity. So, for example, take architecture itself, whether how do you deploy a faster process, how do you handle power consumption issues, how do you handle battery life issues, a whole lot of electrical engineering faculty members and students in IIT Bombay will be working there. And if there are any projects in your institutions relating to these areas. So, we will be forming small collaborative groups across the country, spirited by a couple of faculty members here with the concerned faculty members in respective places. Interfacing the devices to keyboard, for example, the USB port on this can take a USB stick, but cannot connect to a USB camera, cannot connect to a USB keyboard. Why? Because the power consumption is not supported. So, you have to connect a powered USB hub to the USB port. And from that powered hub, you can then perhaps connect a keyboard and so on. There are lot of activities that are required here, holding new versions of Android. Subsequently, as I said, Linux will be working on this. So, we have some researchers here working on this already. As I said, a small Linux port has been superimposed on these tablets already, using which we run C C plus plus compilers and what else. Automatic testing and performance issues related to tablets. How do you test, for example, if you have 100 tablets in your college? So, other than deploying them for the educational use, suppose you have to conduct a test of, let us say, performance of 2D graphics or running a standard benchmark. We will be requesting you to run these benchmarks on each and every tablet that you get. So, there is, for example, an Antutu benchmark or a Linpack benchmark. A Linpack benchmark comes. Linpack is essentially, many of you would be familiar, it is a computational benchmark. Tests with the performance of the floating point computations, performance of the integer computation, etcetera. Now, individually, I could take that Linpack benchmark program suit on a USB dongle, put it on this and then run it. And then when I run it, I will note down the timing that is required. But how will you do so on 100 tablets? How will you do so on 1000 tablets? How will you do so on 100,000 tablets? These are scalability issues. So, some automatic testing procedure. Some suggestions that we have, for example, what our people have attempted is that because there is a Wi-Fi connectivity. So, each tablet, we write a small script like a shell script in a convention unique environment, where from the back end, the applications get loaded. That is another point. If you have 10 applications, how do you load them on all the machines that you have? If a new application comes, how do you distribute that application to the available tablet? How do you install it on the available tablet? These are non-trivial issues, but these are not basic research problem. But still, that requires some R-A. Studies on Wi-Fi connectivity, how do you optimally use the bandwidth? What is the maximum number that you can connect simultaneously? We are sure that from one excess point, up to 100 devices can be connected with some usage. But if there is a heavy use, for example, of video lecture, downstreaming, etcetera, the numbers drop. What is that number? How do we increase that number? How do you make multiple Wi-Fi excess points available for a large class of 300 students, for example? And how do you automatically make sure that certain tablets connect to one Wi-Fi point, certain other tablets connect to another Wi-Fi point, etcetera? These are ticklish issues, not hard basic research problem, but nevertheless requires some effort and you will agree that many of these could form the basis of interesting undergraduate projects in your college. The more important things will come now, content rendering. There is a specific English, what should I say, font which is available. What if I want to render Telugu contents onto this tablet? Can I borrow an existing Telugu font and install it here? Does it work the same way that I install fonts on Linux and the fonts work there? We do not know. All Indian language scripts and contents is going to be a major push for these tablets in coming years, as I said, particularly for the school education. And again I would encourage you to consider content development projects. Again can be done by some final year students in conjunction with some school teachers, in conjunction with experts or even the engineering faculty members who are interested in school education. There are lots and lots of things that are possible here. Animation is another thing. We have a very strong group led by Professor Sridhar Ayer who develops educational animation. There is a site called Oscar site where all these, the educational animations are released in open source. The development of animation is also done in using open source school called Blender. Obviously, Blender will not work on the Acosta. It requires a large, but the animations which are created by Blender, can they not be used with Acosta. So, educational animations, again the creation of animation itself is a large effort where school children, college children, our students, whosoever is interested in contributing to contents can work. But the R and D problem is how do you optimize the animation formats such that they are most effectively available on the tablet. Secondly, how do you incorporate such animations into other content such as notes and things like that. If you go to Wikipedia for example, and you ask for the, what you can say is the technology that the human eye uses. So, there is a diagram of the eye. There is a nice picture of how the cone cells and rod cells work, etcetera, etcetera. And there is an explanation. But if you click in that text itself on a link, the eye gets eliminated and the light getting focused, the light getting captured, the contents getting consolidated, etcetera, etcetera is this way. Why cannot we make such things available optimized for the 7 inch footprint of the Akash tablet. Usability study, what is the interface, how easy it is to use. Even a single word matters on the screen that appears, does it convey the proper meaning. By the way, there are people who work on visual communication and usability who do PhD in this subject. Traditionally, engineers have kept themselves away from these topics. But increasingly, these are becoming important. So, there could be issues like this. Pedagogical studies, how do you measure the effectiveness of use of this tablet in education. How can students and teachers say that without these tablets, the effectiveness was so much with these tablets, the effectiveness is so much. What additional squeakers does the tablet introduce, including distraction for example, if you give tablets to everybody and you give a 20 minute quiz, ostensibly everybody is doing a quiz, but somebody could be playing a game on that app. Now, can you do research such that when a teacher announces a quiz, all other functionality of the tablet is disabled and only quiz interface is available. This is not as simple a problem as it sounds. You want to control a device and then when you implement such control, there will be some smart jokers who will hack that and break that control. And then there will be a perpetual battle, which is an interesting battle from R and D. So, this is roughly the overall expectation from you. We would expect proposal to be sent by the institute, must be signed by the head of the institute. We will need an Akash project coordinator in each college. It could be one of the RC coordinators or any workshop coordinator or any one faculty member who is interested in doing, but there will be a lot of work involved here. Unlike the workshops, we will not be in a position to pay any honorarium to any staff there, because this is supposed to be a joint R and D project. That means your institute is interested in doing this project. So, the institute is required therefore, to commit certain people for certain activity, because when I commit to a R and D project, for example, my salary comes from my institute. MHR didn't pay my salary. MHR didn't pay me any honorarium, but because I am interested in this project, I do it. So, that is how it will be looked at. Once an institutional proposal is approved, the certain conditions I am still writing them, I had mentioned some to you. For example, all the tablets given to you will remain the property of IIT Bombay. You will be responsible for their loss. So, when you allocate them and distribute them to students, you are required to maintain both your own internal register plus there will be an online registry that will be. We will be tracking each and every tablet to whosoever that tablet belongs. And the feedback collection we will try to automate to the extent that we require it, but if you think you need additional feedback, you can have your own mechanism. So, first will be the set of courses that you would like to identify where the teacher is agreeable to use these tablets and show the meaningful use. Ideally, we should have started from July. Unfortunately, the tablet deliveries may begin only in July. Is it possible then for some of you to enthuse your people to say that, look, the tablets may come slightly late. Can we use these tablets for meaningful usage after the mid-same exam, for example? So, somewhere around may be September middle. When is the mid-semester timetable in most of the colleges? September. So, suppose by August, we are able to reach a substantial number of tablets to your institutions. Will you be able to give some immediate feedback by using them in September? Meanwhile, in July and August, the concerned teacher can start looking at the contents which can be downloaded on to this and the other infrastructure can be created. I will talk about the other infrastructure in a moment. So, the first thing is the identification of the subjects and the concerned faculty member to submit a plan identifying activities and contents. Similarly, so the Akash coordinator appointed by your institution will have to do three things. One is Liza with IIT Bombay to keep track of the receipt of these tablets, etcetera, etcetera. The second is Liza with the subject teacher who agrees to teach this course and to distribute and control the distribution of those tablets. The third is Liza with the project students. Now, that Akash coordinator may not be the guide for all the students. So, there will be identification of the project guides who could be from CAS, Electrical, Mechanical, wherever. They will be submitting such project proposals to the local coordinator who will record them and will distribute the tablets there and keep track of the problem. This is the three part thing kind of thing that we expect. Some more part of logistics. As I said, 75 tablets for the use in a classroom, 25 tablets for use in projects. That makes it 100. But the following problem may happen. I am a student in one of the courses that you have identified. I have been given a tablet. I use that tablet and on the fifth day or sixth day, my tablet goes blank. Either the battery discharges completely, it refuses to charge again or the operating system hangs permanently. There is a small pinhole by which you can reset the machine. Usually, that is how you handle tablets or even cell phones, for example. Because Android is not as robust as a regular desktop operating. But suppose there is a permanent problem. Now, will you tell me that, you have no tablet now onwards. Therefore, you will not get any quiz marks for rest of the course. No. You would expect a replacement for that tablet. I will expect a replacement. Now, if you tell me, all right, you give me your tablet. According to rule number 13B or procedure number 14A, I have to send this tablet by post to IIT Bombay who will send it to the supplier. He has a warranty for one year. In his own sweet time, he will replace that thing to IIT Bombay, which IIT Bombay will give us. Come back next year to get your tablet. Not workable. Now, how do you solve it? Remember the difference between a low cost tablet and a high end consumer product. If something goes wrong with your TV, you will just make an angry phone call and somebody will come to your home to repair it. In the worst case, he will take that TV and give you a replacement TV for some time. Now, such a facility is not available at the cost at which we buy. So, what should be the solution? The solution that I have thought of is, I will issue 10 extra tablets to each remote center. But these tablets are to be kept under lock and key after initial testing by the Akash project coordinate. The idea is, the moment somebody says, I have a problem, within 5 minutes, the tablet should be repaired. And of course, properly record. Do you think this is a better workable solution? So, we start with 10 percent extra tablets, but they have to be accounted for. I will tell you the real problem that will happen. The moment your institution knows that there are 10 extra tablets lying in the cupboard and that they have not been used for one month at all because everything else is working, then suddenly there will be requested pressures. The director of the institute will say, I will give you a tablet to see. And it will be very difficult to say no. The coordinator's son will say, Papa, please bring me home one day. Which is more difficult to say no. How do you handle such problems? So, there has to be a fatwa. And the coordinator should cite that golden rule number three or whatever, which where Fatwa has said that any time in a surprise check, if all the reserved tablets are not found in the cupboard, the entire project will be cancelled permanently from that remote. That is the kind of strictness we have to observe because these state tablets are for emergency. And emergency does not come with a pre announcement. So, any is like insurance. So, if any tablet dies for whatever reason, please remember our main objective is that student and that teacher who is involved in this must never suffer. That is our primary view. You agree with this? Fine. So, we will go back. Go ahead with this. Yes, the reason is very simple. We have been given a grant by the government of 25 crore rupees to procure one lakh tablets and to use them for this R and D. This R and D concerns testing effectiveness of these tablets by education. So, we have no provision to sell these tablets. We have no provision to permanently give away these tablets. It is a good question. The answer is these tablets shall remain perpetually the property of IIT Bombay. And the ministry at the end of two year period can ask technically these tablets to be returned to them or to be given to someone. Many of you would have worked on sponsored projects. When you buy an equipment, the sponsoring agency says this equipment continues to belong to us. At the end of two years or three years, we can take this equipment back. So, you have to maintain a stock register and you have to maintain. However, in practice, I have not seen any sponsoring agency coming to you after three years saying give back that server, give back that machine. That may happen. But please do not quote me on record. As per the law of the land, I am not permitted to sell you that. I am not permanently able to give it to you. But it will be usable for the two years for this type. That is a different project altogether and that is supposed to happen in phase two, where the government will procure 50 lakh tablets. There are two types of booking. First is the commercial booking, which we will not talk about. That has nothing to do with the government. It is like I book a TV or I book a car. That is separating. That is different. That will happen in the market. The government does not control the market. The government project itself, the booking in a sense has started in the sense that the ministry has written to all universities and colleges, asking them how many tablets they would like to have for their students at such and such subsidies. Now, all that the government has done is it has collected this information from various institutions. As and when it procures those 50 lakh tablets, those 50 lakh tablets will be distributed ultimately to the students against payment of that non-subsidized portion by the colleges or universities or students or whatever. And in that case, those tablets will belong to those students or those. There are very interesting speakers which are coming up now. Suppose I am one such student. I get a subsidized tablet and I pay only 1500 or 2000, 3000 rupees and rest of the money is paid by the government. Now, I get it. Five of my friends build a private limited company. We all get these five tablets and sell them in the open market at price the rate. How will you prevent me from doing that? So, these issues have to be yet to be addressed. But as I do not know whether I mentioned or not, ever since I got this Akash project and since I have to run this mega workshop, I have been working like that. Tange ka ghoda, if you have heard it, a horse with a blinker. I do not see here. I do not see there. So, 50,000 tablets, free tablets, these that is none of my business. My business is strictly limited to get these one lakh tablets and to ensure that the effectiveness of their usage in education is shown. I have a two prong attack on this. One is for the Indian college itself whereby we test this with subject. But the second and more important you will agree is the R and D effort that will happen in your colleges for development of new content, for development of new applications, educational applications, educational game. That is that is the problem. So, these 10 percent extra tablets is a fair figure to start with. By the way, do not go only by that 10 percent. The numbers are not important. If some institution, for example, identifies 30 projects which require tablets, we would be, if there is a justification, we will consider that and do that. So, I am setting up a back end paraphernalia to answer that. The idea is to make things work to the best of all. Let me show you a small 6 minute movie clip. Now, I come to the second project which is the Akash tablet project. You have just seen the Akash 2 being soft launched. We will tell you about the applications that we have developed in the last 3 months in the institute. It is obvious that such applications cannot be created in a short span of 3 months. What we have done is we have utilized the expertise and the work done over the last several years by different groups in IIT Bombay and have excited them to help us port those applications onto the Akash tablet. Once the production of the Akash tablet starts, which will begin only after we have validated the samples that have been given to us, then we propose to give these tablets to the participating colleges to be used in their classrooms as also for their final year projects. I expect that over 50,000 final year students doing projects would be working on these tablets in the coming years to develop new applications and new contents to benefit the entire educational framework of the country ranging from school education in Indian languages to the college education and higher education. So, this is the team which designed and developed the proximity application, which was originally meant for desktop publishing of interactive lectures. These lectures now can be seen and heard on Akash. And now see an application which permits students to see the video recorded lectures. The proximity tool permits editing of video recorded lectures to create interactive lessons. For example, this is one lesson that has been created. I will wrap up for chapter 3 of the book. The spoken tutorials created by Professor Kandan's team are also available and accessible on this. How school level useful spoken tutors can be developed? The basic tutorial can be first written in English script. But once it is identified, once you have the visuals and animation or whatever, the spoken part can be in any Indian language. And we have engaged actually students, housewives, not necessarily IIT students, any students or anybody in fact, to come forward to write the script in Telgo, Bengali, Assamese and so on and actually to speak it out. So, this should be very useful is what we believe. The lectures and tutorials that you just heard were stored on the SD card which you can see protruding a little bit from this tablet. It is also possible for this tablet to connect on Wi-Fi to a back end server. And the same lectures can also be heard directly from a server. So, here for example is an NPTEL lecture which is located on the back end server. Yakash is connecting to the server through Wi-Fi. Our team has prepared interactive lessons. So, even on this lecture it is possible to go to any one particular topic directly. This is the team which has developed the clicker application on Yakash tablet. It is the same team which was involved in the development of original clicker application on the clicker devices which were designed at IIT Bombay. We will now see a demonstration of using clickers for collecting responses from students in a classroom for quizzes which a teacher might pose. This application permits a teacher to conduct a quiz in the class. What you see is the quiz module which is being controlled by the teacher. Clicks here to conduct the quiz. A quiz appears here. The teacher will set a default time for students to answer the quiz and will launch the quiz. When he launches the quiz, the quiz question will be available on the Yakash tablet and the student can answer this question by clicking on to the right answer that he thinks is the correct answer. After the time that has been set, all the answers from various Yakash tablets in the hands of different students will be collected and once the quiz time is over, I can view actually the result. These are the responses that come from different students against their ideas. I can also see a bar chart. Here is a demonstration of the programming environment that has been built by Professor Karnan Steem and Professor Madhu Bellur Steem on the Yakash tablet. In this, we have actually created a Linux environment on top of the Yakash Android operating system and provide for C programming interface for example. So, here is some sample code, the traditional program which when executed prints Hello World. Here is the execute button. This will compile that C program and execute it. You can see the Hello World coming out as the output. There are many exciting environments such as C++ and Python which have been built but perhaps the most useful for engineers and scientists is the open source Sylab. Sylab is a tool which is equivalent of the well-known industrial product called Matlab and it is used extensively by engineers. So, here for example, is the code written in Sylab which when executed will produce a milk dock image. We now show an exciting engineering application where a Robo is being controlled by the Yakash tablet. The Robo itself has been designed in IIT in Professor Kavi Arya's lab. This is the team of summer interns that you see who have programmed the Yakash tablet to control the Robo as well as to get the video stream coming from the camera mounted on the Robo to be displayed on the Yakash tablet. This is the Robo that you see. There is a Wi-Fi camera which is mounted on top. We will now see the operation of this camera and the Robo by using the Yakash tablet. So, this is the Robo control application. As you can see on the Yakash tablet, they have given a small control on the right by which the Robo can be moved. This moves forward, this moves backward. This can turn the Robo left. So, you can see that the control is very refined here and the video stream is being obtained by this Yakash tablet using a Wi-Fi connector. So, this is what we have been able to do in about one month's time, actually in 15 days time after we got the Yakash tablet. But you will appreciate that none of this work can be done in 15 days. This was possible because several research teams have been working for almost year, two years, three years. All that we have done is we have tapped into their work, taken that as a basis. For example, the Robo control application was built entirely by six summer interns, supported maybe by one project engineer to advise. These summer interns come from your colleges. There are I think two from VNIT. This is one from Dhanbad, one from Surat. These are the, just your scooters. And one of, couple of them are second year, just done second year engineering, electronics. So, how they could build it is, there was about 2,000 lines of code already written by professor Kavyaariya student in the last semester in the E. Yantral lab. So, they took that as a basis, modified it, studied the video streaming protocol that the camera was using, modified that code and made it work. These are exciting projects for the people.