 Good morning, all of you and welcome to this inaugural function. I have pleasure to invite to the dais for the morning function, Professor Sukhatme, Professor Devan Khakkar, our director and Professor Amitabh Sanyal, the head of the computer science and engineering department. Could you please come over sir, so that I can formally welcome you. Thank you for coming. Thank you, Devan. I would also like to invite the lead faculty for this program, Professor Karmalkar of IIT Madras who has come all the way from Chennai to join us, Professor Karmalkar. Thank you, Professor. Let me very briefly introduce the dignitaries to you. I will begin with the person whom we have requested to preside over today's function, Professor Sukhatme. Many of you would know him as a well-known researcher, but more than a researcher, he has been a great educationist. He has been with IIT Bombay for more years than I care to remember. After retirement, he was appointed as chairman of the Atomic Energy Regulatory Board, but he continues to engage with us. It is very rare not to see him at least three or four times in a week to come to his office. He still writes and he writes research papers. He was also of course the director of the institute and I had the privilege of serving under him as the first dean of resources. The number of changes that he made in the academic program and the focus that he tried to get for the research activities has been remarkable and has been sustained since then. Thank you very much, Professor Sukhatme, for joining us. Next to him is Professor Devan Khakkar, our director of IIT Bombay. Of course, before becoming the director, he was dean of faculty here. He has been a professor of chemical engineering, a very renowned researcher and a dedicated educationist. He is continuing to make changes appropriately in the academic and research framework of the institute, providing more flexibility. He particularly encourages interdisciplinary activities and under his leadership in a short time, the institute has seen major activities reaching to fruition such as flexibility in our undergraduate program, inclusion of research agenda into newer areas such as energy and nanotechnology. Thank you very much, Professor Khakkar, for joining us today. Next to him is Professor Amitabh Sanyal, a hardcore educationist and researcher as you can see from his face, a simpleton but deeply passionate about research and education. He leads us in the department of computer science and engineering and in fact, I jokingly say that he has the privilege of leading the largest group of rowdy computer science professors, about 40 of them. Under his leadership, the department has almost twice the faculty strength as any other computer science department in the country. He probably leads the leading researchers in computer science in the department. Thank you very much, Professor Sanyal, for joining us. We also have with us Professor Karmalkar. As I said, he is the lead faculty member who has come all the way from IIT Madras. A few years ago, we had invited him to talk to our research scholars and he gave a series of lectures titled Introduction to Research. All of us liked them so much. Our research scholars were extremely motivated and much better prepared after that series. We released those lectures in open source but when we decided to do this course on introduction to research methodologies, we thought that we must start with introduction to research and we thought of a person no other than Dr. Karmalkar. Thank you very much Dr. Karmalkar for coming and sharing your thoughts with our people here. I would like to very briefly tell you about the trained thousand teachers programs. Many of you have participated in this. Many years ago in the institute when we started the distance education program, the idea was that we should be able to reach to many people who would otherwise desire to attend programs in IIT Bombay but cannot travel to IIT Bombay, cannot stay away from their places. We morphed this initial program which was meant for students, professionals and teachers into structured workshops for teachers. Under this program, teachers assemble at remote centers which have been pre-designated. At each remote center, we have a workshop coordinator who is an expert in the subject that is going to be discussed. We first collect all the remote center coordinators to IIT Bombay and have a detailed oriental discussion which often lasts one week. Then the workshop coordinators go back, set up their labs, set up the tutorials, set up the experiments as required by the lead faculty here. When the main workshop starts, about thousand teachers assemble at 30-35 remote centers. The two way lectures are transmitted through AVU which is a product developed by a sister or a partner institution Amruta University through which we are talking to each other today. It permits interactive lectures and the afternoon tutorials and labs are conducted in the local remote centers under the supervision of workshop coordinators. We have found that this model works best in the sense that the top experts can be heard and listened to and can be interacted with to understand their ideas about the particular subject. But we still retain in this model the cohesive group work in a classroom such as the common tutorials, common discussion sessions and common lab sessions at a place. We have conducted ten such workshops in the past, empowering more than eleven thousand teachers. Three months ago when there was a review in MHRD, the then secretary of higher education MHRD, Svibhapuri Das and Mr. Sinha suggested that why do not you scale it up further. We told them that we had a plan for a mega workshop for ten thousand teachers in December but we are advised to advance that to June and that is why we decided to conduct this program here. Currently, this is merely a scaled model instead of thirty to thirty-five remote centers. We plan to have two hundred remote centers sadly due to the positive of time amongst large number of applications that we received, we could confirm only hundred and sixty eight remote centers from which we are conducting this program. There was an enrollment of about twelve thousand teachers and PG students. We could not cater to them. We enrolled nine thousand but I understand that some teachers did not get the choice of the center that they had asked for and therefore they may not be able to attain. It is our endeavor to increase these number of centers first by another two hundred before December and then to a total of five hundred remote centers. In fact, it is our ambition that every town where there is an engineering college there should be a remote center because the true benefit of using ICT in this manner is that people do not have to leave their place of residence and they can attain the workshop from wherever they stay reducing cost, time and effort which is otherwise vested in this process. We believe that this mega workshop having more than nine thousand enrolled teaching participants is first of its kind globally. We are very happy to do this experiment thanks to the support from the one sixty eight remote centers and thanks to the participation of all the large number of teachers and some post graduate students who have come to attend this course. I will be speaking more to you about this workshop as also about the subsequent programs that we have in mind. We in fact look forward to greater collaboration not only with the remote center faculty but also with the other faculty members from more than two thousand colleges who have assembled here in future years to come. With that backdrop I will now like to request my director Prasadevan Khakkar to share his thoughts with you. Prasadevan Khakkar. Very warm virtual welcome to IIT Bombay to all of you. I must say that I am very glad to be part of this historic occasion when IIT Bombay connects with eight thousand teachers and a thousand students all over the country. Over the last fifty four years IIT Bombay has built up strong capabilities in education and research. It has also built up a strong international reputation for excellence in these spheres of activities. Today IIT Bombay has about eight thousand students of which more than half are post graduate students. We have two thousand PhD students on the roles today more than five hundred faculty members and more than three thousand m tech students. So in many ways research has become a very important focus and of course our educational programs continue to be strong through workshops such as this one. The aim is to freely share best practices of the institute with teachers across the country. Our hope is that this type of exchange will accelerate the development of quality education throughout the country and also we hope that such kind of information transfer will benefit generation after generation of student in time to come. Sharing of knowledge with other colleges is in fact a part of the mission of the IITs stated in the IIT Act. IIT Bombay has always participated in this kind of workshop teacher training and so forth over the years. We have had our quality improvement program for PhD and master students. We have had summer courses for teachers over the last fifty years but what is now very unique is the availability of this national knowledge network. This is really an incredible resource which can have a huge multiplier effect. The thought of having eight thousand people in one place is almost mind boggling. I cannot imagine that all eight thousand or nine thousand of you could have come to this campus the kind of logistics involved, the kind of expense involved, your time involved would have been too great to make this feasible. As a result in the past all courses have been about thirty to fifty students and this is a very slow way of diffusing knowledge. In this new mode where we can instantaneously connect over the network has a great multiplier effect and we hope that many more such workshops and courses can be done so that there is a close interchange between all, between colleges amongst themselves and between IIT Bombay and all the colleges. Being a teacher all my life I think teaching is certainly the best job that one can have. In this kind of a job you are always together with young people to help them prepare themselves and to inspire them to face the world. College teachers have an extra dimension which makes the job even more interesting and that extra dimension is research. Research generation of new knowledge, scholarship, reading about new developments taking place enables us to renew ourselves, to renew our knowledge to keep abreast of the latest developments in the field and most importantly it actually helps us to build a spirit of inquiry in our own selves and in our students and this is becoming more and more important in today's student and in today's professional. I think this course on research methodology is thus most timely we have some really outstanding people Prof. Sukhatne, Prof. Karmakar, Prof. Narona, Prof. Sahanamurthy, many others who will essentially talk about how one should do research what are some of the ways of may be presenting the work and so forth. So, what is the nitty-gritty that is involved and I think this will have a big impact because in the time to come the importance of research is going to only increase. With these few words I would like to wish you a very successful and enjoyable workshop. I know that it is going to be very intensive knowing Prof. Fatak. So, you will have to work hard, but I am sure that you will enjoy it. Before I actually step off the podium I would like to read out a message from the Chairman Board of Governors of IIT Bombay, Dr. Anil Kakodkar who is himself a renowned nuclear scientist. He unfortunately could not be here, we had invited him, but he could not be here because he is out of town and he requested that his message be read out to all of you. So, this is what he writes, I wish to congratulate you and the entire team involved in this major initiative of IIT Bombay aimed at reaching a large body of faculty and students at different locations in the country. This approach that enables a much wider access to an institution like IIT Bombay and its faculty using the power of ICT while retaining the strengths of face to face learning teaching is indeed the way to achieve the twin objective of quality improvement and scale up to meet education and training needs of our nation at all levels. As you are aware I am keenly watching your efforts in taking Akash forward, affordable low cost tablets that can effectively access education and knowledge resources besides being an effective learning tool by itself can make a huge positive impact on education and training particularly in rural and remote parts of the country. I do hope that the pilot experiment on school education using low cost wireless broadband last mile connectivity, low cost tablets and OERs in Marathi that we talked about would be in place soon. Technology enabled new paradigm in education and development that is learner centric, enabler of lifelong learning and development oriented participation in an A-3 connected society all inclusive and guided by wise council is something that all of us in institutions like IIT should work for with best wishes for the success of your efforts and warm regards. Thank you very much Professor Kakkar for those encouraging words and I would also like to express my thanks to Dr. Kakkar. Dr. Kakkar has been keenly supporting all the initiatives that Professor Kakkar and our leadership team has been taking and as you could hear from his message he himself although he is a nuclear scientist and a great administrator but he himself is a great educationist at heart. You might have heard a brief comment in his message about Akash and many of you may be wondering as to what Akash tablets have to do with this particular workshop. This is something which is known to 168 workshop coordinators but is not known to the other teachers that ever since three months ago we were transferred this project of Akash tablet. We have perceived a plan to work jointly with college teachers such as you and working with you using the Akash tablet in its future deployment is one of our objectives. I believe that honorable minister might have something to say about the Akash tablet as well when he addresses all of you on the inauguration of this workshop. It is very convenient, very important moment to ensure that all those 10,000 teachers who are elected here are very important moment in the event. If you really want to have dreams when the leadership is in their dreams then they have realized that something that we need to be very proud of and I have to congratulate all of you for having made this, made us, made us our dreams. As you know that we all started the National Convention on Education in YGT. This was a program of the government to be here and our leadership was responsible to use YGT which is very important. And as you all know education is fundamental to empowerment. Not just about children but about the community because we empower our children. Ultimately when they grow up they will be citizens who will be committed to the goals of our nation and in that process create a future of Asia that we want to embrace as one of the leading powers of the world. And this cannot be done without empowering our children's way of education. And in the planning world essentially YGT is a very, very useful tool to empower our children and I am absolutely delighted that they want to ensure that I am always talking about the teacher training program or teaching about a thousand teachers at one given point in time. A thousand teachers at every given point in time and I am given to understand that already about ten workshops have been held by IIT Bombay and about twelve thousand teachers have been actually trained. Now why is this important for us? It is important for us because there is a raging debate in our country that the quality of students ultimately depend on the quality of teachers. And unless we empower our teachers then naturally our children will not be empowered because it is the quality teaching that ultimately brings about a quality student. And I have always believed both as a politician and as an academic perhaps you don't know that I started my career as a teacher in Delhi. I know how important it is to provide that inspiration for the student community which can only be provided by leaders in the teaching community. We are in the midst of a crisis, a crisis in which the community believes and we believe that there are not enough teachers in the system, not just not enough teachers but not enough quality teachers in the system. And therefore these kind of programs provide the quality teachers that we need. And what has been done today is something truly historic because instead of conducting these workshops, training a thousand teachers at the time you have taken this enormous step and leap forward by training 10,000 teachers in one go which is really what we are launching today. This is something that perhaps has never been done in the world and thanks to the program by Amrita that they have devised through which this has been made to happen. And this of course, this technology that Amrita has provided allows the student community and the teachers to be interactive. So it's really like sitting in one classroom, 10,000 teachers learning from each other and I don't think that this kind of experiment has been done anywhere in the world. So in that sense, it's not only a leap forward but it's an Indian solution to deal with the challenges that we confront and I don't think that we can really look to the global community to provide solutions for us. We have to look inwards. We have to look at ourselves. We have to look at our problems. We have to address those problems and we have to find solutions for those problems. So this is a very uniquely Indian solution for the problem of bringing quality into the teaching system by empowering our teaching community. So I once again congratulate Amrita. I congratulate IIT Bombay for having taken this forward. The other issue which of course again is a symbol of Indian technology is the Akash. Today we are going to symbolically hand over the Akash to students and I have to particularly thank Professor Pathak for taking this forward. The Akash as you know was launched sometimes way back in October 2011 and unfortunately there was some delay in actually taking this project forward for reasons that I don't want to go into now. But three months ago Professor Pathak decided and I requested, we requested Professor Pathak to take on this responsibility and IIT Bombay took on this responsibility and in three months time there has been a sea change in our confidence in the project and now today we are symbolically going to launch the low cost Akash device. I have to also mention the fact that not only is this now Akash 2 which is version 2 of Akash where the processor is now 800 MHz. The life of the battery has been increased I believe for three hours and of course it has a capacitive screen which is of much greater quality. So the result is that this new version of Akash in a sense is again is a step forward in fulfilling our dreams to be ultimately be able to supply a tablet to millions of our children, not just to our children, not just to our student community in technical institutions and in universities but Akash will be a low cost access device for the public at large to be able to deliver public services to the citizens of this country and these are the solutions that will ultimately change India. These are the solutions that will empower India. Imagine a child holding an Akash, it is like the child grasping the world in his hands because he lacks access to anything that you want and Professor Pathak is also and his team of course has also developed some very unique applications on the Akash. Akash is no longer a device that consumes content through the efforts of IIT Bombay. Akash is a device that creates content. That content has been created with unique applications and you can actually now have programs in Python, in C and this is of enormous value to our student community. All in all I think that this is yet another step where we are delivering for the people of our country and of course it is a symbol of the level of collaboration and cooperation that occurs between institutions, whether it's Amrita or IIT Bombay. It's not just institutions but we are seeing individuals rise above themselves and collaborate with each other and with institutions with one aim in mind that let us make a national effort to make India the nation that it deserves to be. We cannot let history control us. The future is within our grasp. We must in fact make sure that we are able to use the imagination and use the tools and the innovative capabilities that we have to be able to realize that future. It is not a matter of us dreaming. The dream is becoming a reality and these are two steps in that reality. I'm also given to understand that we are now in the, you know, 170 centres have been set up or 168 centres have been set up and ultimately the aim is to set up about 500 centres in one go so that every educational institution becomes a centre and there should be connectivity with each engineering college wherever it is located in India. This really is the ultimate dream that we are looking at. I am now connected to St. Ravius College in Kanyakumari. What a pleasure it is to be with you. Good morning everybody. Good morning sir. We are very thankful to you. We are really honored to have an interaction with you and we really thank the ministry and IIT Bombay for empowering teachers to improve the quality of education to the remote corners of our nation. Really we are from a remote corner like Kanyakumari where we can't have access to high quality education which is available in IITs and higher institutions but through ICT. We thank you sir. You have made it possible to us. Thank you. I just want to ask anyone of the students can respond to it. What is your feeling today sitting there? Do you think that you have a new opportunity at hand and that this is going a long way in actually empowering you as you go forward as a teacher? I am really happy to attend this workshop because regarding the research we can understand so many things how to work on research and how to improve our knowledge and so this workshop will be very much helpful to us. That's what I am feeling. Thank you. You know I have always felt as a human being that unless I continually empower myself through lifelong learning I will stop growing. I am sure that you have all come here with that mindset. Is that correct? Can somebody respond on that? Do you believe that there should be lifelong learning and these kind of programs should be done on a continuous basis to empower yourself in times to come? Good morning sir. We feel that continuous learning for engineering college teachers is very much important because such type of programs will be very much helpful for us. Even if you want to learn something from the book it will take so much of time but when we hear from professors like IIT professors then easily we can grasp and we need continuous education is very much needed and I request you to continue such effort in future also sir. Thank you sir. Thank you. Good morning sir. So it is a privilege to talk to you sir. Good morning. Good morning to you all. On behalf of School of Engineering RQ University, Rajkot we are heartily thankful to the Ministry of HRD for sponsoring the two-week mega workshop on Introduction to Research Methodologies. Sir on this occasion I would like to introduce our Executive Vice President, say, Dhanis Bhai Patel, our Registrar, Sevalal Bhai Ramani, Vice Sun Seller, Dr. Ramamohan Rao, Ph.D. from IISC, Dr. C.D. Sankhar, our Dean's School of Engineering and all the participants, all the 100 participants who are going to participate in this mega workshop on Introduction to Research Methodologies. Sir, we are very much happy with the model and the way the workshop is going to be conducted and we would like to thank to Professor D.B. Patak and his team for making an effort success. Sir, we are very much proud to be a remote center, one of the remote centers where more than 10,000 teachers are participating and taking the knowledge from the expert faculties of IIT Bombay. Sir, thank you very much sir and over to you sir. I just wanted to mention to you that, you know, research in metrology is one of the most important issues that confronts our country because our farmers don't get information on time and as you know that the rain seemed to have failed us this year at least in the first month. The expectation is that rainfall will be about 96% today with a margin of error of 8-9%. So if the rainfall is about 90% we are in real trouble and therefore we need to constantly inform our farmers out there when the monsoon is going to arrive, when they should throw their seeds, when they should change to another crop. So research in met is one of the most important aspects of that need to be addressed as a nation and therefore you teachers out there participating in this program are participating in a novel. This is a novel initiative of the ministry to empower you in researching issues relating to the met. Over to you. Yes sir, you are very much right sir. And this kind of workshop will help all the participants to do the quality research and the application oriented research sir. We have the privilege of hosting 5 IST workshop so far. Sir, you will appreciate that in Srinagar institutions like IIT and ISE are still a distant dream but through this workshop we have got so well connected to adopting the best teaching and learning practices that Professor D.B. Patek has become like a household name among the teaching faculty in Srinagar. Sir, I like to put a couple of suggestions today. One of the suggestions would be sir, so far we have been able to create a larger group which spans over number of institutions. Now it is time to create a number of clusters within this group and each institute is associated with a cluster so that we are able to create a manageable unit within this larger group. The immediate advantage would be that there would be better exchange of programs like faculty or on research which would directly accrue a lot of benefits to the students. Sir, my second suggestion would be at MCIT also there are very good initiatives which are coming forth under your leadership especially projects like NKN, projects like national skill development initiatives. I believe we can use such platforms for adding not only adding numbers but producing quality numbers under our flagship programs. Third thing sir, we as an institute are still a large part of NKN. Formerly we were DOACC, now we are NILIT Srinagar. We would request your good self sir that we should be also brought under NKN and sometimes we would like to host you in Srinagar sir, Srinagar has a great weather and we have a great tourist season this time. So we are looking forward to sometimes hosting you in Srinagar. Thank you very much sir and over. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I'd love to have some Gustava and Tabak Madh when I come to Srinagar. Yeah, no, no, no. I think you have very good suggestions. I think these should be moved forward through cluster mode. Good morning sir. This is Dr. Gokhale, director of VNIT Nakhpur. We have been associated with the CD program of IIT Mumbai for a real long time. VNIT Nakhpur is a sister institute of IIT Mumbai and we have been closely associated for past 10 years and the benefits are for everyone to see. In the 10 years we have improved our research publications in a great deal. The research project proposals from various government funding agencies, the faculty receiving their PhDs and so on and so forth. So the benefits are plentiful and this particular effort that has now been firmly rooted into the technical education is the most welcome change. Earlier you know IIT Mumbai was concentrating more on the IT, ITAs but in the recent times the expansion in the other engineering disciplines has been really creditable and we have about 50 teachers sitting over here for 10 to 15 days and continuously working towards it. The best part of it is that the teachers are now made to sit as students in the classroom and the rigor in all these programs has been really wonderful because the value addition that teachers carry with them when they go back to their colleges is really phenomenal and we thank you as well as IIT Mumbai for this particular initiative. I am basically from IIT Madras and I was associated in a remote way with the NPTEL program. Now virtual laboratories also they could be brought in into the foray and technical education would be significantly improved right across the nooks and corners of our country. We are extremely grateful to you for the continued support in this particular initiative as well as being a participant in this particular program. Thank you very much sir. Good day. Thank you. Thank you very much. I think this is very important. You know this particular program has been very popular because in this particular workshop that we are taking up today I believe there were 12,000 teachers who registered and there was not enough space to accommodate 12,000 so that we were able to accommodate I believe only 9,000. So I think despite the you know with the kind of things that IIT Mumbai has been doing over the years by training 1,000 teachers for workshop we have reached a situation where more and more teachers want to take the benefit of this program. This shows the enormous reach of this program the empowerment through this program and how keen teachers are to empower themselves and this is a very positive sign and I am delighted to be in touch with me and IIT Nagpur and be in the midst of you today so good luck and all the best. Thank you. Thank you sir. Thank you very much honorable minister for interacting with some of our centers. I am sure that they are excited by your encouraging words. Over to you sir. If I may suggest that I want to hold for the country to see the version 2 of the Akash. Akash version 2 in which you have included several applications in which you have included several applications and I congratulate you for it. This has a you know a processor which is 800 megahertz it has about a much larger battery life it has a capacitive screen and it's really a super product I want to symbolically not just show this to the people of the country but also hand it over to you for you in turn to hand this product over to the directors. Thank you very much congratulations. Thank you so much honorable minister both for your kind courtesy in interacting with a large number of teachers. As you rightly said we are privileged and honored to have initiated this program and we now feel a part of a very large teachers community in this country. More importantly thank you very much for unviling Akash to a large number of my colleagues here including research students, undergraduate students and even summer interns coming from other institutions have worked very hard for last three months as instructed by you we would now be symbolically handing over these tablets to directors and principals of four select remote centers. As you are all aware we have planned to use our relationship with all the remote centers to do field testing of these tablets because although we have done a lot of work there is no end to the number of useful applications that can be continuously developed and more and more useful contents that can be created for this tablet. Towards this end we wish to use the creative talents of large number of students and teachers across the country from all the engineering colleges. To begin with we have roped in the support and partnership of our remote center colleges. We believe that after the testing the tablet production would start sometime by July end or August but starting with the next academic year we will be delivering these tablets and working closely with the engineering colleges. I am very proud to announce a partnership with SEALAC who had joined us in this program. Unfortunately Professor Rajat Muna could not come but Mr. Zia Sakeb is here the director of Mumbai unit of SEALAC. Thank you very much Zia for coming here. They are the ones who are helping us in rigorous lab testing of the AKAS tablet. As you know we want to make sure that the tablet that reaches the hands of students and teachers works absolutely fine. In cases such as such embedded devices particularly when it is not a commodity item but an item made to specifications it is important to go through such iterative testing to ensure that all the production processes are correctly geared up to produce only the best quality product. Thank you very much Zia and through you I would like to thank Professor Rajat Muna, Professor Amin Kumar and his team who are helping us in this testing. However from the samples that we have received and the extraordinary work that has been done by my colleagues here I would after this event I would like to show a small demonstration of a film but before that I would like to request Professor Sukhatme, the President of the Function and Professor Devan Khakkar to kindly hand over tablets to the four principals who have come here to receive them on behalf of the minister as instructed by the honorable minister. May I now request our friend directors of the partner institutions to come forward and receive these tablets. Professor Sahasrabudde, director College of Engineering Pune Thank you so much friends for having come here and thank you very much for agreeing to collaborate with us for the future activities just for the benefit of all the participants across the country I would like to now demonstrate the additional capabilities that have been built by a large team of IIT professors and students and as I said some students from other engineering colleges in fact we have that team here which is a set of people who have built some of these applications Professor Sahasrabudde I think there is one student who is from COEP who is doing internship here can you say hello to your director there are people there are 110 summer interns from all nook and corners of the country there are in fact some from VNIT there are several from our remote centers themselves I would also like to Pan, can you show Professor Kavi Arya will have the robo that you had very briefly seen in Naunch's hand has been designed at IIT Bombay for the last two years in the YI Yantra lab which Professor Kavi Arya leads and you will soon see a demonstration of how we have made Akash capable of controlling that robo and collecting a video stream from that robo we have Srikant is here can we show Srikant and his team yes they are the people who have developed the programming environment on Akash see many of us consider Akash or such tablets only to be excess devices and we forget that these are actually full-fledged computers to emphasize the fact that these are computers and they can indeed be used at least for learning programming and even running your programs the team led by Srikant has been working in fact they work with Professor Madhu Berlour and Professor Kannan Mawgalyar and it is curious that the programming environment has not been constructed by project engineers and researchers from CS department but from chemical engineering department aerospace department and such place that merely shows the strength that you have so we now have programming capabilities on Akash there is a team which has been creating interactive lessons they have created a tool called proximity I would like to show Parak Tiwari and his team this tool permits video lectures to be converted into interactive lessons so that people can directly jump to a desired theme in a lecture and go to a point of their requirement they we propose to convert most of the NPTEL lectures and these workshop lectures insanely all the workshop lecture materials released in open source so that will be easily accessible to people we also have another killer application called clicker application which is used for conducting quizzes in classes there is a team led by Rajesh Kushalkar and others who have created this particular application I would now like to show a very short movie of 6 minutes in which we have tried to capture please forgive me for very amateurish attempt this is not a professional film we just wanted to consolidate and show people at one point 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 we will 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 people can move over to any point in this lecture the spoken tutorials created by the second team are also available and accessible on this 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 backend 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 backend server the Akash 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 Akash 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 Akash 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 Akash tablets and the answer of different students will be collected and once the quiz time is over I can view actually the result so for example I seem to have answered it correctly because the responses that my answer was correct meanwhile here you can the teacher can see responses from all the students I have to choose the question number 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 Kannan's team and Professor Madhu Bello's team on Akash tablet in this we have actually created a Linux environment on top of Akash 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 you can actually write the code on the fly and execute it here we now show an exciting engineering application where a robo is being controlled by the Akash tablet the robo itself has been designed in IIT in Professor Kaviariya's lab this is the team of summer interns that you see who have programmed the Akash 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 Akash 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 Akash tablet so this is the robo control application as you can see on the Akash 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 Akash tablet using a Wi-Fi connector I hope you can you can see the potential of this tablet while the applications that have been built by that large number of teams in IIT Bombay are impressive I would take all of this to only indicate the possibilities and these possibilities obviously can be exploited only if a large number of talented researchers students, teachers across the country work on creating applications and contents which are useful for our own use as the minister said I would like all of you to appreciate for example that if the school children in the country have to use tablets like this then they must be able to use this tablet for educational purposes in their own native tongue in Gujarati and Tamil they should be able to use those fonts visibly on the Akash tablet they should be able to create contents what it means is therefore there is a huge potential for us to develop targeted applications for all segments of the education in fact while our mandate is to empower engine college teachers and students using this tablet the ministry has agreed to my proposal that this empowerment will also involve some 20-25 students at each engineering college working on specific application development and content development which in turn will span the entire educational spectrum more specifically we are looking forward to a large number of applications and contents being developed by the talented students of these partner institutions which will be directly useful for school education in various Indian languages across the country I think they have a robo setup here our young team of interns from other institutions is very keen to show how the robo functions can somebody focus on the robo please and see that yes you can see the video stream which is being continuously collected from the robo thank you very much young people let's give them a clap they have done an excellent job with this the last job for me is to offer a vote of thanks there are just too many people to thank and my job is made doubly difficult because honorable minister introduced Akash in addition to the workshop for 10,000 teachers we are doing these workshops as you already heard are not new we have been conducting this structured workshop for more than two years and you heard from some of our partnering institutions that they are very effective a whole lot of effectiveness of these workshops comes from a large number of people working behind these workshops to begin with it is the expert faculty members who offer these workshops who offer the academic contents of these workshops who interact constantly with the participating teachers to solve their problems to enlighten them with their own experience and I must first thank all the teachers who participate in these workshops as expert faculty from IIT Bombay well there are many but one particular remark of one of the remote centers we said that they are glad that these workshops are not computer centric or IT centric well the credit goes to my colleagues from other disciplines in the institute led by professor Gayathonday can we see professor Gayathonday here he offered the first non computer science program in thermodynamics and that program became so popular in fact as the coordinator I keep looking at the feedback from the participating teachers which we see on the moodle and there were several people who started addressing him as god of thermodynamics that was a unique title but more importantly he liked the support system of these workshops so much that he called his colleagues in the mechanical engineering department and said that conducting workshop does not put any additional administrative load on the heads of the participating teachers faculty since then the mechanical engineering department has been contributing to a very large number of conduct of workshops under so we have had heat transfer for example we have a coordinator from photovoltaic cell professor Chetan Solanki here can we see Chetan Solanki thank you Chetan in fact we have we have a number of such professor Sudarshan is here the database guru of the world who happens to work for professor Sandeva in fact you just saw one of his lectures converted by our tool into interactive lecture session so thank you professor Sudarshan I will of course have ample opportunity to thank the faculty members who are participating as experts in this particular workshop but needless to add such faculty members make a lot of difference over the coming years it will be our endeavor that we should be exposing to our large number of teachers not just the expert faculty from IIT Bombay but expert faculty from all over the country from any institution because all institutions small or large have one or two extraordinary people there and this technology should permit them to address the participants from any place that we have so professor Karmalkar next time when you talk to our participants you may not have to come to Bombay you can do so from IIT Madras itself the next in line of course is a large backend team which works tirelessly to make these workshops successful so I would like to just show the glimpse of some of the leaders here Dr. Mukta Atre she is the workshop manager most of you would be interacting with her Mrs. Jaya, Gaitanya Jaya is here she is the finance minister of the project it is extremely difficult to spend a single paisa she makes so many conditions and makes my life miserable but does manage to conduct the workshops in assigned budget we have Kalpana Kalpana Kannan is the in charge of all our contents so after the workshop the contents would go on to this we have Mahendra behind who many of you would recognize the logistics name behind us I can see Professor Santosh Narona who is going to teach in this workshop but we will thank you later Santosh we have two advisors who have been with us for a very long time Mr. Avinash Aute he is also an alumnus of IIT Bombay ex TCS after retiring from TCS he started doing some social work I invited him to do social work for these workshops instead so he has been with us he handles the entire design and implementation of all back end systems all back end computer systems we have Prakash Vaidya here he has been an expert embedded system designer and in fact he also designed the earlier clicker systems but his other passion is proof editing and if you see the documentation coming out to be in a reasonably good shape it is because of his extensive proof editing while we have a large number of staff members here next to him is one young lady Firuza Firuza can you raise your hand she works as a research associate and concentrates on the correctness of technical documentation what is remarkable about her is when she was studying in school she started writing books her first book on HTML programming she wrote when she was 11th standard and she has now written by the time she finished her MSC IIT she has written some six books they are of course for school and college children but when she came to me wanting to join as a programmer I said you would be better as a technical writer rather than programmer and she has agreed to join I can tell you I have just taken this as one sample instance but I am very proud to say that hundreds of members of my team and all other teams who have worked tirelessly all have this kind of passion and some unique capability which they bring to the table I just coordinate and take the credit at the end we have of course we have already seen now let me come back to the Akash tablet when we got this project it was very obvious to us that the most important thing is not the device but the applications and contents that go with that device to this end it was impossible to very quickly develop applications all of those who have done computer software development particularly with embedded system would know that you cannot do miracles overnight so what I did is I tapped into the large pool of already done work in the institute you have already seen the glimpses of Kavyaariya's work on Robotics this robo control incidentally which the interns were able to do so quickly in six months was done because there is a whole lot of open source control software which Kavyaariya's students and researchers have already done and these people could build on top of it in exactly the same fashion Prabhu Ramchandra and Prasabh Madhu Belvedur have been working on FOSSI for a long time so the work that they have been doing has culminated into getting this iLab and other packages here the proximity work and the clicker work has been going on the department of computer science for the last two years we had a meeting in the department of computer science with our faculty colleagues and I am going to conduct such a meeting with the rest of the faculty here when I invited them to participate it is amazing how every one of my colleagues in the department said look we do this can this be used in a car we do this can this be done in a car that is when I realized that if the same environment is extended to first 168 colleges and then to 500 colleges where the creative talents of teachers and students can be brought to bear on the further development there is no reason why all the educational contents that you need for India cannot be created by Indians in India I want the engineering colleges to spearhead this thing last but not the least I will mention in the context of these applications the spoken tutorial application which was these are ten minute video tutorials but the audio can be in any language so these are not video films these are actually screens which move around like your slides but the audio is a explanation in any language so we construct first a spoken tutorial in English and then we hand it over to other people we can do the translation of English into Hindi Telugu, Malati and so on they conduct these workshops across the country and in fact we expect the participating teachers in these workshops also to take that forward and ask their students in turn to work towards that direction I think I can speak endlessly on both the Aakash tablet and the workshops but it is just about 11 o'clock at the end of the session so let me do the thanksgiving at the end for the people who have come all the way from long distances Prasasarapudde, Prasachalpa, Prasitopkar, Prasapandit thank you very much for coming here Prasasya Sarkip, thank you very much for making it to us all my faculty colleagues I understand that there are some representatives of the media also who have joined us thank you very much for coming at such a short notice and I must thank my PRO for doing an excellent job because only yesterday evening we got the news from the ministry generally one does not thank one's own close friends and senior colleagues but I think it is only proper that I thank Prasasukhatmay for sparing time and coming here to preside over this function well I know how much he loves IIT and the work that goes on at IIT Bomb so I am sure that if I had not invited as a chief guest he would have quietly walked in and sat in the corner because he has been supporting our efforts particularly my efforts for decades here Prasadevan Khakkar of course is our leader and it is under his able guidance that all of us work I just told you something about Prasarangan Banerjee's office in general the office of Dean RND exactly the same thing applies to my director's office let me just give you one incidence when we wanted to rush through the final processing of the purchase order of Akash there was a certain date before which we had to open the bank guarantee for us to start receiving the tablets in time and some signatures were required as you know in the process by the time the file reached the deputy director's office the office was closed and the deputy director had gone home and the some activity had to be done next day so when I called him he says no problem Farthak just come home I went to his home but my director could sign the file only after his deputy director has seen and signed so I called my director it was already 8 o'clock in the night and you know what my director said he says Farthak whatever time you come you will find me in my office that is the greatness of my leadership here sir and we are very proud of that in my own department when we started working on this large project Prasar Sannayal spent considerable personal time in discussing this with several senior colleagues helped us to appoint a appropriate purchase committee which could apply it's not just some senior professors people were experts and give correct advice indeed without this great leadership at the departmental level at the level of dean and at the level of the director if we did not have it believe me I would say it is impossible for any other institute to complete the purchase process of this magnitude in one month we were helped tremendously by the administrative departments as well as I said no paper ever waited either in the office of the deputy director or material management so Mr. Borkade is here and his colleague Roy we have Dr. Ramesh our deputy director finance and accounts I don't see Chabuk Swar ah he is here he is the auditor let me tell you it is extremely difficult to get past him he is worse than Jaya my finance minister Mr. Borkade read thousand pages of documentation overnight in order to ensure that there is not a single squiggle left in the process we are very thankful to you sir for helping us to move ahead with the Akash and of course with this great support and with the greater support and research from my friends in the other engineering institutions we will take both the Akash and the workshops to greater heights thank you so much thank you one and all please join us for high T outside this thank you