 Before talking more about the open educational resource assignments and the other scheduled activities that are there in this interactive session, we have a small half an hour session by Professor Kannan Moghulia about a SyLAB demonstration program that is going to be conducted from IIT Bombay in the upcoming weeks. As you all know SyLAB is a free and open source software as is the philosophy of the entire FDP where we promote open educational resources and open source softwares. This would be a ideal start for today's interaction where you can learn more about the program that is going to come and the benefits that it will offer you. So I invite Professor Kannan Moghulia to start the session. Good morning, my name is Kannan Moghulia and I lead the SyLAB effort at IIT Bombay. Today is supposed to be just half an hour of interaction session. The real session will happen once, only once and that will be on 12th October that is next Thursday from 3 to 5. During the 2 hour, I will explain to you the great things that SyLAB offers that are offered by nobody else, no other software including MATLAB. Today's session is just to prime you about that real event which is going to happen on next Thursday 3pm. I also take this opportunity to invite you all to attend that session. It is only a 2 hour session but I believe it is extremely important. It could save a lot of work for you in designing assignments, labs, other computing exercise using SyLAB. You can also use that to come up with examples. You can modify them, you can use them in your curriculum. More importantly, you can also understand the syntax of a command that you have never used before. All that is possible with what I am going to show next Thursday. So this is an interaction session. I would want you to ask questions, I am going to open the floor. Before that, I also want to point out that we do have lab migration activity in case, you know in case you want to switch over to SyLAB and you want to know how to switch over your labs will help you, I will explain that and I will also explain how you yourselves and your students, bright students from your class can contribute to these activities. Possibly the students look for internship activities, internship opportunities, I will explain that. We are also working on enhancing toolboxes although I expect these toolboxes to be useful mainly for about 1 percent of your work. Because if you look at the total things, toolbox activity is not so much, in most colleges you do mainly phosphorytransform, ordinary differential equations, matrix manipulations, Eigenvalue, computation, singular value decomposition, you know things like that. These things can be done using whatever I am going to show. So, with that brief introduction, I will open the floor. Is the SyLAB related with the MATLAB and how it is, what are the advantages of the SyLAB over MATLAB? Good question. Yes, SyLAB is an open source alternative to MATLAB and it is available completely free and what I am going to show on next week can be done using your mobile phone also. Using your tablet, using your mobile phone, which means that you do not even have to install. While you are on the move, your students are travelling by bus and they want to do some calculation, they can do that and they will have access to SyLAB code that we have created for 65,000 examples from various science and engineering books. That means many of the books that you use in your curriculum are already covered by this activity. Examples from these books will already be available. This is what I am going to show you next Thursday. I want to encourage all of you to join and also to tell everybody else in your college and nearby colleges who will benefit by this to come. It could save a lot of time for you people because you can see as one gets old, for example I am getting old and I always have difficulty in remembering the syntax of a SyLAB command. How does one call? How many parameters are there? Which is the first parameter? Which is the second parameter? Things like that I do not normally remember. It is always easily explained with an example, example that too with a example from a book that I am familiar with. So, this is a fantastic thing and I do not have to remember, I am going to demonstrate all of that next Thursday. Yes, it is indeed a great computing tool. If you understand this, you will not leave SyLAB, you will use it all the time. Thank you. Sivakasi. Sir, I am Devideesh. I am the room manager only. For that 12th October session sir, is it useful for faculty or students? It is mainly for faculty members, but you are welcome to invite students if you have extra room. Encourage all the faculty members to come, whoever needs to compute because they will find that every one of them will find this useful. Every one of them will benefit and it is going to save a lot of time and effort. That is why we have written that you will save thousands of rupees. In fact, the convenience you derive out of that is priceless because it is going to help you to come up with new SyLAB code quickly taking something, modifying, playing around with this, giving this as a test problem for your lab experiments, lab exams, all kinds of things. I would encourage whether it is physics, chemistry, whether it is chemical engineering, mechanical engineering, aerospace engineering, electrical, electronics, you name the department civil engineering. They will all benefit, they will all see something useful, but after doing all that if you find some extra room by all means, please invite your students. Good morning. Sir, this is Madhav from Asia College of Engineering. I handed out that is SyLAB is equal for MATLAB programs or for assembling all those things? I am going to show you how good it is. Yes. In fact, you will see it is lot better in certain aspects. Actually, it is equal to the MATLAB program. I am saying it is even better in some aspect. Okay, okay sir. It can be used for the students to teach in the easiest way or... Yes, yes. I am saying it is even better. What I am going to show you, you cannot do with any other software. Any other software. Okay, okay. Fine, sir. Right? Thank you very much. Yes. Good morning. Okay, sir. Do you have like SyLAB can help us in computer vision and the image processing stuff like that? Yes, we are also doing that. One of the things that we will talk about is image processing toolbox, single processing toolbox. So, those are the extra things we are adding. What is more? Some of your bright faculty members and students can add your functions also. We are in the process of building these toolboxes. We may even make them better. Okay? So, we would want you to contribute to that in case you have bright faculty members and students. Not only can you use whatever I am offering free of cost, absolutely free of cost, but you can actually contribute to that and make them even better. Okay. Thank you, sir. Welcome. Welcome. Take to India. When you told that, I mean, a lot of things can be done using SyLAB, which cannot be done using any other software. I think it would be good, like if you can give some examples. This is what I am going to show you on 12th. Because today is just an interactive session, it was not planned for the current course Organizers have kindly given me half an hour just to tell you about what I am going to do on that day. Right? So, please do come on Thursday, October 12 between 3 pm and 5 pm. Not only you, please invite all your colleagues who use such computing software, ask them all to come. It is going to be useful for lots of people, whatever I am going to show you, that is SyLAB code for 65,000 examples from more than 550 textbooks of standard science, engineering, all standard books, all popular books have already been covered. And it has been done, this has been created by thousands of students and faculty members across the country. In fact, this also shows the power of collaboration that we can actually work together and create something very useful. The point is well taken. I am going, that is precisely the reason why we have asked for two hours on Thursday. Good morning, Geetanjali Institute. Hello, sir. Good morning. Yeah. Sir, actually, okay, I have two queries that I want to ask you. Yes. In this particular week 3, some of the videos and the questions that are given for, okay, they are not matching to what is given in the content. So what will happen is, you please raise this question after this session. I am only going to talk about SyLAB, okay. After my session is over in about 10-15 minutes, the new instructor will take up your familiar instructor. At that time, you can ask that question. In case you have any question regarding the SyLAB session, the upcoming SyLAB session, please do ask me. No, I think so. Yeah. Thank you. Sir, I have a question. Whether there is any feature in SyLAB which pharma professionals can use? Whatever you do with other software computing, whether it is statistical analysis, whether it is plotting graphs, solving differential equations, or block diagram based simulation, all of these are possible. Dronacharya College. Sir, as the remote center, we have registered for SyLAB session to be held on 12th. The registration of the participants, will the workshop coordinator receive any mail from your site to start the registration or the participants can start registration today itself? That mail was already sent. I think that is open from 7th onwards. Yes. As per your mail, it is open from today onwards. Yes. Good morning. May I have your university? Good morning sir. Sir, my question is like some of the external participants are there in our remote center and they want like on 12th October, if they can individually do this SyLAB. So, coming to remote center is compulsory sir. What they can do is. Review interaction. Yeah. Good question. What we are going to do is, yeah, we are also going to stream them on YouTube. We will publish the link. So, in case there are people who are coming from long distance and for various reasons they cannot come or in their own college, they want to have 30, 40 people attending. They are welcome to join. We will have an interactive chat session also. They can also ask questions from that. So, chat session will be from YouTube. Yeah. That also is possible. Okay sir. So, because otherwise if I just transmit you, transmit and they will not be able to ask questions. Right? If they are in a remote center, they can ask me questions. But if they are in their college, how will they ask me questions if they have any doubts? If the chat session is given, they can also ask questions. So, that is why we are opening up chat sessions in YouTube for them. Thank you sir. For remote center participants, it is not required. Yes, sir. Yeah. Okay. Finalex, welcome. Good morning sir. My question is like the previous question. Can we connect to your session by using AVU? You are already on AVU. Yeah. That will also be done through AVU only. So, by using SyLab, you can solve that is ordinary differential equation and plotting all the things. Can you, provision you have made for non-linear equations? Anything available by using SyLab? Yeah. So, obviously, non-linear, if you see non-linear equations, I assume that you mean non-linear algebraic equations. The standard method is to solve it by Gaussian method. Linear, I said, so you have, sorry, Newton's method. So, something like that is, you know, whatever you can do in other software, you can do it in SyLab. SyLab comes with a complete, you know, language in which you can code all kinds of things. But I am going to tell you about things that we already have, outstanding things that you have not seen before. Okay. That kind of collection, SyLab saw examples for 65,000 standard examples. SyLab code for those and ready to solve from your own textbooks. That is what is going to be new. So, if you have a book in which there is an example that solves non-linear equations, just take that example, it will solve right away. You can modify it for your problem, you will run again. Okay. So, the answer is yes. Thank you, sir. Okay. I am going to take, there are two more people. I will just, yeah, let us finish these two and then I want to spend five minutes to talk about a laptop that we are going to launch last five minutes. Okay. Let us go to the remaining two quickly. Go on. Go on. Welcome. In Mathlab, I am not finding PDF approach. I mean, directly, PDF of Linlay or generalized Linlay, it is a newly found book. Is that facility available in SyLab? Because in R, already it is updated. Yeah. So, I would say to be honest, for statistical computing, there is nothing comparable to R. So, if you are using R, that is, you are already with the best. Okay. And R is fine because R is also open source software. We are very happy with that. Right. So, all the functionalities that you have in R will not be available whether it is SyLab or Matlab. Okay. So, if you are already using R, I would recommend that you continue to use R. For all other activities, please come to SyLab. And we, whatever I am going to propose for SyLab, we want to create a similar thing for R also. So, you do attend the SyLab session. And suppose you have an active R group, you can actually join hands with us. We can do a similar thing for R and it will be fantastic. It will be fantastic. Okay. Thank you. About optimization techniques. Optimization. Optimization. We have a great optimization toolbox in SyLab. Good morning. This is Yagraj Engineering College. Manakam. Manakam sir. Happy to hear. Sir, what is a prerequisite for attending SyLab? Do we have to have the knowledge of having Matlab? So, one of the things I will also talk about is what are the resources available to learn SyLab if somebody wants to learn SyLab using Spokane tutorials. Right? That I will talk about. And from the examples that I talk about, you will be able to figure out whether you need that kind of computing in your curriculum. You know, maybe in computer science, you may not need so much, but certainly your colleagues in electrical engineering, electronics engineering, mechanical engineering, civil engineering, please help them. Invite them to attend. I assume that you are all computer science people. So, you are not familiar with either Matlab or SyLab. And so, I have come to your college many times. Dr. Shalini is a good friend. So, convey my regards to her. So, please do invite your colleagues from other engineering departments. Thank you. One more question. One more question. You said? Yeah, go ahead. Yes, sir. Sir, we have conducted Spokane tutorial workshop on SyLab for our faculty across all departments. Right. Now, they are asking a few questions related like how can we apply this to OR problems or how can we do graphics lab in this, animations in this. They are asking more detail that is how they can apply to their domain. Will it be covered in maybe these first days or any kind of some half an session devoted to applying to our problems? So, one of the things, good question, excellent question. What we are going to do is the following. In two hours, it is not clear whether we will have time to answer all this. But I would want to discuss a way to establish communication between us so that we can actually continue to discuss. For example, we can say all people who are interested in some kind of computing, what if we meet one hour a week separately for that purpose? How do we organize that? So, for that we can discuss the modalities. And if we all agree, we do not mind meeting all of you once a week. At that time, there we could actually identify experts in some other remote center. For example, we have 65 lab migrations that have already happened by colleges across the country. There are some good experts of SyLab amongst engineering colleges across the country. They also can join. So, all that we can discuss and then we can come up with modalities how to meet. Maybe one hour a week, we can meet subsequently. But when to meet and so on, we can discuss next week. Is that clear? Yeah. I want to talk about the, I was talking about this laptop. There is a laptop that we are launching. You can see that it runs Ubuntu 16.04. This is a 11.6 inch machine. It runs Intel Atom processor. It will have, the price is about 10,000. That is the number we have fixed. It will have 4 GB RAM. It will have 32 GB NAND flash. We also plan to give an expansion slot in the back. So, you can open it and then attach your own solid state drive or even a 2.5 inch hard disk. It weighs 1.2 kg and you can see it is a standard keyboard. The most outstanding feature about this laptop is the battery that it comes with. It has a 10,000 mAh battery. We have tested it with complete brightness, 100 percent brightness and HD video streaming. The battery lasted 8 hours non-stop. So, for normal use, I believe that it will easily come for 12 hours. As a result, if your student for example, goes in the morning to college, battery is completely charged, until it comes back in the evening, battery will last. That means throughout the day and travel during bus also, he or she will be able to use this laptop. I believe that this is good enough for many operations. I believe that it is good for even engineering students because we are talking about 4 GB RAM and 32 GB NAND flash. Of course, you can use SD card. You can use USB drive. You can even using the expansion slot add extra things. And of course, because Ubuntu runs, you can put almost all software. We can discuss that. I am not sure whether I will have time to talk about it. Next Thursday, we might even have a separate session. What we want is, we are going to make this available only to certain colleges and centres where there is a need for 300 laptops or more. The reason being, we want to make sure that there is good after sales support. At least at the initial phases, we believe that we want to come up with a nice workable model. Then, we can make sure, because one of the problems with low cost items is what happens after you buy it? What happens? You got a tablet and then it stopped working. Who is going to repair it? We want to make sure of that. We also are exploring the possibility of providing after sales software support including factory reset and those things. So, these are the things we are thinking about. And if you have questions now, you can ask me or we can have a separate session for that also. Over to you in case you have questions. So, apparently the questions are, there are two questions. What is the cost? Cost is about 10,000. I will announce the exact amount shortly through this channel. The second one is where to buy it? We will also tell, because we are only going to work with colleges and centres where there is a need for 300 laptops or more. Because we want to have about 10 centres where this will be first made available. We want to work with them closely, make sure that there are no problems. Because what happened previously was, it was made available everywhere and people are asking questions, there was some issues about after sales support. We want to ensure that the experience is good. Once we figure out and solve the problem, then it can be made available on a larger scale even for people who need lesser number of computers. Right now, at the first instance, it is going to be made available only to those centres that have a need for 300 laptops or more and we will announce it. Okay. So, there is nothing like pre-booking procedure or so probably on an individual basis? The way we are going to do that is, we are going to take an advance of 1000 rupees for each machine and that amount will go into an escrow account. Escrow account which means that the bank is going to hold that money for you. It is a commitment from the students S they have given and if the laptop is delivered, they will indeed buy it and if they do not buy it, that money is lost. It is a non-refundable deposit. Right? But suppose the laptop is not good because we are placing an order, it will take 6 weeks because this is a special order. It is going to take 6 weeks. Suppose the manufacturer does not give good laptop, supposing he tells us, promises something but delivers something else and we do not accept it, then we return that 1000 rupees from the escrow account back to the students. So, it is in the interest of the manufacturer to make sure that he indeed delivers the machine that we are working with. Okay? That is the process we are going to follow. And we would want the college that is interested in buying the 300 laptops to give 300 into 1000 rupees as an advance to go into that escrow account. We would want the colleges to take the responsibility to collect their money, keep track of it, who paid that money, give the 10 percent, which will go into the escrow account. The moment the machine is delivered, we will say it has come and then the vendor will come to your college. You can take that, pay the balance, take the laptop. Is it only for the students? Anybody can buy. Faculty can also purchase. Faculty can buy. In fact, you can even buy your, you know, you might have some support staff and their children also go to colleges, your sweepers, your drivers. They also want to buy. It does not matter. We have no restrictions. It is not subsidized at all. There is no government involved in this. But as I understand that it has to be a bulk purchase for 300 laptops and probably I cannot, I cannot try it on individual basis. Say for one or two laptops, it's not possible. We have to go for 300. That should have bulk figure. That is why we are saying in the beginning, because there are some uncertainties, we want only to go to places where there is a need. Then it makes sense for the vendor to ensure that there is after sale support, good support. We make sure that there are no problems. After doing this experiment, individual computers can be made available later. At the initial phase, only to those places where there is a need for 300 or more. You can always announce it in your college. You can say that, here is this machine. You are welcome to come to IIT Bombay to have a look at this machine. In case you people are interested, you want my team to come and demonstrate, you pay their airfare, they will come and demonstrate to you. And then your people can see it. And your college students can say, hey, I want this. And 300 is not a large number for a college that has 2-3,000 students. Sir, is any demonstration video, is it available say on YouTube or IIT Bombay site or anywhere else? We are in the process of creating. We will create that also and we will make that available. Good point. We are going to make that available. That would be nice, sir. Sir, I would like to know about the warranty period. How much is that? The warranty, good question. One year and after that, the vendor is agreeing to give annual maintenance contract at 750 rupees a year. He says that he has 350 service centers, but all these have to be verified. But one thing we are sure is, if you find in the, you know, the machine that you get, if it is in good condition, because many of these machines, if there is any problem, that will be right in the beginning. Now, supposing you resolve it, you say that until you fix it, I am not going to buy it. Supposing they fix it and they give it to you and I think it will last a long time. And the low AMC is possible, I believe, because the build is actually very good. They do not expect too many problems. So, unless your people, your students do not, you know, if your students handle it properly, treat it with respect. After all, it is a fragile electronic instrument. If they handle it carefully, I believe that it will last a long time. Sir, will the warranty work, will that be on-site or carry-in warranty? That is, I want to know whether it would be possible for the vendor to provide servicing at the college center itself. That is the reason we are trying to do that. That is why we are offering it only for 300 colleges or more. As a result, it is possible in those colleges. We will make sure that service is provided in your college or at most in your town. Actually, I need to know the specification of RAM and also the hard disk of the laptop. Yeah, it comes with 4GB RAM. There is no hard disk. It is only solid state device. It comes with 32GB and there is going to be an expansion slot. You can add 128GB solid state device if you want. You can also add a terabyte hard disk, but these are optional. You can add a 2.5 inch hard disk through the expansion slot. Expansion slot will come with the machine. Can you use any multimedia software on this laptop set? Audio works. Anything that runs on Ubuntu will run. Tejpur, please go ahead. Regarding this demonstration program on iLab that is available for 12, I want for registration. Then I see that the name of the remote center for ASAM is not finding any name. Can we get our center added as a remote center for ASAM? Yes, we will be happy to add you as a center. Thank you, DKT. Professor Kodavade, good morning. Good morning, good morning. Sir, we are interested in this project. I will come to your office and have a little interaction. Okay, great. Thank you. Very good. Good morning, sir. We are very happy to see you, sir. I am Kumar, you know well. Yes. Go ahead, please. Sir, could we have custom designed increasing in the RAM capacity, 8GB RAM Leica? Then the other question we posted for 300 numbers buying, whether any discount so that a person, we have TBI through that a person can take up this kind of work, a motivation kind of thing. For that, do you have any considerations? These are the two questions from my side. If any other thing our people would ask, sir. Very, very happy to see you, sir. Yeah, so happy to see you all. The standard machine that comes with this 2GB, so we are going for a 4GB RAM. We believe that it is sufficient for most people and 8GB we are not looking at right now. It may not be possible at this point. This 10,000 I am talking about is actually discounted price. The standard price is 12,500. That is the reason why I am insisting on 300. If people want to buy in smaller quantities, first of all it is not available and the price will also, after sale support will not be available, it will also become more expensive. Welcome, Hindustan Institute of Technology. My question is, why we learn PSI lab while we have our system and MATLAB regarding that? You come and see it next week. We have PSI lab code for 65,000 examples already available. All your faculty members can start using it right away. Right? Okay. Thank you, sir. Thank you. Hindustan? Yeah, we can hear you now. Please go ahead. Sir, my question is revolving. We cannot hear you. Can you please chat? In the chat you can post your question. So, the question is simulation of power electronics circuits on PSI lab? Yeah, it is possible. We are actually working on a toolbox called, I think it is power, one is PSAT we are working on. The other one is, I think it is called power systems toolbox. We will talk about it next Thursday. So, thank you all. It was all, it was very nice seeing you all and I look forward to meeting you all next Thursday. Please do inform all your colleagues from other engineering and science departments. In case you have extra seats, do allow your students also to come and you will all benefit by that. Thank you. Goodbye. Jai Hind and God bless you all.