 So, good morning everybody and welcome to IIT. You must be told a few things about this internship program. I started this program with about five to eight students coming regularly when Prasad Vinash out there joined me, instantly worked in TCS for many years, led a team of fifteen hundred people and took a voluntary retirement to work for social causes. I convinced him to work for this social cause that is when he joined a club, a project as an advisor and he and his team runs the internship program now. We usually have hundred plus people from across the country and more than three thousand people apply for these internship. So people who are selected are selected with some specific idea in mind. First is the set of people who have academically performed well. Personally, I don't give a damn to the academic performance. I have seen gold medalists, I have seen academically very brilliantly performing people who do not necessarily deliver in life and who do not necessarily achieve their true potential in life. That is not good. However, this is exception on an average people who perform academically well also perform well in their life. That's the general view. And that is why we follow the same rule as others do. Namely, we select people based on their academic performance. We do not apply any pedigree for such selection. We believe that toppers in any institution in the country are as good as toppers in any other institution in the country. And therefore, we select people based on the academic credentials. However, we are also aware that there are a large number of students with great creative minds and abilities who do not necessarily perform well academically. For such cases, Professor Outer devised a strategy of what he calls a software contest. So basically to test people whether they can actually create something useful or not. I think about four years ago you fixed some quota for them so that a certain number of people admitted to internship program do not come necessarily because of their academic performance alone but come here, get selected because of their ability to do some creative work. I believe that amongst you there are several people who have been selected through that mechanism. It should tell you that at the end of the day the academic performance or creative performance, all of them will work well for you to get an opportunity. These things will only open the doors but what you do after getting inside the doors is entirely up to you. We expect a lot of things. By the way, he and his team spent close to two months coordinating with various segments of different national projects that are going on in the institute to find out which are the projects which would benefit maximally by associating a few interns with each other projects. We have been fortunate in being able to do several national projects. The national mission on education through ICT or using ICT has been one of the phenomenal successes. IIT Bombay was privileged to be associated with the AKAS project which we concluded successfully. We also trained thousands of teachers at a time. There are many amongst you who belong to institutions which are our remote centers at which we train teachers who assemble over 300 remote centers at a time. We can train up to 10,000 teachers at a time and that is because this country needs huge scale. You will realize that each one of you who is here would probably have left behind at least 10 people similar to you in achievements. And for those 11 people that I mentioned who are in your institution, there are actually 100 others who did not get an opportunity to come in because at some point in time in a competitive exam they scored one mark less than others or two marks less than others and so on. They are probably studying somewhere else, not getting the kind of opportunity that they deserve. This brings me back to the first observation that I made. Please use your stay here maximally. It is a rather rare opportunity. IIT Bombay has an ethos. IITs are, your institutions are not comprised only buildings, labs and other things. The people who create the difference and it is the people here who collectively make that difference. You should see that. I mean it's not for no reason that the top performance in joint entrance exam or top performance in gate exam always prefer to come to IIT Bombay. Last year my director was telling me that 47 out of the top 50 JEE rankers joined IIT Bombay and that's a large number. I am still searching for those three lost souls. I don't know where they have gone. But the point is so many people do not come to an institution just like that. They come here because they believe that they will gain something. You will be here only for two months. So try to pick up as much of the IIT Bombay ethos as you can. And this ethos is not limited only to the academic activity. The ethos also spread across multiple channels of activities, some of which you will not be able to see because you are at a period of time here when it's a vacation time. But many of you would have heard of Techfest. Some of you would have heard of Mood Indigo. Those are two large festivals conducted, organized entirely by our students with some support from faculty. And these have become hallmarks in large scale meaningful creative activities. In addition, we have a thriving research program, many of which many of you would not have been exposed to such a research program here. Again, part of what you are doing is going to be research. Part of what you are going to be doing is implementation. Research and implementation are to go hand in hand if the advantages of research are to be transferred to usage by large number of people. As I said, we have several teams and they will be making presentations briefly to you throughout the day today, I believe. Tomorrow there is a day of training. So you will know that many of you would be familiar with the ethos that we use. But it is useful to find out the details. How many of you have extensively used Unix, Linux or any Linux version earlier in life? Quite a few. Others better get used to it. We are a complete Linux house. We also believe in open source software. How many of you have used Microsoft Windows as operating system? Practically everybody. How many of you are 100 percent sure that the Microsoft Windows loaded on your machine is a legal piece of software appropriately paid for? One, two, quite a few. How many of you are sure that every machine in your institution which hosts such commercial products are all licensed and properly paid for? One. I would like each one of you to feel so proud at the end of one year from today because I would expect you to go back and tell this to your own colleagues, tell this to your own teachers that using unlicensed commercial product is a criminal offense. In IIT Bombay, if someone is found using an unlicensed software, then the person is debarred from accessing any server for seven days. It is almost like keeping a person hungry for seven days. That's a tradition that we follow. If we do not have any piece of software on a machine, we go to some other machine to use if that has that software. We follow this very strictly because this is an important part of academic ethics which is an important part of general ethics. Of course the general ethical standards in this country are unfortunately not something that we should be very proud of but we need to improve ourselves and we can begin from this point. So as a result, because we have limited funds, even IIT Bombay, I am saying this with conscious awareness, we have limited funds and therefore we try to maximize the use of such funds for buying equipment, tools and software which is absolutely essential for our function. But wherever feasible, we try to use open source software which has no such licensing requirement and that is the reason why you find that not only our environment here but even the work that we do almost always involves open source software and that means that more importantly, such open source software not only you can use but you can dissect, you can modify, you can contribute back and enrich the common flow of knowledge. That is the objective that we generally have in mind. I will use the remaining time to tell you something very specific that I am currently engaged in. We are running a faculty development program to train our teachers in the effective use of ICT for online and blended education. As you know, online courses are proliferating. We also ourselves have introduced IIT Bombay X2 which we offer our MOOCs but a large number of teachers are not familiar with how to use such online resources effectively in their conventions. They still continue to teach, delivering lectures, giving convention assignments etc. This is the first FDP, ICT chairman wanted me to design a program that could be given to all 500,000 teachers of all professional institutions in three years. It is impossible even for IIT Bombay to do that in three years alone. So we will be looking for partners and this is the first FDP that has just rolled out from 2nd of May which has not too many teachers but still 4,000 teachers who are being trained. They belong to different places, different institutions. That program will go on for 10 weeks. There are a couple of things which are part of that program for which we are still constructing the back end software. We use the IIT Bombay X platform which is built on OpenEDX, we will train them on that. But we also plan to build a software platform which will build and nurture collaborative communities. These collaborating communities could be small communities which are sectoral, small communities which are institutional, small communities which span across the country but these communities contribute to creation of open educational resources and appropriate utilization of these open educational resources for furthering better education. So we will be building that software, I will be describing that briefly, there will be some interns whom I will be requesting if interested to join that project. We are also building an OER repository. How many of you have heard of OER or Open Educational Resources? Not many. So you all study from textbooks, not even that. Guidebooks? Yes, guidebooks is more appropriate. But more than textbooks and guidebooks, there is huge amount of digital resources which are available, many of which are open educational resources. The only thing is there are so many, if you do a Google search you will get one lakh answers and you will generally not go beyond the first page of what Google tells you. Am I right? If you have always seen at least the second page, always, sometimes, well what it means is you are depending upon Google to rank those search results in a form which you believe is most appropriate for you. Can there be any machine which can intelligently figure out what is most appropriate for each of the millions of users who make queries? And as an added attraction, the revenue model is based on advertisement. So first few entries will always be advertisement entries. Nothing wrong in that. But we need a capability to search meaningful resources, not all resources in the world. One of the important resources that we use is Wikipedia. How many of you are familiar with Wikipedia? Ah, everyone. How many of you have surreptitiously used a Wikipedia article to cut a paragraph and paste it in one of your submissions? Many. Have you always acknowledged that? No. Yes. One or two, yes, and I am again proud of that. But please remember that that is another form of academic crime, which is actually an ethical crime in general sense. Of course, we are permitted to use open educational resource or open resource anywhere and that is the purpose of open resource. But of course, you are expected to acknowledge with gratitude that you are using such and such resource for such and such purpose. The primary objective of that resource is actually to make you understand something better. That's all. If you write something about it, you are expected to use your own words in rewriting or rephrasing whatever has been in it. In any case, you are expected to give a reference to whatever material you refer. These are parts of academic ethics, which we'll elaborate later as you progress. But that is one of the aspects that we wish to explore, that how do you build an open educational resource repository, which is searchable with large number of tags? That will be another project that I'll be doing. In the context of large-scale teacher study and in the context of technical activities in the educational institutions, last year, November, I was asked to embark on a specific coordination of a region in the country which has huge problems of infrastructure and connectivity in that is the northeastern region. Are there any students here who come from any institute in northeast India? Wow. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, some. Siltcher. Siltcher. Agartala. And you are from? Siltcher. Large number of people from Siltcher, is it? I would like to meet all of you independently for just 15 minutes to find out how we could take this collaboration specifically to make it larger in the entire northeastern segment. As you know, there are seven NITs there. There are several other institutions also, but they are far-flung, not easily reachable. I'm trying to set up a research collaboration among these institutions separately, but I would like a larger collaboration among students and teachers for even normal learning. So I would like to spend 15 minutes with you, and that would become part of our larger effort of building collaborative communities across the country. That's all I wanted to say, make the best use of the opportunity. You see the tags that we wear. I mean, I kept talking about IIT Bombay because I'm very proud of it. I've been holding that logo on my chest for close to 47 years now. It is worn almost as a flag. The only flag above it for me is the flag of the nation. I divided my allegiances first to the nation, second to my institute, and third to people of this country wherever I am able to contribute as a teacher. Such flags as you wear, you all come from well-known institutions, and I say well-known, independent of whether your own institution in your own eyes is well-known or not. How does the issue become well-known? Does that issue tom-tom its name all over the world? No. It is the students who pass out from that institution, they achieve something in life, and then people say, ah, such and such person comes from that institution, therefore that institution must be built. We are grateful to 50,000 of our alumni who have built a name for us because the world believes that they have done something useful. They believe that people who come to IIT Bombay will do something useful. Such a flag therefore is won with a great sense of pride and affection, but it is also won with a greater sense of responsibility because that means that if I wear a flag of my institution and now onwards you will wear a flag of IIT Bombay also on your shoulders because you will be here for next week. So that puts a great responsibility on you. You cannot by any action or thought of yours in your later life bring any disrepute to the flag that you can, whether it is that of IIT Bombay, whether it is that of your institution or whether it is that of that. So wear it with great pride, wear with a greater sense of responsibility and wear it with the greatest sense of accountability to this nation. Why? Because whatever we are doing, whatever our institutions are doing it is all possible because the free and independent India decided that to provide opportunities it will provide facilitation to create so many institutions. It doesn't matter whether your institute is a private institute or a government institute but there is the money earned by the people of this country by their blood and sweat which has gone into making of your institutions and therefore making provisions for people like you to actually study and get an opportunity. As I said for each one of you there are hundreds and thousands like you who do not get that opportunity and therefore the greatest sense must be sense of accountability for the people of this nation, whatever you do in a little bit you must of course make things extremely good for yourself. That's the fundamental purpose of living. After all if I don't do well myself what good you is my training. So I must become very great professional, I must become very rich I must of course do everything possible for my family because that is my next instinct. These are natural and every one of you will fulfill them I have no doubt but beyond that there is something else that you must do you must do something for public good. Everything that you do here during these two months will result in public good because whatever development that happens here nothing is kept in a proprietary fashion. Everything is released in open source for people to use. So even in these two months work with that sense of accountability to people. The few lines of code that you will write will probably be used by hundreds of other people later and if you have a bug there or if you have a non understandable code which people find it difficult to improve later you will be responsible. I think we ask them to put their names in the software that they write. So that they will know whom to come and bash if the software doesn't work. So your heads are on the roll. In nurturing collaborative communities have you ever participated in collaborative communities of any kind? Collaboration. Come on when I copy a journal to be submitted in the lab from my friends I am collaborating with my friends. Good form of collaboration it works well except in some very odd instances I am tempted to tell you this anecdote this happened in 1965 when I was in second year of engineering and there was a lab on fluid mechanics. So fluid flow I don't know all of you would have done some basic course in engineering. So you have various channels with different cross sections and you have to measure the flow and write the parameters and values. And we all did that experiment. Of course nobody really made any measurements because previous batch had done all the measurements correctly or so we thought. And the journals were submitted. There was a new teacher who was actually since I was an NCC enthusiast he was a senior under officer. He had just graduated with gold medal and had become a teacher. And he gave zero marks to all submissions the entire class. And we were wondering of course since all of us had copied we couldn't argue but we had a friend in our amongst us who was his batch mate. He had managed to stay in second year by perpetually filling. So he says I go and ask and he went and said how can you give zero marks the results are exactly same as last year's results. So the teacher told him yes. And the last year results were exactly same as previous year's results which I had done the measurements when I was a student of that course. However the first thing I have done is I have changed all channel parameters and you can never get these results from the present channels. The only thing you can do is come back again on a Sunday do all those lab experiments major things properly record them properly and submit your own results good bad or not. That was a very great lesson to us that you see usually students of any generation genuinely believe that they are smarter than the teachers of that generation. This was true with us when we were students this is true today but there are occasions when teachers turn out to be smarter. I figured it out when I came here as a student and I found out that we had a lot of smart teachers and that continues that Manamari continues. The point I am trying to make is that collaboration has different ways but a true collaboration is one where people work with each other to create something jointly which is better than just the sum total of individuals capability and that is it's like a team play. But in real world when you are working on so many different things in life including in your own areas of study you take your B take or B program you would be doing what about 30 courses. That means you will be studying in 30 different topics for each topic you will be collaborating with different groups of people different teachers to be there and so on. Imagine now the collaboration grows larger that you are collaborating amongst this group now new friends that you have found out you go back and you want to collaborate how will you collaborate simple way emails but emails can be individually very difficult to track if they become a large collection. There are 100 emails within one month's end and now you want to find out who said what on a particular topic extremely difficult to figure out. So you need actually a collaboration platform where you have tags under those tags so that people can actually put their inputs they can be commented upon by others and you can visit the tag to find out what is the latest in community. So how many of you have participated in discussion forums of any kind Stack Overflow for example Rajnam. What is Stack Overflow? Isn't it a community platform where you can actually pose your question get an answer you can search for questions search for answers. The only thing is generally the collaborative platforms are limited to specific activities that you do they are not built around people. Now when you talk about creating open educational resources somebody someone of you writes a good program as an example implementation of a stack somebody else writes a good explanation of what pointers are someone else prepares a video clip explaining how to use Ubuntu for the first time. All of these are open resources but how do people search for these resources where do you host these resources? Searching is not very easy particularly if it's a video clip. Usually tags are associated with every digital resource so that people could search using that tag. These tags are called indexes in the conventional form when you have documents but when you have digital asset of any kind you need tags. How these tags get created? Who is the best person to create the tag? The best person to create the tag is the person who actually created that. However when you create a resource like you write an explanatory email you never write tags along with that email saying that this email describes things related to these five phrases you never do that but that's extra work. We wish to now create a large platform by which we can have such educational resources being contributed such educational resources being tagged and that is not adequate. These tags have to be verified. The quality of the OER has to be verified. There could be five submissions of five programs on how best to implement pointers and three of them may be largely implemented. So somebody, a peer group has to say this is good, this is not good. How do you figure that out? There is a notion of peer assessment. It particularly works when nowadays you crowdsource an activity. You heard of crowdsourcing? Well, many of these features we need to incorporate in a larger framework that we'll build. That is going to be one of the projects that I mentioned that OER repository coupled with the creation of open source, open educational resource and building and nurturing of collaborative community. There is a third and important item which is highly technical. We have our IIT Bombay X running on the cloud. Now this cloud, when we have information about participants, teachers, et cetera, et cetera this is spread across multiple databases. It is not easy to synchronize these multiple databases. What if you want somebody to upload an OER which can be accessed at any point in time? If you have distributed databases then you have to manage where the location of each OER is and the composite locational index will have to be maintained. In the cloud terminology there is a service called S3. How many of you have heard of this? Simple storage service. It's actually a distributed storage but it does not appear distributed to the end user. So you take anything and put it in S3, you get an index and you can retrieve it from that S3. You don't have to worry about whether it is in this location, that location, that location, whether it is in this database, that database, that database. So you have S3 services for objects and blocks and files. Now what has happened is IIT Bombay X which is a platform that we use, OpenID acts, uses the S3 services of Amazon. Have you heard of Amazon? Amazon provides large cloud in the United States. It provides all these services. And the code is intrinsically linked to the S3 services of Amazon. We normally have dissociated with the S3 services for majority of our storage. So our students' data, our teachers' data, our content, course content are all located physically here in our servers, in our mini-cloud that we have built. But we are still forced to use the S3 services for what we call the ORA kind of assessment where people submit an assignment, say programming assignment, that is auto graded. So temporarily it goes to S3 of Amazon. It is picked out immediately by auto grader and we delete it. There is that assignment lies there. Of course the tags with that assignment do not reveal whose assignment it is, etc. But still we do not want to do that which means we have to build our own S3 services here. The cloud that we have implemented using software developed by a company in India which actually developed it in Germany in India and they have recently opened source that software. We will be building the S3 services on this cloud. So there will be a project to work on the S3 services which could eventually permit us to use a streaming software separately to provide something not exactly like YouTube but something like streaming connectivity to video resources that we have. So that is a technical project and that is the third project that my team will be dealing with. We have MTAs and other research staff to guide on these three projects. Thank you very much. All the best. This is going to be an important period in your life. I have taken many interviews when I was in TCS. When I take an interview of a fresher, I do not want to question him on what subjects he has got. Basically since he has just learned them and I have learned them long time back, probably the student will know more than me. Of course, by the time we finished asking the questions, my HR could also ask questions. What are the seven levels of your communications stack? And he could correct also. He knew all the seven levels just by listening to the answers. General questions, yes. The most important thing in an interviewer we are looking for is something which you will be doing now. It is a project, it is an end objective and you have worked in a professional manner. So you can expect when you get out and go for an interview that questions will be asked on what you have done here. Most of the people will give you an overview of what you are doing. It is not important to know only your program. You have to know the full area, why you are doing it and then what is your portion. What is the portion contributed to others? There is another thing which you will learn in this team work. Most of us are not individual programs. They are team effort which you do not find in your college. So that is the other thing that you have to see that learn that when you give a final presentation. That is why I do insist that your presentation talks about what you have learnt. You have to discuss among yourself what you have learnt out of your 6 weeks because when you go for an interview make sure that all of you speak. Hopefully do not go to an interview. Two of you do not go to an interview and say what you have done. The same thing that does not carry anyway. Avoid getting interviewed by the same company and the same person. I had two people. We had a project called Eklavya. Two of them worked on two different aspects of the same thing. But they could not explain themselves properly. Both of them went for the interview outside IIT. One of them talked about Eklavya is this, this, this. The other person talked exactly different. The roles were different. One person was doing some sort of data driven approach. The other person was doing something else. One person got the job, the other did. Probably the interviewer felt what is this? Two people working the same project and doing two completely utterly different things. It is very important to know the full thing. What you have done? What other person has done? Don't copy what the other person has done. A smart interviewer knows what you have done and what somebody else has done. To explain everything, of course, people who know better English will score much better. It is not a technical interview in that sense. Now, the way we have structured it is the new thing which we are doing this year. The next three talks are going to be about what we are doing as a part of what is a social activity, national activity, whatever. They are not nothing to do with your projects. Then, we go into each of the project descriptions and finally, you can go home and decide what you want to do. Tomorrow, 12 o'clock, we close the portal for selection and by evening, you should know what it is. You all have to undergo a test of all the things that you will be taught tomorrow. It is not going to be that tough. We are going to use this time our Godzilla portal. Godzilla was developed by four of you last year. Their names are there. They have not done a good job. It was buggy software. So, don't do that. Part of the thing you have to learn is testing. But since we had to run the contest, we had to correct a lot of it. Since we are now going to run an exam, time-based exam, we have to modify it. And by the way, Godzilla is not in India. It is outside. I have booked a service from US. I think that is more reliable than the service I have here. So, like you said, Amazon is there. Godzilla is also there. So, you will have the test. The test will be on, there will be, I think, six programs which you have to write, plus multiple choice, which looks like a program. Godzilla is so general that I can give you multiple choice. In the same thing. Except that I will not give a radio button to click. I will ask you to write one, two, three, four. And then I can check. And since it is a program, I can do any kind of thing that is doing manipulations and all the randomization, et cetera. I do not think I will have extra people. If you have people, some of them will work on professionalization of Godzilla. I think that is something which is usable. Most of the work I have done in public, a lot of people will be doing similar. All exciting for them, generally. At the end, when we have a final presentation by all of you, it is like a festive atmosphere. All right, I will pass it on to my colleague here.