Start-Up Now!

Start up now 1

Project article 2

SURA 3,4

Honor the mentor 4

Newsflashes 5,6

Personality Profile 7

Faculty Profile 8

The “Power” of Gram Vaani

9

ACM India Annual Conference

10

Fun Section 11,12

Inside this issue:

Aditi Kapoor, Chief Editor

CSE Newsletter

Brought out by ACM STUDENT Chapter

It is human instinct to shy away from mistakes and blame our-selves for making them.. How-ever, mistakes are simply oppor-tunities to learn something new. The more mistakes a person makes, the more they will have learnt and the greater chance they will have of succeeding on their next try. The key, however, is to learn from them and take them as stepping stone for the next mile-stone.

All this and more is reflected in the Adam Story. Launched at CES 2010 by Notion Ink , an en-trepreneurial venture by IIT grads, Adam is their first go, in the tablet market. Regularly re-viewed and featured in prominent media, it has quickly grown into an internet love child. Spec-to-spec, Adam has stood on its own against every tablet n the town, including the iPad. Sold out in minutes during it’s pre-booking window, Adam is the first device in the world to integrate two breakthrough power-saving com-ponents - nVidia’s Tegra 2 Chip and a Pixel Qi screen. Though the launch was marred with glitches, the world media has hailed No-tion Ink for taking on the Goli-aths.

The essence of 'starting up' can be best summarized by this issue, which predominantly focuses on budding ideas, be it SURA pro-jects, new workshops or the inter-esting personality profile reflect-ing the strife and triumph of Adi Shamir. Read on for more!

"It is not the critic who counts,

not the man who points out how

the strong man stumbled, or

where the doer of deeds could

have done them better. The

credit belongs to the man who is

actually in the arena; whose face

is marred by dust and sweat and

blood; who strives valiantly;

who errs and comes short again

and again; who knows the great

enthusiasms, the great devotions,

and spends himself in a worthy

cause; who, at the best, knows in

the end the triumph of high

achievement; and who, at the

worst, if he fails, at least fails

while daring greatly, so that his

place shall never be with those

cold and timid souls who know

nei ther vic tory nor de-

feat."( Theodore Roosevelt,

1910)

Fortune indeed favors the brave! It takes the greatest amount of courage to take the first step, the rest just follow. And it’s this leap which we fear. The constant worry about not meeting expec-tations, messing up, falling down, prevent us from taking risks. The risk which could ful-fill our dreams if we gave our-selves the chance.

In order to become a successful entrepreneur you may well have to ‘pay your dues.’ You'll most probably have to fail a few times, learn from your lessons, and only then be able to come through a winner. While you don't have to take wild chances, you do have to take calculated and educated risks.

“Rest is not idleness, and to lie

sometimes on the grass on a

summer day listening to the

murmur of water, or watching

the clouds float across the sky,

is hardly a was te of

time.” (John Lubbock )

As the semester comes to a close and the great summers stretch ahead, lets take a break with this new refreshing issue, before the final grind for the majors. Find out what’s happening in the department. From welcoming the new faculty, to introducing some int eres t i ng p roj ec ts , t o d i s cus s ing the va r ious prestigious awards given to faculty members of our department, this issue covers it all.

Not only do we discuss the various events covered by the ACM Student Chapter like talks/seminars by various high profile speakers, workshops, contests etc but also various other events of the department like freshers given by ACES and the departmental fest. ACM India Annual Conference which was held in January proved to be an enriching experience for all those who attended it. A glimpse of the same is given in the pages ahead. Did you wonder how various companies got their names? Well move directly onto the fun section for details!

Th e n ew s l e t t e r t e a m appreciates the receipt of articles and feedback received so far and continues with the hope that this edition will also be enjoyed by the readers. Looking forward to continued participation from professors and students in future editions!

Editor’s Column

Volume 4, Issue 1

Contributed by: Savin Goyal

Student : Sunita Tiwari

Supervisor : Prof Saroj Kaushik

Publication details : Sunita Tiwari and Saroj Kaushik, “WSS-NFP: Tool for Web Service Selection Based on Non-Functional Proper-ties using Soft Computing”, International Conference on Machine and Web Intelli-gence (ICMWI’2010) ,Proc of IEEE ICMWI 2010, Oct 2010, Algiers, Algeria, ISBN 978-1-4244-8608-3, DOI: 10.1109/ICMWI.2010.5648127, pp 28-34

URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsptp=&arnumber=5648127&isnumber=5647825

1. Introduction

Web services provide a promising solution to an age old need of fast and flexible informa-tion sharing among people and businesses. Selection of web service has become a tedi-ous job because of the increasing number of service providers providing services with similar func-tionality. In this work, we have developed a selection tool (WSS-NFP) for web services which can rank services based on their non-functional properties such as performance, delay etc. We have used soft comput-ing techniques for selection and discovery of web ser-vices based on non func-tional properties.

Web service may be fully described by two sets of properties namely func-tional and non-functional. Functional properties de-scribe what a web service can do and nonfunctional properties describe how good a web service can do. Functional prop-erties include input, Output, conditional out-put, precondition, access condition and effect of service. These functional properties can be characterized as the capability of the service.

Non functional properties are response time, reputation, cost, reliability etc.

2. Technical Details

The tool we have developed can be customized for any domain of web service. The proposed tool consists of three main components, namely, Pub-lish Module, Ranker Module, and Fuzzy System Design & Training Mod-ule. The overall design of the proposed tool is shown in figure 1.

The web services provided by the ser-vice providers need to be advertised or published. Different providers can reg-ister or publish their services in the service registry using the publish mod-ule. System Design and Training mod-ule is further divided in two parts namely System Design module and Training module. Since Fuzzy Tech-niques provide powerful ways to solve the real world problems having uncer-

tain and unpredictable environment. Therefore we have used this approach to solve the problem under considera-tion. The domain expert will design and train a Neuro Fuzzy System for each web service domain. The domain expert can customize the system by

specifying the following :

• Number of input parameters for a spe-cific domain

• The possible fuzzy sets and their mem-bership function parameters

• Initial rule base based on their experi-ences and intuitions.

The proposed tool provides GUI for design-ing the system. A fuzzy system can model the quantitative aspects of human knowl-edge and reasoning process without using precise quantitative analysis. But it takes lot of time to design and fine tune the member-ship functions which quantitatively defines the linguistic terms. We have used neural network to automate this process and re-duce the time while improving the cost. We have used ANFIS for fine-tuning the mem-bership parameters of the system designed.

The ranker searches the set of services that matches the client’s functional require-ments and then rank them on the basis of

non-functional properties of the advertised services. User’s pref-erences for non-functional pa-rameters are considered by tak-ing weight for each input pa-rameter. These weights are then taken into consideration while the rule evaluation in the fuzzy system. 3. Conclusions

We have proposed and imple-mented a tool WSS-NFP for web service selection based on non-functional properties using soft computing techniques. Re-sults generated by WSSNFP are comparable with existing mathe-matical models. A system for particular domain can be cus-tomized and trained using the proposed tool. We have pro-vided GUI to facilitate the use of the tool by the different users of

the system. In our future work we will in-corporate the feedback knowledge from web service execution in the service selec-tion.

Page 2

An interesting project article:

WSS-NFP: Tool for Web Service Selection Based On Non-Functional Properties Using Soft Computing

Contributed by: Sunita Tiwari

1. Description of Community Model for

Cloud Computing and Virtualization

Student: Abhishek Gupta and Jatin Kumar

Supervisor: Prof. Sorav Bansal

Details: Application provisioning, mainte-nance, high availability and disaster recov-ery make virtual machines ideal for use in a setup where computational power of com-puters is not used up to the optimum level. For example, VMWare, but its non-intuitive and a bit complex interface along with high software costs calls for an application which replaces the VMWare in an institute setup

like IIT-D. Also, being highly customized to our needs we will be better able to utilize our resources. For building such interface the help of an API namely libvirt will be taken. A recent study in General Computing Lab have shown the actual usage statistics of Lab Computers to be less than 5% of what would have otherwise been possible. Thus, our model will focus on utilizing the computational power of already available Lab Machines which are available most of the times. The work on client-server model has already been done and at present, focus is on better UI and command-line interface for the same so that it can soon replace the VMWare based network. The implementa-tion will see not only monetary benefits to IIT but a customized user interface required by an Institution. An institution like IIT Delhi will see a tremendous computational power being generated out of almost noth-

Page 3

Some interesting SURA proposals

based network. The implementation will see not only monetary benefits to IIT but a customized user interface required by an Institution. An institution like IIT Delhi will see a tremendous computa-tional power being generated out of al-most nothing.

2. FPGAs as accelerators for Next-

Generation Sequencing(NGS)

Applications

Student: Dhruv Jain

Supervisor: Prof. M Balakrishnan

Details: Bioinformatics is a field which concerns with application of informa-tion technology and computer science to the field of molecular biology. A very popular discipline in bioinformat-ics is Next-generation sequencing or DNA sequencing. It specifies sequenc-ing methods for determining the order of nucleotide bases-adenine, guanine, cytosine, and thymine in a molecule of DNA which is then assembled for analysis. A central challenge in DNA sequencing is sequence alignment, whereby fragments of much longer DNA sequence are aligned and merged in order to construct the original se-quence. A wide variety of alignment algorithms and software have been sub-sequently developed over the past few years. Some commonly used ones in-clude BWA-SW , Bowtie , Mosaik , Velvet , SOAP and MAQ. These algo-rithms have been implemented success-f u l l y o n p r o c e s s o r s and supercomputers. Most of these take lot of time to execute on General pur-pose processors. Hardware accelerators such as FPGAs and GPUs can be used with processors to fasten these applica-tions. As per our knowledge there are very few reports published in literature about accelerating these applications using FPGAs. This project aims at ex-ploring FPGAs as accelerators for these applications resulting in speeding up sequence alignment by using hardware-software co-design.

3. Optimization of slot allotment of

courses in IITD

Students: Utkarsh Ohm and Suyash Roongta

Supervisor: Prof Naveen Garg

Details: Every semester each dept with-out much cooperation from other de-partments floats courses in a slot of their choice. This leads to comflict of interest for many students especially pursuing minor degrees or courses across say, more than 2 departments. We propose that each student fills in his choice of courses without the slot in mind following which we allot slots to courses minimising the number of con-flicts giving higher weightage to core courses. Max cut Local Search algo-rithms and Particle Swarm Optimisa-tion are among several algorithms that we plan to test.

4. Plagiarism Detection Tool

Students: Alankrit Chona and Harsh Gupta

Supervisor: Prof Huzur Saran

Details: A plagiarism detection tool is the need of the hour in the modern world with software being written and plagia-rized at a bewildering pace. Importance of such a tool in academic scenarios can hardly be over emphasized.With a bewil-dering range of techniques available, for this purpose there is a compelling need for up-to-date comparative research into their relative effectiveness,Challenges such as detecting plagiarism in a wide variety of programming languages re-main. There is a growing need to devise an efficient algorithm, with realistic run-times, the validity of whose results can be argued.

Page 4

Honor the mentor award

5. Automated Diagnosis and

Detection of Brain Disorders with

Image Processing

Students : Soniya Goyal and Sudhanshu Shekhar

Supervisor: Prof. K. K. Biswas

Details: Neuro-Disorders have been a challenging area for the Medical Science because of both the technological constraints and the time taking diagonosis available so far but many a times also because of the late detection of the disorder due to following reasons :

• The present technique of MRI scans and diagnosis of disorders called Radiology, is highly practical in the sense that the radiologist should have complete knowlege of brain parts and success of an imaging technique is judged not just on the images themselves but on the radiologist's

performance and its effect on patient management, factors that influence the ability of the observer to in terpret the information.

• Then , there are several cases where many recent diseases detected in human brain are so closely related that it is almost not possible for a human eye to detect the difference between them and come up with one of them with certainty for example in case of A l z h e i m e r ’ s d i s e a s e , Hun t i ng ton ’ s d i sea se , or Parkinson’s disease.

• Also the very large gap between the number of neuropatients to the number of neurologists in India and the time taking Manual analysis of one MRI scan often take the disorder to danger stages before even the patient get to reach a doctor .

So with this scenario in mind we have come up with the technique of image processing to be used on those MRI images of the patients. In this we would be comparing the images with the standard Deformable Models which are both for different Types of diseases and also different Stages for a particular disease. Then, we would provide the analyst with complete details of the comparison results according to the percentage match with each of those standard models so that the radiologist now could see more clearly the kind of Syndrome and the Stage of the Disease of the patient. This technology could pot en t ia l l y provide diagnost ic information to distinguish different causes of dementia and other forms of neurological illness, rapidly and noninvasively

Some interesting SURA proposals contd.

"The most profound technologies are those that disappear: they weave themselves into fabric of everyday life until are indistinguishable from it"

[Mark Weiser, The Computer for the 21st Century, Scientific American , Sept. 1991][Mark Weiser, The Computer for the 21st Century, Scientific American , Sept. 1991][Mark Weiser, The Computer for the 21st Century, Scientific American , Sept. 1991][Mark Weiser, The Computer for the 21st Century, Scientific American , Sept. 1991]

The ACM Chapter would like to con-gratulate Professor M. Balakrishnan

and Professor Anshul Kumar who

were felicitated on Tuesday, Decem-ber 28, 2010 by the “Honor the men-

tor award” . This award was started

as part of Golden Jubilee Celebra-

tion, with the aim of allowing a group of alumini to honor a particular fac-

ulty.

Details of the award can be found at

the following

link:http://www.iitdalumni.com/news/honor-mentor-program

Compiled by: Abhishek Gupta and Ankit Agrawal

• Rudra Tripathy, Amitabha Bagchi and Sameep Mehta. A study of ru-mor control strategies on social networks. In Proceedings of 19th ACM Intl. Conference on Informa-tion and Knowledge Management (CIKM '10), pp 1817-1820, October 2 0 1 0 . doi:10.1145/1871437.1871737

• Sunita Tiwari and Saroj Kaushik, “A Non Functional Properties Based Web Service Recommender System”, Proceedings of Interna-tional Conference on Computa-tional Intelligence and Software Engineering (CiSE 2010), Wuhan, China, Dec 2010, IEEE Catalog Number : CFP1026H-CDR, ISBN:978-1-4244-5392-4

• Niladri Chatterjee, Saroj Kaushik, Smit Rastogi and Varun Dua., “Automatic Email Classification using User Preference Ontology”, Proceedings of International Con-ference on Knowledge Engineering and Ontology Development (KEOD 2010), Valencia, Spain, November 2010, SciTePress, ISBN 978-989-8425-29-4, pp 165– 170.

• Saroj Kaushik and Deepak Kolli-palli, “Multi-agent based Architec-ture for Querying Disjoint Data Repositories”, International Confer-ence on Machine and Web Intelli-gence (ICMWI’2010), Proc of IEEE ICMWI 2010, October 2010, Algiers, Algeria, ISBN 978-1-4244-8 6 0 8 - 3 , DO I : 1 0 . 1 1 0 9 /ICMWI.2010.5648048, pp 28-34.URL:

• Sunita Tiwari and Saroj Kaushik, “WSS-NFP: Tool for Web Service Selection Based on Non-Functional Properties using Soft Computing”, International Conference on Ma-chine and Web Intelligence (ICMWI’2010) , Proc of IEEE ICMWI 2010, Oct 2010, Algiers, Algeria, ISBN978-1-4244-8608-3, D O I : 1 0 . 1 1 0 9 /ICMWI.2010.5648127, pp 28-34.

I. Visitors

• Dr. Dhruba Borthakur, Open Source Apache Hadoop, 10th November 2010

• Youmna Borghol, tional ICT Austra-lia, 7th December 2010

• Dr Siddhartha Srinivasa, Intel Pitts-burgh, 7th December 2010

• Dr. Sebastien Ardon, National ICT Australia, 8th December 2010

• Prof. Rabi Mahapatra, Texas A&M University, 8th December 2010

• Shivaram Kalyanakrishnan, Univer-sity of Texas, Austin, 10th Decem-ber 2010

• Dr. Raghav Bhaskar, MSR India, 10th December 2010

• Dr. Rashina Hoda, Victoria Univer-sity of Wellington, New Zealand, 13th December 2010

• Dr. Charles E. Perkins, WiChorusdi-vision of Tellabs, 13th December 2010

• Prof. Gregory Guthrie, Maharishi University of Management, Fair-field, IOWA State, USA, 16th December 2010

• Prof. Vineet Bafna, Univ. California, San Diego, 17th December 2010

• Prof Arun Somani , IIT Delhi( Vis-iting ), 4th Jan 2011

• Prof. Deepak Kapur, Uni-versity of New Mexico, 7th Jan 2011

• Dr. Rik Sarkar, Technische and FreieUniversities in Berlin, 10th Jan 2011

• Dr. P. A. Subrahmanyam, Stanford University, 11th Jan 2011

• Dr. Aviral Shrivastava, Arizona State University, 12th Jan 2011

• Dr. Anoop Gupta, Microsoft Re-search, 17th Jan 2011

• Dr. Arnab Bhattacharyya, Dept. of EECS, MIT, 19th Jan 2011

• Mohit Saxena, University of Wiscon-sin-Madison, 28th Jan 2011

• Dömötör Pálvölgyi , ELTE, Budapest, 9th Feb 2011

• Prof S V Raghavan, IIT Madras, 10th Feb 2011

• Dr. John Augustine, Nanyang Techno-logical University, Singapore, 15th Feb 2011

• Prof. John Hopcroft, Cornel Univer-sity, 21st Feb 2011

• Prof. Gerard Huet, INRIA, France, 21st Feb 2011

• Prof. Andrew Lim, University of Hong Kong, 9th March 2011

• Prof. Umesh Bellur, IIT Bombay, 11th March 2011

• Prof. Sandeep Sen, IIT Delhi, 11th March 2011

• Prof. Simon Kramer, Univ. of Lux-embourg, 21th March 2011

• Dr. Saurabh Panjwani , MSRI, 13th April 2011

II. Department Updates

• Ayesha Chaudhary defended her thesis on 28th March 2011

• Smruti Padhy defended her thesis on 6th April 2011

III. Publications

• O. Turkcu and A. K. Somani, "Efficient Multicasting Ap-proaches Using Collection-Distribution Networks," in Proc. of INFOCOMM 2011, Shangha-iChina, April 2011.

• A. K. Somani and A. Gumaste, "Light Trails: Distributed Optical Grooming for Emerging Data Center, Cloud Computing, and Enterprize Applica-tions," in Proc. of OFC, 2011, Invited Paper, March, 7-10, 2011.

Page 5

Department News Flash

Page 6

After all, it’s not “just” about com-puters, “always”!

IIT is a dream for many students yet only a selected few make into it, and even fewer into THE Computer Science and Engineering Department. But then, is it all about computers always? Are these Computer Scientists’ brains only restricted to the zone of academics and technical field? Well, no. And if yes initially, then ACES makes sure that it doesn’t remain so in the remaining time they spend in IIT.

ACES or the Association of Computer Engineers and Scientists is the cultural body in the department which provides a platform to the students to showcase this talents, to enjoy, to compete and acts as a coolant for the all-time-charged-and-tensed environment of the department. Right from your first year in IIT, till you graduate, ACES makes sure that you have nice things to do apart from the usual academics.

This year started in a rather exciting way. With a new team, a new enthusi-asm, ACES planned the freshers’ party for the 2010 entrants which turned out to be huge success. There was a lot of

leg pulling, comedy group acts, sessions of introduction and interaction, a bit of puzzle solving (to remind them that no matter how much fun you have, at the end it’s CS&E!), mimicry, a lot of dance and burgers and coke. We had Prof. S. Bansal and Prof. Vinay Rebeiro present who enjoyed as well and enlightened the students. But the fun zone doesn’t end here. CSE had the first ever departmental fest of its own, COMPFLUENCE, rang-ing over two days. The major events were the scrabble, debating, movie screening and quiz. The enthusiasm of the participants turned out to be a major plus point of this fest with a decent par-ticipation from all the batches. And so, this ACES initiative was a major success and we hope that COMPLUENCE gets bigger and better in the coming years.

“Funde” are an important part in life at IIT, especially from seniors. We made it a little “formal”. The summer internship-and-what-to-do “funde” session for 2nd yearites by the 3rd year seniors was hugely attended and appreciated; after all, all the funde at one place isn’t a bad idea. Not only this, the 3rd and 4th yearites also had their share of funde regarding the opportunities after IIT,

PhD interests and queries regarding jobs.

This semester was as eventful as the first, with some very popular events being organized. We saw 17 teams in the Ten-nis Ball Cricket tournament against the Electrical department. Eventually, CSE 4th year ruled the grounds!

Still “all play and no study can make Jack a dull boy” and so Number Games event was organized where students competed over Sudoku and Kakuru. With a massive participation, unlimited refreshments and a competitive-tensed environment, the Counter strike tourna-ment also proved to be an awesome ex-perience for both the organizers as well as the participants.

And now, we have the much awaited, our very own, department t-shirt. The year 2010-2011 has been very eventful and now with the new team coming up shortly, the enthusiasm will only in-crease. Let’s all make our time at IIT more multi-dimensional!

ACES Freshers’ Welcome

Submitted by : Saumya Yadav

Publicity Secretary, ACES

• Aditi Kapoor, K. K. Biswas, “A case-based reasoning approach for detection of salient regions in i m a g e s ” , I CVG I P ' 1 0 Proceedings of the Seventh Indian Conference on Computer Vision, Graphics and Image Processing, ACM New York, NY, USA ©2010, 48-55

• Sonia Khetarpaul, Rashmi Chauhan, S K Gupta, L Venkata Subramaniam, Ullas B Nambiar.“Mining GPS Data to D e t e r m i n e I n t e r e s t i n g Locations” , In proceedings of 20thinternational WWW2011 conference workshop IIWeb '11, March 28, 2011, Hyderabad, India

• P Panda, M Balakrishnan and A.

Vishnoi, “Compressing Cache State for Post-Silicon Processor Debug” IEEE Transactions on Computers, Vol. 60,No. 4, April 2011, pp 484-497

• R. Devadoss, K. Paul, M. B a l a k r i s h n a n , “ A T i l e d

Programmable Fabric using QCA”, FPT 2010, Beijing, Dec. 2010, pp. 9-16

IV Awards

• The ASSISTECH group's paper on a Smartcane for the

Visually Impaired has won the best paper awar d a t th e 12th International Conference on Mobility and Transport for Elderly and Disabled People (TRANSED

• Aaditeshwar Seth's project on rural community radio stations won the Juror's distinction at the Manthan Awards.

V. Events

• Data Analytics and Operations Research Workshop in Oct 29& 30, 2010

• Workshop on Cloud Computing in 1st November 2010

• Geometric Computing in Nov 12-14 2010

• Visit from Google University relations, in February 11, 2011

• Indo-US workshop held on March 9-11 2011

Department News Flash (contd.)

Adi Shamir is among the most famous cryptographers, best known for the widely-used RSA encryption system. Shamir was born in Tel Aviv, Israel, in 1952. He ob-tained his B.S. degree from Tel Aviv University in 1973. He was awarded his M.Sc. degree in 1975 and Ph.D. degree in 1977 from Weizmann Institute of Sci-ence, Israel. Then, he joined Laboratory of Computer Science in Mas-sachusetts Institute of Technology as an instructor. At MIT, Shamir met Ronald L. Rivest. They started developing algorithms for public-key cryptography. Leonard Adle-man was brought in to test the systems devised. The initial systems developed proved easy to solve but on their 43rd attempt they developed a system based on prime numbers and one-way functions which was secure enough. It was named RSA, patented, and the RSA Data Secu-rity Incorporated was formed to look after the system. Shamir’s work was often shadowed by officials concerned about national secu-rity. In 1977, Scientific American offered a $100 reward to anyone who could crack a message encoded using the key. Readers could request a copy of the sci-entific paper. Thousands of copies of the

paper were sent out. The National Security Agency unsuccessfully tried to ban the distribution, consid-ering it as a danger to national se-curity.

In 1980, Shamir started working at the Weizmann Institute as a Profes-sor of Applied Mathematics and Computer Science. There, he co-invented the Feige-Fiat-Shamir Identification Scheme. He also de-vised visual cryptosystem, Shamir’s secret sharing, zero-knowledge and secret dispersion systems. He co-discovered Differential Cryptanaly-sis. The interesting thing to note is that it later emerged that differen-tial cryptanalysis was already known and kept a secret by the IBM and the NSA. In 1999, Shamir announced TWIN-KLE (The Weizmann Institute Key Locating Engine). TWINKLE is an electro-optical device that will exe-cute sieve-based factoring algo-rithms much faster than a personal computer. It can be utilized to break computer generated codes

considered secure, like those used by financial and government systems. It has not been made reality as yet. Shamir has also introduced the succes-sor of TWINKLE named TWIRL (The Weizmann Institute Relation Locator)

which is more efficient. Adi Shamir has received many awards for his extensive contribu-tions. Shamir was co-awarded the 2002 ACM Turing Award, IEEE Koji Kobayashi Computers and Communications Award and the

Secure Computing Life-t ime Ach i evemen t Award. Shamir has nearly 100 publications to his name besides many more prestigious awards. Shamir has a legendary reputation in the field of cryptography and secu-

rity. But, the legend is worried about the present state of computer security. He remarks: "Security wins many bat-tles but loses the security war. We are definitely going backwards in com-puter security.” He is also perturbed about the individuals’ security and warns the society: "The government will give you full privacy until they want information about you." The society today needs many more people like Shamir if the privacy of each and every individual is to be preserved. Sources:

• www.wikipedia.org

• answers.yahoo.com • www.justice.gov.il

• www.schneier.co

• www.zdnet.com

Page 7

Personality Profile : Adi Shamir

Compiled by : Anant Mittal

“The major crypto result is that this taught us

about how to design future hash results to be

stronger. I would say the practical impact [of colli-

sion attacks] is still not strong.”

“A hobby a day keeps the doldrums away.” ~ Adi Shamir

“We can see the point where the chip

is unhappy if a wrong bit is sent and

consumes more power from the envi-

ronment.”

Prof. Ragesh Jaiwal joined as an as-

sistant professor in the Department of

Computer Science and Engineer-

ing at IIT Delhi. His areas of interests

include Algorithms, Complexity, Theo-

retical Cryptography, and Machine Learning. Before joining IIT Delhi, he

worked as a Postdoctoral Research

Scientist at Columbia University, New

York.

Q 1. Please walk us through some of

the landmarks of your career.

Ans 1. I completed my B.Tech from IIT- Kanpur in 2003. After that, I went to University of California, San Diego to pursue the PhD program. Some-where in the middle of that , I received my M.Phil degree. After defending the thesis in 2008, I worked as Post Doc-toral Research Scientist in Columbia University for about two years. Q 2. Tell us something about your

student life and postdoctoral Re-

search Scientist and the contrast

between the two.

Ans 2. Life was amazing in IIT Kan-pur . The first three years were very hectic as the course structure was very intense but in the end it was great fun to be there. The major difference be-

tween post doctoral and Phd is that in the later one, there is always someone to advise you but the idea of postdoctoral is to be-come independent and solve research prob-lems on your own. You can always work on the problems of your interest. Overall , it was an enriching experience. Q 3. How did you decide to come to IIT-

Delhi as a professor ?

Ans 3. I have always wanted to come back to India and pursue a career in academic field. I really like teaching . IIT Delhi is one of the best places as the students here are excellent and it has been a great pleasure to teach them Q 4. Besides academics, what other ac-

tivities/hobbies are of major interest to

you?

Ans 4. During my life at IIT-Kanpur , I was a part of hostel band as I used to play Gui-tar. During my Phd programme I used to do a lot of driving and hiking but after coming back to India, I haven't been able to find much time to do these things. Q 5. What made you choose Theoretical

Computer Science as your research

area ?

Ans 5. During my graduation , I did some advanced level courses at IIT K like Ad-vanced Complexity Theory, etc. This area always fascinated me, so I kept digging in and made some progress on a few important problems. Theoretical computer science is one of the pillars of computer science. Without the formal study of this subject , we can't even think about the advanced levels. Today lot of focus is there in areas like han-dling large databases, Cryptography, etc.

but to do non-trivial work in these areas, we have to go back to algorithms. Thus, strong foundation of algorithms is required to do something impactful. Q 6. What are some of the other research

areas in which you are working pres-

ently ?

Ans 6. Presently , I am focusing a lot on Theoretical Cryptography , especially on topics like Streaming Algorithms, Security Networks and Data Privacy. These are new and interesting areas and all these problems are very relevant nowadays. I always encourage students to explore these areas. When you explore new areas with students it always takes times but we are making progress. Q 7. Any message you would like to give

to students at IIT-Delhi ?

Ans 7. Think positively about academics and research. Even if you have family com-mitments and have to work after graduation, think positively about academics on long term. May be as an undergraduate student, you do not get to look at the various re-search areas , but there are always people in the department who are always ready to help you in doing impactful work. There are lot of excellent students here and we do not want to lose all of them in non-research fields.

Faculty Profile :Prof. Ragesh Jaiswal

Page 8

Compiled by : Ankit Agrawal, Georgy Sebastian & Nitin Aggarwal

“Don’t worry if it doesn’t work right. If everything did, you’d be out of a job.” (Mosher’s Law of Software Engineering )

T h e Power of Ideas is an initiative of Eco-n o m i c Times that p r ovides h u m b l e p l a t form

to groom and nurture entrepreneurs by connecting them with relevant mentors and investors. Various associations like Department of Science and Technology (DST), Government of India and Centre for Innovation, Incubation and Entrepre-neurship (CIIE),IIM, Ahmedabad are involved in it. This year, over 12,500 business ideas were received and out of those our professor Dr. Aaditeshwar Seth is one among the winners and few selected future Entrepreneurs who are receiving cash grant of Rs5 lakh. The whole ACM team congratulates him for this achievement. His idea of Gram Vaani can be summarized as follows :

The product can be plugged to run in rural radio stations, cable TV outlets, and can also be utilized on Android handhelds and netbooks. Various Cen-tralized entities such as governments and companies can always deploy content into this network of radio and television stations, for delivery in different parts of

• Bridging the Digital Divide for

Growth (GRINS is a winner in the

Manthan Awards), Saabira Chaud-huri, livemint.com, Dec 21, 2009.

• You’re listening to laptop radio, Arindam Mukherjee, OPEN maga-zine, July 25, 2009.

• Gram Vaani devices economical

solutions for CRs , An ita Iyer, radioandmusic.com, June 29, 2009.

• Keeping the Lines of Communica-

tion Open, Jonathan Erickson, Dr. Dobb’s Journal, Oct 29, 2008.

• Knight News Challenge 2008 Win-

ners Announced Today, John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, May 14, 2008.

Sources:

• http://gramvaani.org/

• http://www.ideas.economictimes.com/

Final_CutOff.aspx

Page 9

Contributed by :Ankit Agrawal

The “Power” of Gram Vaani

ents.

From 2007-2009, as corporate vice president (CVP) of Technology Policy and Strategy at Microsoft, Dr. Anoop Gupta guided Microsoft's engagement with governments and institutions around the world regarding Micro-soft's vision of upcoming technology innovations and the combination of policies and regulations that might maximize their benefits for citizens. During this period, he also served as CVP of the Unlimited Potential Group

All talks are interesting to an audience working in that area, but once in a while, there comes a talk which enthralls its entire audience irrespective of their field of research.

Dr. Anoop Gupta gave one such talk on “Telepresence”. Dr. Gupta did his B. Tech from IITD receiving the President's Gold Medal in 1980. Since then Dr. Gupta has published more than 100 pa-pers in major conferences and journals, including several that have won awards. He has contributed to more than 75 pat-

and Education Products. He lead the company's efforts in new business mod-els and technologies to help close the digital divide and help bring social and economic opportunity.

Dr Gupta is currently a Distinguished Scientist at Microsoft Research where he helps drive cross-cutting multi-disciplinary research projects that have potential for large societal and business impact. He reports to Rick Rashid, sen-ior vice president and global head of Microsoft Research.

A talk to remember : Telepresence: from Virtual to Reality

the network. The main goal is to create such a network for coordinated informa-tion delivery in remote and rural areas. The network is in fact not just a network in the technical terms, but actually an ecosystem of non-profit agencies, com-panies, governments, local community groups, and even individuals, who serve to create the necessary people linkages in rural communities and disseminate information. Thus, Gram Vaani aims to develop telecommunication and media solutions to give a greater voice to the people at the grassroots level and enable them to have closer engagement with large institutions in the development sector (governments, NGOs, corporate) and their end-customers. It has been designed keeping in mind the unique challenges of operating in rural areas of developing countries and builds on an innovative combination of technology platform coupled with on-the-ground people interfaces. This is the only such model we have come across for creating a people-cum-technical network for in-formation sharing and exchange in rural areas. Besides being one of the winners in this contest, Gram Vaani has been in the news many a times. Some of them are listed below :

• R a d i o g a g a ! , A n i k a Gupta, Hindustan Times, LiveMint, Aug 19, 2010.

Page 10

ACM’s annual Indian conference was held at Hyderabad on 28th and 29th January with an objective to expand ACM’s presence in India. ACM India’s efforts to illuminate the role of comput-ing in driving innovation in a global environment are a high priority. This conference was just a part of such ef-forts only. The conference provided a forum for presenting and discussing challenges, present and future works in the area of computing. There were four enlightening tutorials on latest tech-nologies from the likes of Microsoft and Google.

Day 1 was all about presentations and discussions and the Day 2 was devoted to tutorials.

After inauguration ceremony and the welcome address by P J Narayanan, Co-Chair ACM India, the conference started with a keynote address by Charles Thacker on improving the fu-ture by examining the past. Next was a presentation by Barbara G. Ryder on harnessing the power of static and dy-namic program analysis. Her presenta-tion was followed by a an enriching panel discussion on : The Business

Case for Diversity, and the Science

Behind the Problems in Realizing Di-

versity. The panel was moderated by Beryl Nelson from Google and in-cluded Nandini Chatterjee, Mani Abrol and Ben Walters. The lunch break was followed by an intriguing session on the past and future of Computing in India. The esteemed speakers included the

ones who have seen the journey of computing in India since 1940s till date and have kept a close tab on latest de-velopments. There were Mathai Joseph, Shashi Ullal, Harish Jagtiani and Anand Deshpande who took us en route the mainframe and punching days to virtu-alization and cloud computing.

The day’s last presentation turned out to be a not just pleasant surprise but also a learning experience for everyone present when Eric Brewer preferred to speak on how computing power can be of help to NGOs in reaching out and helping people in need, instead of the planned presentation on cloud comput-ing. He shared his endeavours with others by collaborating with Indian NGOs and getting cataract eyes opera-tion problems solved in remote villages in Central and North India. The day was concluded with a brief recapitula-tion of the ACM’s efforts in expanding its presence in India. A couple of these efforts include grants for research pro-jects, NGO projects, travel grants meet-ing certain conditions, starting an ACM chapter in India and so on and so forth. Not many attendees were aware of these facts and found this information helpful.

The Day 2 began with tutorials on Vir-tualizations in two separate sessions – one from Microsoft and the other one from Trillion Technologies. I preferred to attend the tutorials in second half so can share a detailed version of those only! The second half of the tutorials

included two separate sessions on Web 2.0 from Adobe and Google respectively. Adobe presented a demo of their inte-grated runtime environment for develop-ing multiscreen application. The motiva-tion for developing this environment came from the fact that now-a-days, or-ganizations want their applications to be distributed not just on Windows and Ap-ple computers but on mobile phones with varying kind of interfaces and operating system. This environment would reduce the development effort drastically by allowing developers to write code once and get it executed across multi-screen environments and verify the look and feel of application without having to write separate codes for different inter-faces. The next session, in particular, was appreciated by many who had been struggling with performance issues in Web Applications. This session was based on Google’s project that is work-ing towards increasing the speed of download and display of web-pages.

All in all, it was an enriching and stimu-lating experience to attend the ACM India Annual Conference which not only contained the recent technical advance-ments, but also explained their relevance towards the betterment of the society as a whole and Indians scenarios in particu-lar.

ACM India Annual Conference

Submitted by : Richa Sharma

A talk to remember : Telepresence: from Virtual to Reality (contd.)

A brief abstract of the talk is given be-low : From Star Trek and Star Wars to The Matrix and Avatar, Hollywood has

reflected man’s dream of Telepresence. Today Telepresence is embodied in the

marketplace by solutions such as HP Halo and Cisco Telepresence, dedicated

conference rooms sporting built-in furni-ture and life-sized high-definition video,

costing hundreds of thousands of dollars per room. In the future, Telepresence

systems will be more diverse, enabling

connections between not only meeting rooms but also offices, hotel rooms, vehi-

cles, and even large unstructured spaces

such as conference halls and stadiums.

Mixed virtual and physical reality as

well as ubiquitous computing - includ-

ing robotics – will play key roles, be-

cause these systems will not only need

to immerse the participants in a com-

mon world, but will also need to empowe

the participants in ways that are better

than being physically present. In this

talk, the speaker explained the various component technologies as well as ex-

periences that are being developed in

Microsoft Research for the future of

Telepresence.

Contributed by : Aditi Kapoor

This is a departmental newsletter. It’s there share news, views and information and to instill a sense of awareness and pride in the work undertaken by our fel-low students and professors. ACM chap-ter members are currently a part of the editorial board.

We invite contributions for articles and also membership into the ACM student chapter. This paves way to be part of the

Editorial Board or in the organization and planning of various activities and contests. Suggestions and viewpoints/comments for the same to enhance it further are also most welcome.

Your contributions can be in the form of vari-ous articles covering any achievements, inter-esting projects, publications or fun section

contribution in the form of poems, jokes, cartoons, and interesting facts.

We also invite you, especially the PG students to join the team and be involved in all the latest happenings of the depart-ment.

Call for Articles

Page 11

A rose remains so even from a distance

You may not be able to feel its fragrance

but know you do that it exists

Authors of long ago inspire from a distance

You can never meet them

but know you do that on their words, many souls

subsist

Fun Section:

Aditi Kapoor, Chief Editor

ACM : A plethora of activities

With the advent of social media, we as a team have taken an initiative to shift to a variety of social media, and attract more and more interested audience, not limited by the boundaries of our campus or even the country

In an effort to increase our visibility and reach to a mass audience, we have embarked upon an extensive publicity and networking initiative. This started with a technical freshers orientation program but went on to include vari-ous workshops, contests and seminars. ACM@IITD organized the provincial round of ACM-ICPC for the benefit of the coding community in view of the

looming regional round. This year, we also launched a Lecture series which featured high profile visitors to the campus. Recent lecturers include Dr. Manish Gupta - Di-rector of IBM Research India and Chief Technologist, IBM ; Prof. Arvind - John-son Professor of Computer Science & En-gineering, CSAIL, MIT ; Prof. Ronald Fagin - ACM SIGMOD Edgar F. Codd Innovations Award Winner and Exponent of Fagin’s theorem. The series has been appreciated by students and faculty alike.

A sneak glimpse of the collection is avail-able at our picasa web album. The albums also contain photographs of some of the events that we have organized.

ACM chapters opens up an im-mense number of opportunities for us to work selflessly for the students and so-ciety. The ACM definitely helped all of us provide a valuable platform to reach out to students, professionals, and to influence their lives positively.

Through this platform , we would like to invite students, especially the new PG students to join our ACM departmental team

Akash Khandelwal , Chair

Contributed by : Aditi Kapoor

Loved ones are sometimes apart in physical distance

You can't hear all the words, you can't feel the loving

touch

But know you do that it exists

Success sometimes haunts from a distance

It may not be yours today

But you know come it will someday if you persist

Did you know how these names originated?

Q1. Apple Computers

It was the favorite fruit of founder Steve Jobbs. He was three months late for filing a name for the business, and he threatened to call his com-

pany Apple Computers if the other colleagues didn't suggest a better name by 5 o'clock that day.

Q2. Cisco

It is not an acronym as popularly believed. It is short for San Fran-cisco

Q3. Intel

Bob Noyce and Gordon Moore wanted to name their new company ' Moore Noyce' but that was already trademarked by a ho-tel chain so they had to settle for an acro-nym of INTegrated ELectronics.

Q4. Sony

It originated from the Latin word 'sonus' meaning sound .

Q5. Java

Originally called Oak by creator James Gosling, from the tree that stood outside his window, the programming team had to look for a substitute as there was no other language with the same name. Java was selected from a list of suggestions. It came from the name of the coffee that the pro-

grammers drank.

Q6. C

Dennis Ritchie improved on the B pro-gramming language and called it 'New B'.He later called it C. Earlier B was created by Ken Thompson as a revision of the Bon programming language

(named after his wife Bonnie).

Q7. C++

Bjarne Stroustrup called his new lan-guage 'C with Classes' and then 'newC'. Because of which the original C began to be called 'old C' which was considered insulting to the C community. At this

time Rick Mascitti suggested the name C++ as a successor to C.

ACM Student Chapter Sponsor—M Balakrishnan

BROUGHT OUT BY ACM STUDENT CHAPTER

Newsletter Team Magazine in-charge: Aditi Kapoor

(aditi@cse.iitd.ernet.in)

Assisted by ACM chapter members Associate Editors—

Nitin Aggarwal Savin Goyal

Ankit Agrawal Chair - Akash Khandelwal

( cs5070208@cse.iitd.ernet.in (Photos in above order left to right)

Page 12

Contributed by : Aditi Kapoor