Internet Safari - Awareness Program

Internet Safari is an awareness project jointly conducted by the National Internet Exchange of India (NIXI) and the International School of Information Management (ISiM), University of Mysore. The project aims to spread awareness about the internet and its usage among the faculty and students of Government schools, particularly those wherein the penetration of the internet is least. The objective of the project is to introduce the children to the internet technology and its tools and thus enable them to harness the unlimited possibilities beyond.

The project started with compiling a courseware that could be taught to the primary school children. I was decided to develop a courseware from scratch and present it using multimedia technology replete with animations. After a lot of effort the courseware was ready and a plan to implement the project was drawn. A total of 17 students of ISiM volunteered to teach the children.

The first leg of the project was scheduled on 12-13 April 2010 at the International School of Information Management (ISiM). The students were drawn from four schools.

1. Government School, Vontikoppal, Mysore

2. SaiBaba School, Jayalakshmipuram, Mysore

3. Mathrumandali School, Near Kalidasa Road, Mysore

4. Lalitha Convent, Vontikoppal, Mysore

The classroom was decorated with plants so as to lend a lively ambience to the proceedings. The schedule for each day was divided into 3 sessions. Two theory sessions of 45 mins each were held in the morning with a break in between. The afternoon session included 3 hours of hands-on practice that included real time Internet usage.

The program began with the lighting of the lamp by 4 children, each representing a school that participated in the event. Mr. Ashish Ray gave an introduction to internet technologies and a brief insight into the curriculum of the course. Mr. Chidananda K and Ms. Bhagyalakshmi then taught the students about the basics of internet technologies like, Connecting to the Web, Browsers, Forms, Searching, Email, E-Governance & Online Communities. Each topic was elaboraly explained with powerpoint presentations. Other relate topics like ISP, Basic components required to connect to the internet, how to choose internet connection etc were also covered.

Ms. Sukrita also presented the topic of GMAIL as an example of email account. Ms. Kavitha complimented her effort with teaching the basic of internet messaging using yahoo messenger as an example. Ms. Samatha then, covered the topics of social networks specially dedicated for kids. Ms. Bhagyalakshmi covered the topics concerning video hosting on internet using Youtube as an example.

The participating students were provided with lunch on both the days. They were also given ice creams during the session breaks.

A group of 17 volunteers handled the program effectively by dividing themselves into various sub-groups to delegate the responsibilities. The ‘Training group’ was responsible for tutoring. The ‘Target group’ identified set of schools and co-ordinated with them to get the students to attend the program. The ‘Management group’ coordinated with the other teams to arrange the logistics and handle the overall supervision of the activities.

The team comprised of,

Ashish Ray	Kavita	Neeranjan
Chidananda K	Samatha	Ram Prabhakaran
Gagan	Soumya	Phani
Bhagyalakshmi	Sukritha	Sunil Kumar B A
Dun YunQuing	Rajalakshmi	Akshaey
Wu Lijuan	Vamshi

On completion of the course (theory and practical sessions), an Online Quiz was organized. The quiz comprised of 50 objective type questions for a total 100 marks. Of all the students who took up the test, best 5 performers were selected for a prize.

The five winners were,

Varsha Urs C	Keerthi Kumar	Pragyna
Meghana	Pramashree

Feedback forms were circulated among the participants. The filled up forms were collected from them to know their opinion about the course and the way it was handled. Prof. Shalini R. Urs, Executive Director, ISiM presented the prizes to the five winners of the quiz. She also handed over the participation certificates and the courseware (interactive multimedia disk) to each of the participant. She invited couple of participants to speak about their opinion of the event. In the end, all the participants and the coordinators of the event posed for a group photograph.  

 

Other pictures taken during the event

To know more about the event/project, write to office@isim.ac.in

NVI Awareness Program

An event Report of

NEW VENTURES INDIA AWARENESS PROGRAM

4-6 PM, 27-Apr-2010, ISiM, University of Mysore

‘The New Ventures India’ is a joint initiative of the CII - Sohrabji Godrej Green Business Centre, Hyderabad and the World Resources Institute, Washington DC. The initiative was established and supported by USAID under the Global Development Alliance. The mission of the organization is to match scalable green business opportunities with skills, talent, technology, markets and money. The program identifies companies within its portfolio and facilitates the funding for these projects.

An awareness program was organized on 27-Apr-2010 in Mysore at ISiM with an objective to sensitize various stakeholders about green business opportunities and what NVI is doing to assist the development and growth of green businesses by facilitating fruitful interaction between entrepreneurs, mentors, business advisors and potential investors. The event was aimed at attracting emerging entrepreneurs who are currently running green business enterprise and are looking to scale up. The service providers, investors, successful entrepreneurs, policy makers were also targeted.

The program started at 4PM with Prof. Shalini R. Urs, Executive Director, ISiM  introducing the guests to the audience. Mr. Hemant Nitturkar, New Ventures India was the first person to speak. He introduced NVI as a business accelerator that supports environmentally- and socially-responsible enterprises in emerging economies. He also said that they identify small and medium-size enterprises (SMEs) with high-growth potential that generate strong social and environmental benefits and provide then them with business advisory services and access to capital. Additionally, they facilitate with local and international investment communities and networks to help further develop capital resources available to these enterprises. He proudly said that NVI operates a global network of six centers of sustainable entrepreneurship in Brazil, Mexico, China, Colombia, Indonesia and India. He also spoke about the emerging opportunities in the Green Business Space.

Ms. Nandini Vaidyanathan, CARMa Ventures Services was the next speaker. She addressed the gathering on the topic of ‘Things to watch out for while growing your Business’. She started her talk by addressing the basic issues like what it takes to become an entrepreneur in the first place. She then explained with examples the various nuances that make a difference in the business plan. She advised the entrepreneurs to revisit their business model often, put in place the processes and people among other things.

The final presentation was by Mr. Indus Khaitan, The Morpheus. He spoke about ‘What do investors look for before investing in a company’. He spoke in particular about the 5 main ingredients that any investor will look for in a start-up before investing in it.

After the presentations, the panel addresses to some of the queries from the audience. After the Q&A session, the audience and the panel members left for networking over high tea. 

Event Photographs

 

ISiM Workshop on SNA

A three day workshop on the social network analysis was organized at the ‘International School of Information Management (ISiM)’, University of Mysore. This document elaborates the details of the 3 day event.

About the workshop/relevance:
Social network analysis as a field of study is growing rapidly and in popularity. It is now evolving into a new paradigm across academia, business, industry, popular culture and folklore. It is both an approach and a tool to uncover and understand the hidden side of connections that drive certain phenomenon involving a network of human players. SNA is the technique of mapping and monitoring the relationships and flow of knowledge between individuals, teams, organizations, electronic devices, URLs and other interconnected entities. With the success of social networking tools like Facebook, Twitter, Myspace and Orkut with the masses, their influence on the group behavior and opinions are being increasingly felt every day. SNA is since being perceived from being a suggestive metaphor to an analytic approach to a paradigm, with its own theoretical statements, methods, social network analysis software, and researchers.


Workshop Objective:
Introduce the audience to the goals and perspectives of network analysis.
o Understanding of network data and issues related to collection, validity, visualization and mathematical/computer representation.
o Methods of detection and description of structural properties such as centrality, cohesion, subgroups, cores, roles etc.


At the end of the course, the participants will be,
o Able to examine data in 'social networks way'
o Identify and formulate network analysis problems
o Solve them using network analysis software and Interpret the obtained results.


About the Faculty:

Kevin Crowston is a Professor of Information Studies at the Syracuse University School of Information Studies since 1996. He received his A.B. (1984) in Applied Mathematics (Computer Science) from Harvard University and a Ph.D. (1991) in Information Technologies from the Sloan School of Management, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). His current research interests include: empirical studies of coordination-intensive processes in human organizations; theoretical characterizations of coordination problems and alternative methods for managing them; and design and empirical evaluation of new kinds of computer systems to support people working together.


Facilities at the workshop:
Accommodation was offered to the outstation participants at a discounted rate at ‘The Fern Residency’. The delegates were handed the workshop kit that included A bag pack, Workshop presentation Material, Workshop CD (Pajek software, Presentation slides, Reference book etc), Notepad and a pen. The participants who were not carrying their own laptops were provided with individual desktops/laptops to be used during the workshop.


Workshop Schedule:
The contents of the workshop were spread over 3 days. The detailed session plan was as mentioned below.

Workshop Participants :
There were 29 participants in all for the workshop. They were drawn from all parts of the country and abroad. The classification of the participants is pictorially represented below.

Day 1 Proceedings:
The workshop started with the introduction of the participants. Each of them explained their objectives behind attending the workshop. The workshop started with running through the basics of graph theory. The distinction between the regular network analysis and the social network analysis was brought out. The participants were then informed about the various social networking relations that can exist between individuals – friendship, Liking, business transactions, information/knowledge sharing, formal relations, biological relations, associations and affiliations being few of them.


After the tea break, issues related to network analysis were taken up. Network was defined as the sum of the graph and its constituent data. The graph itself is constituted of two elements – Nodes and Links. Therefore network can be redefined as the data that resides on the nodes and that which can be interpreted by the links. More concepts were understood such as the size of the network, density of the graph, Average degree, directed network, reciprocity of the network, adjacency matrix, collecting network data and completeness of data.
After the lunch session, the participants were introduced to Pajek – Large Network Analysis tool. The ‘World Trade’ dataset was taken as an example to understand how the tool can be leveraged to understand the network and the social interactions among the nodes.



Day 2 Proceedings:
The day started with the review of previous day’s sessions. ‘Knoke’s Exchange Network’ (KnokBur) was taken as an example to understand some of the concepts of power law networks and degree distribution. After this, the issue of ‘Reachability’ was taken up for discussions. The concepts like ‘Walks’, ‘Paths’, ‘Cycles’, ‘Geodesic distance’ and ‘diameter’ were discussed as applicable to the social network analysis.
More concepts were introduced such as structural holes and Brokerage. These concepts help in identifying the centrality (nodes which are the most important in the network). It was learnt that even the central nodes can have varying degrees of centralization. Prof. Crowston explained further that based on the number of links that a node receives compared to the links that it sends, the ranking of a node can be determined. He also explained how different kinds of networks have to be analyzed differently to assign appropriate rankings to its nodes.


After the lunch break, the participants worked on various datasets/cases to implement their learnings. Some of them even tried to extract fresh network data for the purpose.


Day 3 Proceedings:
The final day’s session mainly concentrated on the concepts of ‘Position and Social Roles’. Positioning refers to identifying the nodes across networks that have similar attributes as defined by the patterns of relations. Social roles refer to the relation and identification of one node with respect to the other. For example, a ‘father’ is defined by the mandatory presence of the ‘child’ node etc.


During the lunch break, the team gathered for a group photograph. And after the lunch session, participants worked with datasets to explore more network concepts using the Pajek software. The workshop concluded with Prof. Kevin Crowston handing over the certificates to the participants.

Pictures taken during the event 

Day 1

Day 2

Day 3

To know more, please write to Mr. Jayanth Jagadeesh at (jayanth@isim.ac.in / office@isim.ac.in).

PGDIM Batch 2010 (MIS course)

Back Row (L to R): Kevin, Shajia, Sanil, Ratan, Sourav & Jayanth Jagadeesh

Front Row (L to R): Gulam, Salah Saif, S. Kishore (Faculty), Kunal, Mohd. Hosein, Tabassum & Vidya Priya

ECM - Class 2010

Standing (L to R): Shwetadri, Alka, Karjan, Pravin, Prasanna, Vijay, Pavan, Mr. Bhanu Potta, Ganesh, Mohammad, Aswani, Jahfar, Salem, Sivamallaiah
Kneeling (L to R): Artmiz, Nikesh, Kiran, Priyanka, Khushboo
Sitting: Chiranjeevi

BioInformatics - Class 2010

Last Row: Sivamallaiah, Srikanth, Adithya, Ganesh, Prof. VP Kallimani, Shwetadri, Priyanka, Aswani, Nazia
Middle Row: Kiran Babu, Nagamallikarjuna, Pravin, Vikash
Front Row: Vijay, Karjan, Prasanna

IPR & Cyber Laws - Class 2010

Standing (L to R): Salem, Prasanna, Vijay, Karjan, Mohammad, Jahfar, Pavan, Aswani, Ganesh, Srikanth
Middle Row (L to R): Sagar, Suraj, Shobana, Priyanka, Khushboo, Nazia, Kiran, Alka, Artmiz
Front Row (L to R): Adithya, Vikash, Nagamallikarjuna, Nikesh, Shwetadri, Prof. AVR Rao, Chiranjeevi, Kiran Babu, Sivamallaiah, Pravin, Jayanth

Seminar on 'Enterprise Content Management (ECM)'

Date and Time: Saturday, 6th Feb 2010, 10Am to 1PM
Venue: ISiM, University of Mysore

The event started with Prof. Shalini Urs, Executive Director, ISiM welcoming the guests. Mr. Bhanu Potta, faculty for ECM to the M.Tech students of ISiM, then introduced the two guests – Dr. Arun Gowda and Mr. Arjun Thomas. Of the two speakers, Dr. Arun Gowda who is currently the Global Product Manager with Emerging Market Services Unit of Nokia was the first one to address the gathering.

Dr. Arun delivered his lecture on the topic of ECM in Pharma Research Enterprises. He started off the presentation by pointing out that the latest cinematic blockbuster - AVATAR had a script that ran into 6000 pages and it grossed USD 2 bn worldwide. With that as yardstick, he asked the audience to imagine what amount of content must have been developed to bring out ‘Lipitor’ – cholesterol reducing drug by Pfizer grossing an yearly revenue of over USD 10 bn for over a decade now. Citing this as a metric of the amount of content/research that goes into the making of a Pharma product. He then gave an insight in to the typical life cycle of a pharma drug and the various types of content that gets generated all along.

He further pointed out that the typical drug related content follows a life cycle of five stages – Collection, Storage, Processing, Analysis and Dissemination. All along the data cycle, the technology acts as the enabler to draw conclusions and interpretations. He acknowledged the role of the Web crawlers, Analytic tools, Data mining techniques and Advanced Search features in assisting the clinical research.

Dr. Arun then went on to point out the various forms of content that get generated during the lifecycle of drug research. The Clinical Test Protocol, Case reports Forms and Clinical Trial Data forms the bulk of data. These data, which is inherently confidential in nature is then stored in a secure database. The data is then analyzed employing advanced Clinical Trial Data Management (CDM) softwares. The analysis is done by the copy editors, Statisticians and Medical writers who report their findings through Regulatory Submission Reports, Posters and Publications among other means. He stressed that the entire process is carried out under utmost data confidentiality environments, perhaps next only to those in automobile manufacturing industry.

He made a special mention of Oracle, Accenture and Quintiles as the leading technology providers for clinical R&D data analysis. Pennside, PharmARC, Genpact and TCS are some of the companies known for their expertise in Pharma related Data Analytics.

The second part of the seminar was on the topic of ‘ECM in IT Enterprises’ presented by, Mr. Arjun Thomas, Sr. Consultant at the Knowledge Management Office at Dell Perot Systems. Mr. Arjun started his presentation by defining the ECM as applicable to the IT enterprise. He pointed out that the IT companies typically ride the wave of ECM and are more likely to endorse new trends in the field.

He pointed out that since the advent of the Web 2.0 framework, many new channels of content creation have emerged. He compiled most of the new channels in a wagon wheel picture.

He particularly, pointed out the popularity of Wiki’s, Facebook, Blogs, Folksonomy, Youtube, RSS feeds and SlideShare among our generation and their impact on the social life. In a lighter vein, he also pointed out that “These days, one is so busy social networking on the internet that he has no time for face-to-face socializations”.

He then put forth the concept of incorporating these tools within an organization’s intranet to engage the employees as an organizational strategy. Such a technique could result in better dissemination of information, formation of collective opinions and effective management of human resources. He also opined that such a framework can also be employed to create whitepapers to capture knowledge and expertise that could be archived for later use. He further mentioned how the ECM tools can be leveraged to meet organizational goals. He concluded his talk with some tips on looking out for usability and customer experience factors to create an effective ECM system.

The event concluded with Prof. Shalini proposing the ‘Vote of Thanks’ and presenting the speakers with a memento.

View Event Pictures

Special Lecture: Information Control and Terrorism

A special Lecture on “Information Control and Terrorism: Tracking the Mumbai Terrorist Attack through Twitter” by Dr. H. Raghav Rao Professor of Management Science and Systems, University at Buffalo, was organized by ISiM on January 19,2010 at 12.30 PM.

Prof. Rao’s talk about information warfare, situational awareness and decision making by terrorists in the context of Mumbai terror attacks, began with a very brief account of his personal interviews with the Mumbai police during August 2009, as part of his research. Revisiting the events that led to killing of least 173 people and wounded another 308 people on 26th of Nov 2008, he pointed out that data shows that live media feeds provided the terrorists with vital information about the situation and helped them in getting an upper hand. As soon as the unfortunate event began unfolding, social networking sites such as Orkut, Facebook and Twitter were flooded with situational information that described in detail the events happening at CST, Leopold Café, Taj Mahal Hotel and Oberoi Trident. These vital pieces of information poured in by the common users were mostly the details of the latest developments at the hot spots. Soon, the media also sprung into action and started competing with Twitter in beaming the whole show live to the world.

Twitter - a free social networking and microblogging service that enables its users to send and read messages (tweets) of up to 140 characters and can be forwarded to other people just like SMS’es, were critical sources both for the terrorist and others. Prof. Rao opined that though intentions may be to share information about the developments, they do end up as a source of sensitive information about the situation and the rescue operations to the terrorist also.

Drawing excerpts from, “Mumbai Terrorist Attack: Dossier of Evidence (2009)” and “26/11 Mumbai Attacked", Edited by Harinder Baweja, Roli, 2009, Prof. Rao evidenced that the terrorists , through synchronous monitoring of Twitter and other live media established the situational awareness (SA). SA is being citied as one of the facts that enabled terrorists to hold their grounds for three days. Citing another example from the book, 26/11 Mumbai Attacked, wherein, a certain Pakistani handler monitoring the media alerts and commands the on-spot terrorists that the media were aware that they were hiding in room number 360 and 361. He further instructs them to relocate to another holding position and also to destroy any cameras in the building.

The audience - a mix of students, academics, journalists and persons from the police and army participated in the lively discussions that followed the talk. Some among the audience also opined that the media should be banned from telecasting the proceeding Live, to which Prof. Rao responded saying that it might be difficult to have a blanket ban; however it could be a good idea to delay the broadcast. He suggested that ‘information control’ could be employed as a means to maintain information superiority such that it prevents the terrorists from making informed decisions. Prof. Rao concluded that it is important to understand the dangerous implications of uncontrolled and ad hoc dissemination of situational information.

"Click Here" to see the photographs taken during the event.

Foreign Delegates from NI-MSME visit ISiM

A 33 member foreign delegate team from the ‘National Institute for Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises (NI-MSME), Hyderabad’ visited the ‘International School of Information Management’ on 19th December 2009 between 3.30pm and 4.30pm. NI-MSME actively supports the government in formulating policies for promotion of small enterprises and assisting national and international organizations including potential entrepreneurs through a host of services like research, consultancy, information, training, education and extension. This institution has trained more than 1.35 lakh Indian participants and more than 7,000 executives of 127 countries since its inception.

The visiting delegates were part of two programmes.

Total Quality Management (TQM) team

1. Mr. Damai Peter Liah (Sudan)
2. Mr. Ali Mahmoud Mohamed (sudan)
3. Ms. Eman Ali Sawi Ali (Sudan)
4. Mr. Hamidullah Naizi (Afghanistan)
5. Mr. Syed Shahpoor Mehruban (Afghanitan)
6. Mr. Kagashani Seperatus (Tanzania)
7. Ms. Mazigo Jane Msilu (Tanzania)
8. Ms. Ramsohok Hemlata (Mauritius)
9. Mr. Mokaloba Tsoeu Joshija (Lesotho)
10. Ms. Kozhabayeva Aigerim (Uzbekistan)
11. Ms. Ntsinanyanna Olebogeng (Botswana)
12. Ms. Xantthee Margaret Dubuison (St. Lucia)
13. Ms. Rojsaengroeng Rapeeport (Thailand)
14. Ms. Chinapanyathip Kueaanan (Thailand)
15. Mr. Iroko Yao Oniakitan (Togo)

Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) team

1. Mr. Dickson Nyakeri (Kenya)
2. Mrs. Su Su Hlaing (Myanmar)
3. Ms. Aye Win (Myanar)
4. Ms. Zogbo Setter Moluwoi (Liberia)
5. Mr. Md. Elias Bhuiya (Bangladesh)
6. Ms. Pattarin Kiatkamolkul (Thailand)
7. Mrs. Nida Fsaisi Soboh (Palestine)
8. Ms. Awatif Tawaor (Sudan)
9. Ms. Sandra Lucrecia (Guatemala)
10. Mr. Siyovush Bobokhonov (Tajakistan)
11. Mr. Gashaw Abeje Melese (Ethiopia)
12. Mr. Mohammed Jadana Abdul (Malaysia)
13. Mr. Elisha Elias Shigella (Tanzania)
14. Mr. Murat Alper Ozturk (Turkey)
15. Mr. Wisam Saeed Aasi (Iraq)
16. Mr. Falah Mahmood Shehab (Iraq)
17. Mrs. Madhumatee Ramkhelawon (Mauritius)
18. Mrs. Seraphine Nahigombeye (Burundi)

They were in India to be a part of the 8 week ‘International Training Programme’, the last leg of which included the study tour to learn about trends and practices in the field of management and intellectual property rights. “NI-MSME had identified ISiM as the premier information school that employs many innovative practices”, told Dr. N. Srilakshmi, Programme Director of the visiting team.

The guests, who arrived at about 3.30 pm were accorded a warm welcome. Jayanth, ISiM introduced the guest to Prof. Ramasesha, Senior faculty at ISiM. Prof. Ramasesha then briefed the visitors about ISiM and its genesis. He then brought in the importance and the relevance of Information Management in the current world. He pointed out that measures like transparency and efficient information management are integral part of every organization. He also brought in the co relation between the quality management and knowledge management. He opined that the stream of Knowledge Management was a derivative of Quality Management.

Mr. Jayanth Jagadeesh then addressed the gathering about some of the best practices followed by ISiM. He started with the concept of ‘cluster model’ of operation. Cluster model of operation is one wherein institutes/organization that share a common vision pool their resources. He briefed the gathering about how various ways in which educational institutes can pool their resources for mutual benefit. The delegates appreciated the concept and acknowledged that such a practice will lead to better utilization of the resources and improve the competency of all stake holders.
He then took up the case of ‘WikiGyan’ as an operational example. WikiGyan is an ISiM led initiative to build a platform which can engage the government, corporates and the society for mutual benefit. The idea is to build a platform (mutually agreed norms, regulations, templates) for sharing survey data and other forms of information. Once there is enough data populated one can take informed decisions/conclusions based on that. It is also noteworthy that this project is mentored by industry giants like Google and Infosys.

This was followed by a round of discussions. Some of the delegates posted their queries and a interesting round of discussion took place. The event concluded with Dr. N. Srilakshmi thanking Prof. Ramasesha and Mr. Jayanth for the valuable insight into the innovative concepts and management practices associated with the ‘International School of Information Management’.

MI-MSME Link: http://www.nimsme.org/index.php

COMAD 2009

The 15th International Conference on Management of Data – COMAD 2009 was organized by International School of Information Management between 9-12th of December 2009. COMAD - modeled along the lines of ACM SIGMOD, has been the premier international database conference hosted in India. The first COMAD was held in 1989, and it has been held on a nearly annual basis since then. COMAD has always had a significant international participation, with about 30% of the papers being from outside India, including Europe, USA and East/South-East Asia.

The 15th COMAD was organized at two venues.
• Infosys Technologies Ltd, Mysore &
• ISiM, University of Mysore, Mysore.

The conference showcased,
• 3 Keynotes,
• 18 Research paper presentations,
• 6 Industry paper presentations,
• 3 Tutorials,
• 4 Demonstrations and
• 2 co-located workshops.

The conference itself was held at Infosys Technologies Ltd. and the workshops were conducted within the premises of International School of Information management (ISiM).

The two workshops were held on 9th Dec 2009 at ISiM.

The Business Intelligence workshop focused on the various concepts of Business Intelligence. The key highlight being the practitioners’ perspective on BI and its applications and how it is changing the way we manage our data today. The workshop also delved into the BI framework, terminology and the business problems that BI helps to resolve. Microsoft BI Suite Toolkit will be used to demonstrate the basics of Data Transformation, Analysis and Design of Reports. The workshop was conducted by the BI team of Infosys Technologies Ltd.

The prime focus of the PhD Workshop was to provide a platform wherein students who have already registered/planning to register for PhD can present their ideas before experts and peers in the field and get feedback from them for their work. Contributions were invited from PhD students working in the broad area of data management. After rigorous peer review, four papers were accepted for presentation at the workshop. The workshop will also include two invited talks – ‘Mining the Web for Business Intelligence’ by Prof. Rohini K. Srihari (University at Buffalo, State University of New York) and ‘How to Survive a PhD’ by Prof. Sharma Chakravarthy (University of Texas at Arlington, USA)’.

The conference was held within the sprawling campus of Infosys Technologies Ltd at Mysore. The program schedule was spread over three days from 10th – 12th Dec 2009. The program started at 9AM and went on till 5.30 PM everyday.

However, the major attraction of the event had been the three keynotes.

Prof. Sunita Sarawagi presented the keynote address on 10th of December on the topic of – ‘Querying for Relations from the Semi-structured Web’. Her talk covered mainly the issue of a class of web queries whose result is a multi-column relation instead of a collection of unstructured documents as in standard web search. Furthermore, she demonstrated the means to compile the result from several, possibly overlapping, tables and lists on the web, particularly in the cases wherein the user specifies the query either via a few example records, or a text description of columns of the relation.

Prof. Amr El Abbadi presented the keynote on 11th of December on the topic of ‘Fraud, Anonymization and Privacy in the Internet: A Data-oriented Perspective’. During the talk, he touched the varying security aspects of data in different contexts that arise in today’s internet applications. He also spoke of the increasing popularity of social networks that has initiated a fertile research area in information extraction and data mining. He opined that it could be leveraged for better understanding of sociological, behavioral, and other interesting phenomena.

Dr. Anand Deshpande presented the keynote address on 12th of December on the topic of ‘Top 10 Technologies to Watch 2010’. He delved on the ideas of Cloud Computing, Analytics, Scientific Computing, UID project, India Scale Issues, Mobile Commerce, User Interfaces – query and results, Enterprise Search – structured and unstructured data, Email, social networking and Game boxes.

The conference also extended a welcome tea party and a banquet to the delegates. The event witnessed an approximate number of 175 participants. The number has been the highest compared to the last few occasions. Participants came from all parts of the country and abroad.

The pictures taken during the WORKSHOP, CONFERENCE, WELCOME PARTY and BANQUET are shared as web albums.

FOSS Challenge

A half a day ‘Student development Program’ was organized at ‘International School of Information Management’ on the issue of “Free and Open Source Software (FOSS)”. The talk/seminar was delivered by the group from Mahiti Infotech Pvt Ltd.

Mahiti is a 'Social Enterprise' based in the 'Garden City of India, Bangalore'. They empower clients to reduce the cost and complexity of Information Technology through the strategic use of Free/Open Source Software. They specialize in multi-platform, multi-lingual web applications, extranets, intranets, multimedia and kiosk applications. Their services include consultancy, software design and development, server cluster deployment, 24/7 monitoring, application maintenance and customized training / advocacy. We pioneer the implementation of solutions based on Free and Open-Source Software(FOSS).

Mahiti is an active contributor to the Free and Open Source movement. They have worked with over 500 organizations both voluntary and for-profit over the last 9 years on various web-sites, messaging, e-commerce, knowledge management, supply-chain management, CRM, collaboration, social networking and advocacy projects. They are also credited to have held numerous technical and non-technical trainings in FOSS for over 1000 organizations. Mahiti has been listed to provide training on Ubuntu Linux based desktop and servers.

They were in the ISiM campus on 17^th November 2009 to talk about the merits and strength of FOSS over the proprietary software. They started on schedule at 1430 hrs.

The event started with the introduction of the guests to the audience. Ms. Ramya Lakshmi, Senior Programmer, Mahiti was the first one to address the gathering. Ramya, proud alumni of ISiM was accorded with a big applause. She introduced FOSS as “programs whose licenses give users the freedom to run the program for any purpose, to study and modify the program, and to redistribute copies of either the original or modified program”.

She then, continued by pointing out some of the major FOSS success stories around us. She pointed out to Wikipedia as a bright example. Some of the other examples that were cited were,

• The German Parliament (German Bundestag) uses Linux on its 154 servers
• French agency for e-government made FOSS mandatory for all public administrations
• National Health Service recently switched to Linux
• US Department of Defence uses around 150 different FOSS applications for security and interoperability motives.
• White House in Washington D.C has adapted the CMS Drupal which is an Open Source CMS.

Even in India, C-DAC (government supercomputer arm) has moved entirely to Linux.

Mr. Vishnu Kumar was the next one to speak. He emphasized on the importance of using FOSS at educational institutes. He argued that most of FOSS projects were incubated in academic institutions around the world. The Internet itself was an outcome of the cooperation of academics and defense institutions. He believes that Proprietary software use hidden source codes (that which teachers and students can't access, only use) in contrast to FOSS that allows user to create; modify and (re)distribute the program/software. He also pointed out that the Open Source Technologies as PHP, Python, Plone, Zend, Java, Joomla, Drupal, have become a necessity in the tool kit of the professional IT engineer.

He strongly criticized the practice of vendor lockin, the modus operandi in which the commercial software vendors push/promote their software into academical field (first free copies and later demand money). He firmly believed that the users deserve to know the source code of any software.

Mr. Vijay Rasquinha was the next to speak. He introduced many operations of Mahiti to the audience. He also demonstrated many of the online applications that were built within the stable of Mahiti. One of the impressive demonstrations was that of a cellphone utility that was implemented in Kolkata.

He strongly encouraged students to take up projects and internships that were on FOSS. He suggested that this would help them learn and understand the processing of any system. He also offered many projects within Mahiti to the students of ISiM. Many students showed keen interest in pursuing them.

Mr. Kolappa and Ms. Bhavana also then addressed the audience about the PHP and ZEND and its invaluable use in implementing solutions on FOSS.

The programme ended in the evening at about 5.30pm with thanking the guests for the wonderful talk on FOSS and its strengths.

Vijay, Vishnu, Kolappa, Bhavana and Ramya from Mahiti Infotech Pvt Ltd.

Tech Talk - Cloud Computing

ISiM’ians were challenged to the Cloud 20/20 – Student Technical Paper Contest by the visiting team from Unisys, Bangalore. The challenge was put forth during their ‘Tech Talk’ at the ‘ISiM Lecture hall – 1’ on Friday, 6th of November 2009.

The event started on time. The itinerary of the program was as given below.

3:30 PM - 3:45 PM - Introduction to Unisys & its India careers
3:45 PM - 4:15 PM - Seminar on cloud computing & Unisys Secure Cloud
4:15 PM - 4:30 PM - Cloud 20/20 -Online Technical Paper Contest
4:30 PM - 4:50 PM - Quiz on Cloud computing & prize distribution
4:50 PM - 5:00 PM - Q & A Session and Refreshments

The event started of with Jayanth introducing the two guests – Mr. Tarun Bhool and Mr. Shivaram Venkat to the audience. The audience comprised mostly of the students of International School of Information Management.

Mr. Shivaram was the first speaker. He started his address with an introduction of Unisys and it’s operations in India. He pointed out that Unisys Corporation is a 136-year old global leader, providing Information Technology services and programs. It provides a portfolio of IT services, application software, and technology consulting that solves critical problems for business and governments in protecting their assets and improving their operational efficiencies. The heat was turned on when the discussions started on “Cloud Computing”. Mr. Shivaram explained the concept of the cloud and the various modes of operation on cloud. He particularly emphasized on three models,

• SaaS – Software as a Service
• PaaS – Platform as a service and
• IaaS – Infrastructure as a service.

Then he went on to explain how SaaS can help the user (especially the Small-Medium companies) cut down their cost on investment on purchasing software. PaaS is the concept of hosting the entire desktop on the cloud. Answering a query, he suggested that the PaaS model was different from VPN in the sense that it is much more secure and its scalability is high. IaaS is yet again a boon for the small-medium corporates who can use the IT infrastructure on a rental basis for a specified time. The speaker also pointed out that as a pilot project, mailboxes of all Unisys employees are hosted on cloud.

The discussion was full of queries by the audience seeking clarification on most of the aspects of cloud computing. Most of the questions were on the credibility and legality of the technology. Many among the audience questioned the data security of hosting one’s information over a shared cloud. Some others questioned about the ownership of the data that resides on the cloud. Few others questioned if the legal systems across the world are ready to accept this technology.

The speaker opined that currently the technology is in its nascent stages and that these issues are being debated worldwide and solutions were being created as we speak. He was also posed with concerns regarding the connectivity and performance of cloud hosted services. The speaker was opinion that these were real threats but however was optimistic that these issues would be addressed as the technology evolves.

Mr.Chidananda and Mr.Jahfar interacting with Mr. Shivaram

After the intriguing debate on cloud computing, it was time for the ‘challenge’. Mr. Tarun was the next speaker. He started off with an insight into Cloud 20/20 – Student Technical Paper Contest 2010. Mr. Tarun then proceeded on to a quiz on ‘Cloud Computing’.

Mr. Tarun turns quizmaster and Pavan get a prize.

After the quiz session, Jayanth presented the vote of thanks. The event concluded with a round of applause for the guests for putting up a great show.