Thursday, July 30, 2009

1st yr Orientation, Odd sem'2009-10: A Retentive Show !



It is well said that when change starts assuming its shape ,its effect becomes ubiquitous. Last year initiation is getting the momentum of transformation.Yesterday's(29th July'09) first year orientation program was vindicating the same. Leaving aside the technical glib, the way the whole show were presented shows the rejuvenated zeal of renovated IIITM.

From emcee to epilogue, from Tour de force of IIITM to disappearing Topsy Turvey of IIITM staffs, everything was endearing.

The First time ...
  • This was the first time when venue of the event was shifted to it's most deserving location (newly constructed auditorium , still it will take 3+ months in full functioning).
  • This was the first time, when we witnessed a 'change', 'change' in the way of presenting the things. Like, hostel warden was putting everything in details from no. of rooms to no. of cots.
  • This was the first time, when registrar was presenting the academic life cycle of a student in IIITM in detail with depiction of his administrative hierarchy.
  • This was the first time in the history of IIIT's when IIITM Gwalior has started institute's fully paid premium medical insurance for students.
  • Again this was the first time when largest number of faculty introduced themselves during an event with 4 new faces.

The most surprising fact was that when jammed jamboree of Audi got the exact no. of labs, PCs and other related facilities in detail in presentation.

Rest other activities were humdrum except non formal presentation of student life @ IIITM.

The most intresting (rather irritating: the taste of testy no, guys remember the cell no: 94******* :P) part of the whole show was the commercial show of our bearer banks. Gosh! i'm running out of the adjectives !

The peroration was stunning as usual. The reuniting speech of our hourable director, prof. Dr. S. G. Deshmukh sir was infact the curtain raiser at the end.

The rejonavating speech of chief guest Mr. Majmoodar would remain forever in the minds of all the budding IIITMites.

Recollect the concept of 32 from his speech (Dekho 32 samajh gaya aur tu nahi samjhi. ;))

PS: Here the term 'Show' is delibaratly used many times: The hiatus show in new audi (show with an interval ;))
























UGC Review Committee in Institute :20-21st July,09



IIITM is one of the first IIITs, established by GoI and a brain child of MHRD in promotion of IT and Management in India. IIITM is also the first IIIT to be granted as Deemed University status. To review it's functioning team of UGC comes here time to time.

UGC Review Committee recently visited the campus to review the functioning of the institute on 20-21st July, 2009. Following are the UGC committee:

S.No.

Name

Designation

1.

Prof. V. Ramachandran

Vice Chancellor

Anna University, Tiruchirapalli-620024

Chairman

2.

Prof, Manohar Lall

Deptt. Of Computer and Information Sciences

Indira Gandhi National Open University

Maidan Garhi, New Delhi-110068

Member

3.

Prof. L. Venugopal Reddy

(Former Vice Chancellor and Prof. of Management)

10-2-289/208, Sai Vihar Aptts.

(Oppositte Food World), Shanti Nagar

Masab Tank, Hyderabad-500034

Member

4.

Prof. R. K. Singla

Deptt. Of Computer Science

Punjab University, Chandigarh

Member

5.

AICTE nominee

Member

6.

Dr. K. P. Singh

Joint Secretary, UGC

Member Secretary




Tree Plantation by Team inside campus:























Source: Registrar office, IIITM Gwalior

Student Exchange Program with Ecole Centrale, Paris

Monday, July 27, 2009

IT companies decide to hire only in last semester: The IIITM perspective





NASSCOM has already given a clear indication of moving placement activities to last semester few months back, this week's IT companies' unanimous decision has abridged supplementary brainworks.

“All our member companies have unanimously taken this decision. The change is not only for this year, it is permanent,” said Som Mittal, president of software industry body Nasscom. The decision taken by Nasscom is unlikely to be reversed even if demand picks up. In fact, the trend may even catch up with companies outside the IT industry.(source:ET Bureau).




Note: the placement figure for 2008-09 is old, the latest is 85%

This news has many implications for IT institutes. Being an apex IT and management institute in the country, IIITM Gwalior owes larger responsibilities.


"As being a research oriented institute, placement was never a big concern for us. We should focus on imparting a quality education in knowledge economy and should strive together towards global excellence", says Prof S.G. Deshmukh, director ABV-IIITM Gwalior.

IIITM Gwalior is ingrained for its distinguished 5-year integrated postgraduate program. So, it may work in both directions for the institute.

"Here companies start visiting the campus in IXth semester, so shifting the placement activities to Xth semester won't affect the whole process,rather it would provide an extra time for students to focus on their thesis and different electives and ably be prepared for placement activities in the last semester", prof. S. G. Deshmukh trails off.





On the other hand Dr. Santosh Rangnekar,Training and Placement coordinator of ABV-IIITM Gwalior says ,"we will keep continuing with the placement activities like arranging various seminars of eminent speakers, CEOs, ; conducting mock GDs/PIs; taking different personality development sessions."

"In this case we will try to contact non IT companies and will invite them for campus recruitment. we have different programs running here like two year MBA/M.Tech courses which demand multi-sectors ", shrugs Dr. Rangnekar.

Meanwhile the student community here in IIITM are a bit apprehensive about their future.They are in constant touch with their Alumni mentors. Some are taking audacious decision of taking various certification courses like CISA, CFA, FRM, PRM or writing GRE, GMAT, CAT in the penultimate semester.

Whatever might be the final implications, one thing is certain that too much hyped recession and Nasscom recent directives have disturbed the student community in their hibernation. Eventually it's providing much waited positive shift in the higher education in India.

Friday, July 24, 2009

Team from IIITM won the 1st position in Lord of the code 2007-08






Team comprising of Rahul Kala,Chandra Prakash,Dhirender Sharma and Rahul Khandelwal secured 1st position in Lord of the code. The competition was organized by Kanwal Rekhi School of Information Technology (KReSIT), IIT Bombay and Red Hat.
Their software was titled "Central System for Admission to Universities (CSAU)" The project is available under Creative Commons License at the project site.


This is the 2nd time consequitivetly that IIITM has won the first position in this competition.

For details please visit the project site :-

http://ekalavya.it.iitb.ac.in/showRhsResult2007.do


Brief Project Report of the team:

Abstract:


We are very much acquainted with the fact that looking at the diversity of courses offered in each university and the number of colleges per university, it is very difficult for both the students and the university officials to co-ordinate.We propose to make a central system ‘Central System for Admission to Universities (CSAU)’ that can be used by the universities and other organizations like CCB/AIEEE for having end-to-end solutions to every phase of the admission right from the application submission to the allotment of the college, branch and hostel..The main idea is to automate the entire task, making it a lot more time-saving, cost-saving and easily accessible by the students, officials and Universities.

Objectives:

  • Use of modern technologies in the admission procedures
  • Transparency of the system
  • Security of the system from illegal intrusions
  • Security from lost/lack of internet connectivity at crucial times (alternative measures provided)
  • Time-saving, cost-saving measures
  • Ease of adaptation to diverse systems being implemented presently
  • Provision of integration with manual work at every step
  • The system has a very strong back-end design which has been especially designed and analyzed exhaustively with a lot of time and effort.

Purpose:

Project Features

  • Online (and offline) Selling of form
  • Online form filling
  • Online form updation
  • Online form verification
  • Offline verification of things not verified online, or which cant be verified online
  • E-Exam
  • E-Counselling
  • Online preparation of question paper
  • Online admin control for paper setting
  • Online declaration of exam, counseling and hostel allotment results
  • Central admin control at all levels for every official to monitor/control/manipulate data at any level according to privilegesCentral place for all sorts of static and dynamic information to be available online, like seats/contact information/procedure/updates etc.)

Components from other projects:

  • Database Server: DB2 (v9.1, IBM)
  • Web Server: Websphere (IBM)
  • Application Server: WAS (Websphere Application Server, IBM)
  • WSAD: Development Tool
  • IDE: Eclipse, Rational Application Developer
  • J2EE: Application Architecture (Sun Microsystems)
  • Language: J2EE, SQLJ
  • XDoclet
  • Sun Mail APIs


Innovation:

The system has a very strong back-end design which has been especially designed and analyzed exhaustively with a lot of time and effort. At the time of design we had come to know of enumerable number of ways in which an examination/counseling can be conducted (eg. Counseling procedures for CAT MBA, counseling patterns for MP PET, examination system of IIT JEE(screening and mains), examination system for AIEEE(one paper, fully objective)). The back-end design needs no modification whatsoever to adapt to any of these changes, only modifications to the front-end and business logic are required.


The market which consists of Indian Universities, organizations like AIEEE/CCB and IIT-JEE, university like IIITM, Gwalior which takes students from outside examinations like CAT admissions for MBA. Because of the use, the software is likely to be sold directly to these organizations

Saving paper, resources, manpower, money is a social cause. Since government is the major customer, the govt. money would be saved which can be used for development.


Practical Application:

The University Admission System is mainly dedicated to facilitate all procedures of Admissions ,online in Universities. So that Man power could be reduced in all admission procedures and time could be saved.

The project consists all admission procedures Online.

  • · Admission Form fulfillment by candidate
  • · Form checking & Identity verification.
  • · Examination center allotment
  • · Admission cards distribution.
  • · Examination conduction
  • · Result (Merit list)declaration
  • · Score card & counseling letter distribution.
  • · Counseling procedure.
  • · College allotment.
  • · Hostel allotment.

University Admission System is undoubtedly Applicable in all universities which provides higher education.


Declaration

We hereby declare that the project described above is an original work of our team and all help taken from external sources has been duly mentioned.


--Team spiritIIITM






S/W snapshots.



























Thursday, July 23, 2009

E-Governance initiative of 2nd year students...


As being an apex IT and management institute in country IIITM Gwalior has always beaconed the crèche of innovations. Keeping up the in-things and ensuing the proficiency of P2P learning, a group of 2nd year students has done something spectacular what seems Herculean but endearing at their standard.

Their product is now successfully deployed in some of the M.P. Govt offices. And it's also being credited as first product of 'IIITM incubation center'.They developed 'File Tracking System', a product which is already existing in the market but with some unique features with fully open source technology. The most important part of it is their non technical marketing endeavor. They have convinced highly bureaucratic M.P. govt offices in deploying their product after coming in 3rd yr.






“File Tracking System (FTS)” is developed by IIITM students- Rohit Shukla and Vinit Ranjan under the guidance of Dr. Anurag Srivastava.

“File Tracking System (FTS)” is a system which effectively and efficiently track files, manages time and manpower involved in file-transaction among various departments of an organization. The FTS has been developed looking at the vital needs of every office using Internet/Intranet.
It minimizes unnecessary use of manpower for transferring files or letters through one office to other in any organization, Reduces the chance of losing or manipulating the information about incoming/outgoing Files or letters. The ability to store and search through various options like subject, duration, name, date etc. makes FTS user- friendly.

FTS is fully open source technology based product. The use of open source technology in the development of FTS has increased its acceptability technically as well as economically. Incorporation of Bi-lingual (Hindi-English) ability enhances the implementation process of FTS.

Awards and Accolades:
  • Best Software Award in e-Governance(2008-09) by M.P. Government
  • FTS is currently deployed in CENTRAL BUREAU OF NARCOTICS, Gwalior(M.P.) and ABV-IIITM,Gwalior.
  • *1st prize in HRM-SUMMIT’09 2nd prize in ENIAC(under Magnum-opus,IT-BHU annual technical fest)Salient Features of File Tracking System (FTS)


Salient Features of File Tracking System (FTS)




  • FTS enables easy monitoring and tracking of files in a typical government office.
  • It enables quick gathering of necessary information about the file (source, destination, time lapsed, remarks by concerned officials). A useful log is made available about various transactions in the system.
  • It reduces chances of losing or manipulating the information about incoming/outgoing files or letters. This feature is especially important in today’s RTI regime.
  • The ability to store and search through various options like subject, duration, name, date etc. makes the FTS more user- friendly.
  • Quick search on files/letters enables to save time by transferring file/letter through electronic mode from one office to other in any organization.
  • FTS being developed on the philosophy of open source technology does not require procurement of additional proprietary software.
  • Bilingual (Hindi-English) feature makes FTS easy for implementation.
  • Web enables access allows FTS to network various offices in a typical government setting.
  • FTS enables optimum use of various resources such as manpower, time and budget.
  • The ability to generate periodic work reports helps in getting objective evaluation of staff performance.
  • FTS is platform independent (O.S. independent)software, so no need of dependency on particular Operating System.
  • The tabular log information about pending files helps to handle deadlines and timelines effectively.
  • Forbidden time-manipulation motivates the staff to be attentive and cautious thereby increase in the efficiency of department.
  • FTS gives pre and post file transaction information through alert messages and thus always keeps the file transaction status in user’s knowledge.


Methodology of implementation:

  • A Prototype was presented in the inaugural session of SF-FOSS at ABV-IIITM, Gwalior and was well appreciated by the officials of Department of IT, Govt. of India as well as persons visiting from IBM, India.
  • Suggestions have been well taken by the technical as well as administrative team of FTS in upgrading the product.
  • Beta version was developed in the month of October 2008 and was tested in one office of ABV-IIITM and on the basis of feedback received from the users it got modified again and finally deployed in January 2009 in that office and also extended for other offices and sections in Feb, 2009.
  • FTS was presented to the masses in the workshop “FOSHTE” jointly organized by SF-FOSS and NRC-FOSS, Chennai in November 2008 and got remarkable appreciations and up-gradations were made on the feedback by the experts.
  • The product has got wide publicity and on an invitation of Central Bureau of Narcotics, Gwalior Beta version of FTS was presented to them and according to their requirements modifications have been done and alpha version was developed specifically for that office and deployed for testing.
  • The final version of FTS was deployed in Central Bureau of Narcotics, Gwalior on 6th march, 2009.

S/W Screen Shots: