I-Care 2012

Following the footprints of our past events, I-CARE 2012 is yet another successful meet for students, academicians and researchers. This year, we introduced two winter schools with I-CARE, to bring together, the students motivated in doing research, and give them a platform to learn and help them identify their research goals. The schools were organized on October 18-19, 2012 at IBM campus in Manyata Embassy Business Park, Bangalore. The main workshop organized on October 20, 2012 at IISc Bangalore, provided an opportunity to the academic community, especially students, to learn about various industry issues (industrial problems), innovative solutions, and new research directions.

IBM has a long-running tradition of research collaboration with our colleagues in academia. The goal of IBM's Collaborative Research Initiatives is to continue strong partnerships with the university ecosystem and ensure open innovation as a means to respond to the changing needs of the world. IBM Collaborative Academia Research Exchange (I-CARE), an annual event initiated in 2009, aims to promote collaborative innovation and explores new ways of fostering a culture of innovation. Here’s a summary of the events conducted in 2012 program:

Winter Schools

This year, we have added 2 Winter Schools in the areas:

1. Big Data & Cloud Computing
2. Analytics and Optimization

We have seen tremendous response from students to participate in these schools, more than 200 students from top tier campuses across India sent their application to participate. Chairs finally selected 30 students for each classroom. These are some of bright Masters and Ph.D. students who aspire to pursue research in these areas. The school is intended to provide an opportunity for Ph.D. students to get together with industry practitioners and researchers, give an introduction and cover fundamentals in these areas, expose them to some of the most challenging problems faced by the business today, and learn techniques/tools applied to address these problems. These schools

Both the schools covered some of the interesting topics by senior academicians and industry practitioners. Here’s the glimpse of the areas touched in these classrooms:

Analytics & Optimization

Big Data & Cloud Computing

Time Series Analysis Govindan Rangarajan, Professor, Dept. of Mathematics, IISc Pankaj Dayama, IBM Research Classification, Decision Trees, and Ranking Shirish Shevade, Associate Professor, Dept. of CSA, IISc Shivani Agarwal, Assistant Professor, Dept. of CSA, IISc Dinesh Garg, IBM Research Math Programming and Constraint Programming N Hemchandra, Professor, Dept. of IEOR, IIT Bombay S Kameshwaran, IBM Research Alfiya Tezabwala, IBM Research Stochastic Optimization and Reinforcement Learning Shalabh Bhatnagar, Professor, Dept. of CSA, IISc Munish Goyal, IBM Research

Introduction to Big Data & Cloud Computing and Stream Processing S Seshadri, Founder, BolTell Massively parallel data storage systems S Sudarshan, Institute Chair Professor, CSE, IIT Bombay Big data platforms and programming models Sriram Raghavan, STSM and Manager, Big Data, IBM Research - India Cloud based data analytics Anupam Singh, VP Technology, MarketShare Large scale text analytics Sriram Raghavan, STSM and Manager, Big Data, IBM Research - India Testing big data systems Jayant Haritsa, Senior Professor, IISc

I-CARE at IISc

The main workshop at IISc was attended by over 250 Faculties, Students and IBMer’s. This year’s event was planned to be more interactive and informative and we have received an excellent feedback by the participants. Keynote Talks, Panel discussion, Technology Showcase, Poster & Video Presentations were all appreciated by the audience.

Keynote Talks:

Topic: Design of High Integrity Embedded Systems for Control and Monitoring: DAE Perspectives from Safety and Security

Speaker: Dr. B.B. Biswas, Head of Reactor Control Division, BARC

In this talk, Dr. B.B. Biswas discussed about large classes of computer based systems being developed by various DAE units for internal use in instrumentation and control (I&C) of nuclear power plants and information systems. The talk discussed the requirements towards meeting safety and security concerns from system design philosophy and various research requirements and the extramural research initiatives taken by DAE in particular BARC.

Topic: Cheap devices, cloud computing, collaborative innovation: what do all this mean for India?

Speaker: Dr. G Venkatesh, Chief Technology and Strategy Officer, Sasken

In this talk, Dr. GV explained how India offers some interesting opportunities for exploiting recent trends in low cost devices, cheap data connections and cloud services to create collaborative solutions for the local communities. What is unique about India, and why do we need a different approach for India? What makes India the ideal breeding ground for such collaborative innovation? What are the pitfalls to such collaborative innovation and how do we overcome them? This talk will attempt to explore some of these questions.

Technology Showcase:

This section showcased the collaborative work that got generated through various UR programs like Shared University Research, Faculty Awards, & Remote Mentoring. Theme of presentation in this section was, “Technologies for Social Impact”.

• India 2020- A Dubious Distinction of being Diabetes Capital of the World! (Dr Chandan Chakraborty, IIT Kharagpur)
• Smarter Farming (Dr Mydhili Nair, MSRIT Bangalore, Nishant Kulkarni, IBM)
• Education using Cloud (Mr Lalit Kathpalia, Director Symbiosis Institute for computer Science and Research)

Research Showcase:

Abstracts for Research Poster competition were invited in following 4 Tracks:

1. Information Management and Solutions
2. Services for Emerging Countries
3. Programming Languages and Software Engineering
4. Next Generation Systems

We received a total of 130 Submissions from 37 Institutions across India. 38 Submissions selected for poster presentation representing 14 Institutions with an acceptance rate of 30%.

Winners in this section are:

Best Poster: ROSHNI: Recreating Optical SigHt by virtually Navigating Indoors Authors: M Balakrishnan, Ankit Kumar, Ashwini Choudhary, Devesh Singh, Dhruv Jain, Dhruv Gupta, Himanshu Meenia, Kartik Singh, Manas Sahu, Mohit Taak, Naman Gupta, Nitin Kamra
Affiliation: IIT Delhi

First Runner-up: Transducer Models of Sliding Window ARQ Protocols for Noisy Channels
Authors: Jay Thakkar, Aditya Kanade
Affiliation: IISc

Second Runner-up: Twit-Digest: A Web based Tool to Analyse and Visualize Twitter in Real-time
Authors: Aditi Gupta, Akshit Chhabra, Ponnurangam Kumaraguru
Affiliation: IIIT-Delhi

Tech2Share:

Technology based videos were invited in this competition. We received a total of 15 Submissions representing 15 Institutions. Program committee selected 7 Submissions for final presentation at I-CARE with an acceptance rate of 50%. For the first time, we started this contest and received very good response in terms of quality of submission.

Winners in this section are:

Best Video: Lo3 : Low Cost, Low Power, Local Voice and Messaging
Authors: Jeet Patani, Vijay Gabale, Rupesh Mehta, Ramakrishnan Kalyanaraman
Affiliation: IIT Bombay

First Runner-up: The CODD Metadata Processor
Authors: I.Nilavalagan, Deepali Nemade
Affiliation: IISc

Second Runner-up: TALK!: Indian Sign Language Detection System using Gesture Recognition Techniques
Authors: Niranjan.M, Saipreethy.M.S, Ajith.J
Affiliation: Amrita School of Engineering, Coimbatore

Panel Discussion:

Prof. Srinath Srinivasa, IIIT-Bangalore moderated the panel discussion on the topic, “Tech Enabled Learning: Bridging the Gap or Losing Focus?”

Recent times have seen a spurt in a number of solutions for technology enhanced learning. So much so that tech enabled learning is often seen as an alternative to conventional classroom education. Examples include Coursera, Stanford's online certification courses, Khan academy, etc. Tech enabled learning is augmented by several open access online knowledge repositories that bring high quality knowledge to the fingertips of anyone with an access to the Internet. These changes have already set in a quiet revolution, where universities and conventional classroom education are undergoing a fundamental transformation. There are significant evidences to believe that technology enabled learning have started to bridge the gap between high citadels of learning and the student population from remote areas. All of these however, are not without its detractors. There is also an increasing concern raised by educators that tech enabled learning is creating a false sense of achievement by favoring on breadth rather on depth. Teachers often complain about students not attending conventional classes and building a local learning community; and instead taking up the same course online, and participate in its online community. There is also disagreement about whether online learning communities are as effective as conventional learning communities inside universities. This panel discussion addressed such a question by encouraging the panelists to put forth their different perspectives on this issue.

This panel discussion was participated by:

• Prof. Jayant Haritsa, IISc
• Prof. S. Rajagopalan, IIIT-Bangalore
• Dr. Shivkumar Kalyanaraman, IBM Research
• Dr. Srinivas H Sengamedu, Komli Labs

A proceeding of I-CARE 2012 workshop is available here:(421KB)

Workshop Team

General Chairs

• Y. Narahari, IISc
• Raghu Krishnapuram, IBM Research

Program Committee Co-Chairs

• Supratik Chakraborty, IIT Bombay
• Nishant Sinha, IBM Research
• Bhooshan Kelkar, IBM UR

Track Chairs

• Information Management & Solutions
  • Srinath Srinivasa, IIIT Bangalore
  • Aditya Telang, IBM Research
• Services for Emerging Countries
  • Rajendar M. Sonar, IIT Bombay
  • Nirmit Desai, IBM Research
• Programming Languages & Software Engineering
  • Madhavan Mukund, CMI
  • Suresh Thummalapenta, IBM Research
• Next Generation Systems
  • Sanjit Kaul, IIIT Delhi
  • Ravi Kokku, IBM Research

Winter School Chairs

• Big Data & Cloud Computing
  Prasad Deshpande, IBM Research
• Analytics & Optimization
  Munish Goyal, IBM Research

Video Track Chair

• Anshu Jain, IBM Research

National University Challenge Chairs

• LV Subramaniam, IBM Research
• Bhooshan Kelkar, IBM UR

Program Committee

• Aditya Kanade, IISc Bangalore
• Ashish Verma, IBM Research
• Bikram Sengupta, IBM Research
• Biplav Srivastava, IBM Research
• Bruhathi Sundaramurthy, IBM Research
• Debdoot Mukherjee, IBM Research
• Deepak P, IBM Research
• Durga Toshniwal, IIT Roorkee
• Giriprasad Sridhara, IBM Research
• Indrajit Mukherjee, IIT Bombay
• Jayanta Chattejee, IIT Kanpur
• Kamalakar Karlapalem, IIIT Hyderabad
• Krishna Kummamuru, IBM Research
• Mainak Chaudhari, IIT Kanpur
• Manish Bhide, IBM
• Meenakshi D'Souza, IIIT Bangalore
• Monika Gupta, IBM Research
• N C Narendra, IBM
• N V Krishna, IIT Madras
• N.L. Sarda, IIT Bombay
• P Sreenivasa Kumar, IIT Madras
• P. J. Narayanan, IIIT-Hyderabad
• Prabhakar TV, IIT Kanpur
• Pradipta De, IBM Research
• Pranavadatta Devaki, IBM Research
• Pushpendra Singh, IIIT-Delhi
• Raghavan Komondoor, IISc
• Ramanujam Halasipuram, IBM Research
• Satish Vadhiyar, IISc Bangalore
• Shalabh Bhatnagar, IISc Bangalore
• Shantanu Godbole, IBM Research
• Shivali Agarwal, IBM Research
• Shrikant N. Parikh, SPJIMR SSME Centre
• Shyam Kumar Gupta, IIT Delhi
• Soshant Bali, IIIT-Delhi
• Srikanta Bedathur, IIIT Delhi
• Srikanth S Adayapalam, IBM
• Srinivas Aluru, IIT Bombay
• Thomas George, IBM Research
• Umadevi Reddy, IBM
• Umamaheswari Devi, IBM Research
• Vijay Arya, IBM Research
• Vijay Mann, IBM Research
• Vinay Rebeiro, IIT Delhi
• Vinayak Naik, IIIT-Delhi