Posts Tagged IIT
Higher education must ensure character-building and ethics says IIT-Madras Director
IIT Madras Director M.S. Ananth handing over the degree certificate to a student at the Graduation Day of Vinayaka Mission’s Kirupananda Variyar Engineering College in Salem
Higher education must ensure character-building and ethics among students since today’s web-based technical education does not inculcate such traits, said M. S. Anand, Director, IIT – Madras.
Delivering the convocation address of the Vinayaka Mission’s Kirupananda Variyar Engineering College at Periya Seeragapadi on Sunday, Mr. Anand pointed out that industrial education could put stress on the know-how approach, which in turn would worry educationists of the country.
Components
Education had three components such as ‘Knowledge, Know-how and Character’ among which the last-mentioned one was essential.
“Our education system has evolved from ‘gurukkul,’ system in which students stayed in ‘gurukkuls’ where character-building and ethical standards were essentially taught.
Later it transformed into a monastery type in which the learning process had been, to some extent, democratised,” he said.
Then it had evolved into a printing and industrial education, which underscored the know-how approach only.
The IT revolution had prompted the students to have search engine-based knowledge sourcing from their houses.
Mr. Anand asked the students to base their career on truth and fearlessness as Gandhiji had propagated during the large and only non-violent Independent movement, which was unique in the world.
The country chose what was right such as secularism and democracy. It survived many drawbacks and achieved great results particularly after Green, White and Brown revolutions, which fed its millions.
India as a country was dynamic with its manufacturing and service sectors showing signs of tremendous development.
In fact manufacturing industry had recorded 12 per cent growth and would emerge as a leading sector in the country in 25 years from now. Here we have the ‘gun and butter’ dialogue spending on defence and development equally.
He asked the teachers to be facilitators of learning with constant update and wanted the students to be ‘future challengers,’ to lead the country in the days to come.
He said good institutions had produced students with good character.
Principal A. Nagappan in his presidential address pointed out that the institution had facilitated students to become professionals.
He said that 722 engineering students, 202 post graduates and seven research scholars were conferred degrees.
Vice-president N. V. Chandrasekar and Director N. Ramasamy were present at the function.
Working against the clock to put together Chennai’s first TEDx conference at the IIT-Madras
Posted by ganesh in Chennai, Education, Information Technology (IT), function, government, meeting on November 28th, 2009
A group of enthusiastic young volunteers, drawn from fields as diverse as the media to information technology to entrepreneurs and students, are working against the clock to put together Chennai’s first TEDx conference at the IIT-Madras on November 29.
TEDxChennai 2009 will be the first independently organised Technology, Entertainment and Design (TED) event for the city through a licence granted from the Sapling Foundation, a private not-for-profit organisation based in the U.S. that has pioneered the conferences.
TED conferences are popular “by invitation only” meetings devoted to “ideas worth spreading.” Over the years, they have become pivotal in bringing to the spotlight, innovators, both established and upcoming, from various fields. The list of speakers at the annual international TED conferences has included former U.S. President Bill Clinton, U.K. Prime Minister Gordon Brown, former U.S. Vice-President Al Gore, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates and Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, among others.
The TED India meeting organised was held in Mysore in the first week of November and featured, among others, Minister of State for External Affairs and Congress MP Shashi Tharoor and Massachusetts Institute of Technology student and inventor of Sixth Sense technology Pranav Mistry.
Earlier this year, TED curator Chris Anderson called for applications from individuals across the world to apply for independently organised TED conferences that would be marked as TEDx. Kiruba Shankar, who is a part of the Knowledge Foundation, which has previously organised conferences such as Blogcamp, an ‘unconference’ of bloggers, and Proto.in, a platform that brought together entrepreneurs and investors, had applied and TED granted the licence. “We intend to make it an annual affair,” he says. “There are a lot of interesting innovators from south India, and TEDx Chennai can be the event that showcases them.”
Nominations
The official website — www.tedxchennai.com — offers, for anyone who visits, the opportunity to sign up and nominate TED Stars — trailblazers from various fields — who will receive special invitations to the event.
“Community driven”
“The idea is to keep it a community-driven event as much as possible,” says Benedict Gnaniah, advertising professional and one of the organisers. Those who have confirmed participation at the TEDx as speakers include Padmashri awardee and head of the Telecommunications and Computer Networks Group, IIT-Madras, Professor Ashok Jhunjhunwala, Carnatic music innovators Anil Srinivasan and Sikkil Gurucharan, chief functionary of Prajwala, an anti-trafficking NGO, Sunitha Krishnan and former Chief Vigilance Commissioner N.Vittal.
Broadband speed suffers most in accessing international servers
The broadband experience in India is akin to zooming on a highway for a short while before hitting a queue at a toll plaza, according to the findings of a study by LIRNEasia, a think tank on Information and Communication Technologies, and the IIT-Madras.
The study, conducted across five metros in India along with Colombo in Sri Lanka and Dhaka in Bangladesh, found that while Internet users connected to the ISP server in no time, significant milli-seconds were lost in the onward journey through different operator routers.
Mapped in terms of Round Trip Time (RTT), or the time taken for data packets to leave user reach destination server and return to base, the speed of broadband suffered most while accessing an international server.
“The implication for consumers is that though a user may get close to the speeds advertised by the operator while accessing servers within India, the download speeds from an international server for even a supposedly fast broadband connection would only be in the 200 kbps range,” said Timothy Gonsalves, Head of Department of Computer Science and Engineering, IIT-M and co-founder of the Telecommunications and Computer Networks Group (TeNeT) –research partner for the study.
The International Network Latency (or the round trip time to the first overseas entry point) was much higher than the minimum requirement of 300 ms (which is the standard in a country like Singapore) for peak hours. In other words, while the national download speed was well above the minimum of a broadband plan, the international equivalent barely reached the minimum in most cases. The solutions lay in tuning operator gateways, expanding international bandwidth and encouraging more caching or hosting of content in India.
The study found that South Asians received far less value for money than counterparts in, say, North America. Apart from infrastructure limitations, an important reason is that unlike users in Japan and China, Internet users in the South Asian region habitually accessed content hosted on servers in U.S. and Europe leading to clogging of international bandwidth.
“Though speed is an important determinant, a good broadband connection must satisfy other metrics,” Chanuka Wattegama, senior research manager at LIRNEasia told The Hindu.
This is why the research group applied six parameters for its broadband quality of service study using the Attester software developed at IIT-M.
Broadband connections were evaluated over multiple tests at different periods of the day and the week.
Far from an academic exercise, the LIRNEasia study findings are shared with stakeholders, including regulatory bodies such as the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI).
According to Mr.Wattegama, the study recommendations that have been accepted by TRAI include directing service providers to maintain a contention ratio of 1:30 for business users and 1:50 for residential users
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