october 2011 newsletter

Innovation in an Indian Context

By Dr. Smruti Ranjan Sarangi

Innovation in an Indian Context

1,2

Project article 3

I2Tech 2011 4

Newsflashes 5

Faculty Profile 6

Personality Profile 7

Faculty Profile 8

Flipkart profile 9,10

ACM activities 10,11

Fun Section 11,12

Inside this issue:

CSE Newsletter

Brought out by A

CM STUDENT Chapter

Most undergraduate and gradu-ate students consider the idea of creating a startup at some point of time in their life. They are mostly inspired by the lives of visionaries like Steve Jobs, and Bill Gates. Also, creating a suc-cessful startup is a very superla-tive technical achievement, an extremely attractive option both professionally as well as finan-cially. Consequently, many stu-dents, academicians, and work-ing professionals are drawn into this seemingly lucrative profes-sion. However, the economics of innovation is extremely different in India as compared to the Sili-con Valley. I would tend to ar-gue that the meaning of the term “innovation” means different things in different places. It needs to be interpreted in the c o r r e c t s o c i o -e c on om i c c o n t e x t . This article makes the case for a more bal-anced ap-proach for dealing with the issue of pursuing a career founding startups as compared to

traditional jobs in India.

When we think of “innovation”, the first thing that strikes us is something like an iPod, or iPad. We need to fundamentally revisit this notion of invention in devel-oping countries in India. We need to understand that to create something like an iPod, we need hundreds of positive factors in our socio-economic system like the availability of high quality technical manpower, designers, venture capitalists, marketing managers, and extremely diligent sales personnel. If Apple were deficient in any one of these de-

“Great ideas, it is said, come into

the world as gently as doves. Perhaps, then, if we listen

attentively, we shall hear amid the uproar of empires and nations a

faint flutter of wings; the gentle

stirring of life and hope.”

--Albert Camus

Great environments are definitely breeders of great ideas but everybody needs a break from the tight timelines to nurture such ideas. As we enjoy the last few days of the mid-sem break, let us refresh ourselves with the latest updates of the activities of the department and the people

associated with it.

In this issue we heartily welcome two new faculty Dr. Maya Ramanath and Dr. Smruti Ranjan Sarangi to the department. We also thank Dr. Sarangi for his highly motivating article on innovation in an Indian context. A live example of this is discussed in an interview with an Alumini, also the creator of Flipkart, one of the most popular online shopping ventures in India. Ideas flow from one plain to another, be it through the open house, various seminars or other events organized in the department. The ACM Chapter organized many major events including Yahoo Hack U! and IKES 2011, a research based knowledge exchange symposium organized in collaboration with

IBM IRL.

The team offers its homage to one of the greatest innovators of the era, Steve Jobs, through his personality profile as well as some of his famous quotes. Switch on your thinking pads for the fun section that offers a new poem and

a crossword with a difference.

Read on for all this and more!

Editor’s Column

Volume 4, Issue 2 October 2011 -partments, an iPod, would not have

been possible. We can think of an iPod as the outcome of a massive system consisting of many many gears, all operating in perfect har-mony and synchrony. The loss of any single cog in the wheel can stall

the entire system.

For example, when I went to Ethiopia, I saw a man sitting by the road side making new TVs. He had a couple of old CRT TV sets of different makes. He was cannibalizing different parts from them, and creating a brand new TV set consisting of entirely re-furbished parts. This to me is, “innovation”. Doing this surely does require some amount of technical knowledge. Secondly, you require a supply chain that provides old TVs with at least one part working, and then you need a

market that can pay you well for the invested t i m e a n d

money.

Now, coming back to the Indian context, let us look at the financial

angle first. To make a product, we need at least three engineers. Two engineers need to be devoted to development, and one engineer needs to focus on testing. Even if we assume that a couple of entre-preneurs don’t draw any salary, we will nonetheless need to pay the engineers at multinational company rates. Assuming an av-erage figure of ten to fifteen lakh rupees CTC per year, this amounts to about 40 lakhs per year for three engineers. Sec-ondly, we need some basic com-puting infrastructure, licenses for software, and money to pay utility bills, and rent. Assuming five lakhs for rent per year, and the rest for computing facilities, we

“Since we live in an age of

innovation, a practical education

must prepare a man for work that does not yet exist and cannot yet

be clearly defined”

~Peter F. Drucker

Aditi Kapoor, Chief Editor

Innovation in an Indian Context (contd.)

estimate this amount to exceed 10 lakhs. Most of this cost is variable given the fact that we have to take deprecation into ac-

count.

Along with the engineering costs, we should not underestimate the need for sales and marketing. We need to hire the services of a very capable and preferably senior sales/marketing executive who has very good relations with retailers, dis-tributors, venture capitalists, funding agencies, and potential clients. Typically, this person is somebody very senior and needs to be paid a very high salary. He or she should get at least 20 lakh rupees in today’s market. Secondly, we need to invest a sizeable amount of money in marketing campaigns, travel, and presen-tations in major international events and trade shows. This should cost 10-20 lakhs more. Lastly, we need to pay for finan-

cial, legal, and HR services.

Adding up all of this, we come upto an estimate of one crore per year in person-nel and operating costs. However, we are not done yet. We need to consider the fact that the corporate tax rate in India is 30%, we have VAT and service tax, and the cost of capital is 10-15% per year. This means that for supporting a small size development team, we are looking at one and half crores per year. This is about 300,000$ per year, which is not an insig-

nificant amount by American standards.

If the startup is able to generate this amount plus much more, then we can justify the investment. Let us say that we have a startup that provides some kind of a web service. We charge 1000 Rs from each customer. We will need fifteen thou-

sand customers each year. Assume that we are creating a small device or software costing 500 Rs. that can be sold by retailers. We need to sell at least 30,000 copies. This is not a small feat by any measure. Secondly, ven-ture capitalists expect a 1:10 return, which increases the size of the prob-

lem by an order of magnitude.

The main problem is that we are pay-ing AMERICAN salaries in an IN-DIAN market. The possible solutions to this problem are as follows. The entrepreneurs need to take on the role of engineers, and work with a very low pay for extended amounts of time. Unfortunately, it is very hard for sen-ior people to go without pay for a long time owing to family commitments, and junior people might be deficient in skills. Nonetheless, if students want to open a startup after they graduate, they need to first and foremost concentrate on acquiring very advanced technical skills especially in programming and computer systems. Otherwise, they

will be reliant on other engineers.

Secondly, as mentioned by the legen-dary late Steve Jobs, a techno-business effort is a marriage of computer sci-ence and liberal arts. Students need to focus on their soft skills like writing and art of presentation. This will en-able them to take up some or most of the roles of the senior marketing ex-

ecutive.

Unfortunately, the Indian education system is not geared towards produc-ing a person who is an amalgam of technical as well as non-technical

skills. Most of the time, students are good in only one area and lack expertise in the other. Hence, it is very essential for pro-spective entrepreneurs to develop them-selves as extremely versatile individuals. In specific, they should focus on world class system design skills, be extremely effective presenters, and if possible be-come an extremely eloquent and articulate speaker. Almost all successful entrepre-neurs and corporate honchos have these

skills to different measures.

It is possible that even with all of these attributes the costs and risks of running a startup in India clearly outweigh the ex-pected benefits. This is the case for most of the startups that lack a clearly defined vision and business model. In this case, it might be a good idea to focus on a service oriented model than a product oriented model. The former has low risks and low returns, whereas the latter has high risks and possibly high returns. Once, the ser-vice oriented startup does well, and the monetization begins, entrepreneurs can think of increasing the innovation bar, and

focusing on newer ideas.

To summarize, I believe that creating startup in India presents some uniquely Indian challenges, which are just not lim-ited to the lack of availability of high quality manpower and venture capitalist funding. However, it is possible to cir-cumvent them if prospective entrepre-neurs equip themselves with the correct skills, start with smaller objectives and

innovate their way up the ladder.

Here's to the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers, the round pegs in the square holes... the ones who see things differently -- they're not fond of rules... You can quote them, disagree

with them, glorify or vilify them, but the only thing you can't do is ignore them because they change

things... they push the human race forward, and while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius, because the ones who are crazy enough to think that they can change the world, are the ones

who do.”

~ Steve Jobs

Student : Sandeep Kumar Bindal

Supervisor : Dr. Sorav Bansal

Publication details : S. Bindal, S. Bansal, "Systematic ranking of Thread Schedules for Testing Multithreaded Programs," ACM SRC PLDI Student Research Competition, San Jose, June 2011. (Third Prize Winner in Un-

dergraduate Research Category. )

Introduction

Concurrency is used pervasively in the devel-opment of large programs. However, testing concurrent programs is notoriously hard due to the inherent non-determinism. Recently, many different techniques have been pro-posed to identify concur-rency-related bugs early. An effective but expensive approach is model-

checking, where all possi-ble schedules of a pro-gram are executed to as-certain the absence of a bug. Unfortunately, the space of all schedules is huge, and exhaustively enumerating it is usually infeasible. Therefore, an alternative is to try and maximize the probability of uncovering a bug rather than trying to ascertain it’s absence. Background Work

Many different ap-proaches have been pro-posed in this direction. Musuvathi and Qad-eer recently proposed using context-bound to rank schedules, and show that it is an effec-tive method to uncover most common bugs. A context-bound is the number of pre-emptive context-switches required to execute a schedule. The schedules are enumerated in increasing order of their contextbound. They had shown that all known bugs in real-world applications can be found with context-bound values of 2 or less. The space of schedules is reduced significantly at low context-boundvalues, but it is still too large to ex-

haustively enumerate. Tools like CHESS based on this algorithm reduces this search space by considering only explicit synchronization operations as possible pre-emption points. This ap-proach is based on the assumption that all shared-memory accesses will be pro-tected by a lock but many systems delib-erately avoid explicit synchronization, often for performance reasons. Another recent tool, CTrigger, focuses on atom-icity-violation bugs and preferentially searches the space of schedules that are likely to trigger these bugs. CTrigger first profiles executions of the program to determine the shared variables and their unprotectedaccesses. It then at-tempts to generate schedules that are

likely to violate assumptions of atomic-ity. CTrigger is primarily interested in atomicity-violation bugs and often over-looks other concurrency bugs.

Methodology

3.1 Ranking

We propose a ranking scheme of test schedules, which is applicable to all programs irrespective of the synchroni-zation disciplines being followed, and targets all types of bugs. We rank the

thread schedules to be tested on four di-mensions, namely, contextbound, memory locations (variables), threads, and loop iterations. We discuss all these ranking

criteria as follows:

• Ranking on Context Bound

• Ranking on Number of Memory Loca-

tions

• Ranking on Number of Threads

• Ranking on Loop Iteration Bound

Conclusions

We have implemented this algorithm in a concurrency testing tool for Java, called RankChecker. Our tool does not require

source-level annotations and instru-ments the binary class code of a Java program and associated libraries to insert appropriate schedule points. The instrumented test program is linked with the RankChecker library which spawns a scheduler thread to dictate the thread interleavings using

semaphores.

Table 1. shows the results of our experiments. The programs from MergeSort to AirLineTickets are taken from ConTest Benchmarks. We are able to find out all the known bugs in the ConTest Benchmarks. We have also tested our tool on cache4j, a fast threadsafe implemen-tation of a cache for Java Objects, upto (c = 2, v = vtot, t = 2, l = 1) but

we are not able to find out any bug.

Other key contributions of our work

include :

• Providing a systematic ranking of test schedules while testing concurrent-

programs.

• Presenting new classifications of bugs based on the number of variables in-volved, the number of threads required to uncover it, and the number of loop

iterations.

• Presenting a concurrency-testing tool for Java based on our ranking scheme. Our tool tests for many different types

of concurrency bugs at once.

An interesting project article: Systematic Ranking of Thread Schedules for Testing Multithreaded Programs

I2Tech 2011 – Innovation at it’s best at IIT Delhi

Indian Institute of Technology - Delhi exhibited its latest technological innova-tions and projects at its open event, I2tech-2011 on Saturday 23rd April 2011. Continuing the tradition of last six years, this year too i2tech promises to be real treat to the eyes of the connoisseurs by presenting finest of the projects to tech-nology enthusiasts, students and col-leagues from other technical institutes, school children, industries and general public. This aims to provide platform to outer world, especially young minds at school level and their professors, to know and learn about the ongoing research pro-

jects in IIT Delhi.

There were about 350 projects worked upon by B. Tech, M. Tech and Ph. D stu-dents in consultation with their profes-sors. These were showing the current problems in various fields and on going research work to solve them. Projects were from departments of Nano Technol-ogy, Biological Science, Civil, Mechani-cal and Computer science department and

various more.

Some of the key projects for display were Voice Application for Municipal Complaint Management, Design and implementation of a News reader based on social networks, Maximal matching

in a dynamic graph, Smart CANE etc.

The event’s highlights were display and demonstration of more than 400 student and research projects & products to 3500 visitors from schools, colleges, indus-tries and general public. In this year’s even all 13 departments, 11 centers and 3 schools participated enthusiastically. Special demonstration of sixth sense

Technologies, Rube Goldberg Experi-ments, Film Screenings, Quiz pro-grammes to school students also marked the occasion. Special lectures were also delivered by Prof T.K. Datta on Earthquake & Tsunami – The Twins and by Prof Ambuj Sagar on Society's Grand Challenges: The Role

of Technology and Technologists.

First prize was awarded to a project titled “Remote reconfigurable acoustic surveillance platform using low power DSP hardware with built in self test ” conducted in CARE department and the next 2 were given to students Me-

chanical department.

It was overall a knowledge enriching

experience for both students from out-

side and within IIT Delhi, to learn and

exchange new ideas.

“Everything that can be counted does not necessarily count; everything that counts cannot necessarily be

counted.” ~Albert Einstein

Compiled by : Swati Verma

We are proud to say that the ACM IITD Chapter has done it again! We won the ACM Student

Chapter Excellence Award during 2010-11 for Outstanding School Service among ACM student chapters from all over the world based on the re-view by an Essay Competition. The ACM Student Chapter Excellence Awards Program recognizes

chapters that display considerable initiative during the academic year. All student chapters compete for this award in five key areas. Winning chapters in each of these five areas receive $500 and an award banner to proudly display on their chapter's Web page. These chapters are featured on the ACM Web

site and in ACM MemberNet

“Did you spot

the banner on

the top of the

first page of this

edition?”

Other

Award

Winning

Chapters

ACM Best Student Chapter Award goes to IITD again!

Outstanding Chapter Activities: The UCLouvain ACM Student Chapter

Outstanding Community Service: University of Michigan/Dearborn ACM Student Chapter

Outstanding Recruitment Program: New Jersey Institute of Technology ACM Student

Chapter

Outstanding Chapter Website: Northeastern University ACM Student Chapter

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.

• A. Gupta, J. Kumar, D. Mathew, S. Bansal, S. Banerjee, H. Saran, "Design and Implementation of the Workflow of an Academic Cloud," Databases in Networked Information Systems, University of Aizu, Japan,

December 2011.

• S. Bindal, S. Bansal, "Systematic ranking of Thread Schedules for Test-ing Multithreaded Programs," ACM SRC PLDI Student Research Compe-tition, San Jose, June 2011. Third Prize Winner in Undergraduate 2010, SciTePress, ISBN 978-989-8425-29-

4, pp 165– 170.

IV Awards

• Sandeep Kumar Bindal won third prize at PLDI SRC 2011 in the Un-dergraduate Category for his work on Systematic Ranking of the Threads Schedules for Testing MultiThreaded

Programs.

• The Trafficdroid team of Kanav Goyal, Kushal Dudani, Saurabh Gupta, and Shikhar Gupta won third place in the Ericsson Application Awards for 2011, for their Android

application on road traffic monitoring.

• Dr. Sorav Bansal won IBM SUR

Award, 2011

• Dr. Amit Kumar awarded INSA

Medal for Young Scientist 2011

V. Events

• IIT Delhi’s 1st Knowledge Exchange Symposium (IKES 2011) organized by ACM Student Chapter in collabo-ration with IBM IRL , 16th October

2011

• Hack U! organized by ACM Student Chapter and Yahoo, 13-15th October

2011

I. Visitors

• Dr. Nisheeth Vishnoi, Microsoft Re-

search, Bangalore , 25th April 2011

• Sunil Bharti Mittal, Bharti Enterprises

Ltd , 25th April 2011

• Steve Ballmer, Microsoft Corporation, ,

26th May 2011

• Prof. Kaleem Siddiqi, McGill Univer-

sity, Montreal, CA, 3rd August 2011

• Prof. Sanjay Madria, Missouri Univer-sity of Science & Technology , 5th Au-

gust 2011

• Prof. Chandrajit Bajaj, The University

of Texas at Austin, 5th August 2011

• Dr. Sheldon Levy, Ryerson University ,

5th August 2011

• Ashwin Karkala, Oracle, 6th August

2011

• Nandan Nilekani, Infosys, 10th August

2011

• Dr. Ed Cutrell, Microsoft Research In-

dia , 10th August 2011

• Prof. Dinesh Manocha , University of

North Carolina, 12th August 2011

• Dr. Sourav Chakraborty, Chennai

Mathematical Institute, 30th August 2011

• Prof. Ashish Goel, Stanford University,

12th September 2011

• Dr. Sorav Bansal, IIT Delhi, 5th October

2011

• Soshant Bali, IIIT Delhi, 14th October

2011

• Nisheeth Vishnoi, Microsoft Research,

Bangalore, 18th October 2011

• Elisa Celis, University of Washington,

Seattle, 18th October 2011

III. Publications

• Amitabha Bagchi, Adit Madan, Achal Premi. A computation-ally inexpensive and power efficient fully distributed topology

for data collection in heterogeneous

wireless sensor networks. In Proceedings of the 7th IEEE Intl. Conference on Dis-tributed Computing in Sensor Systems

(DCOSS '11), pp 1-8, June 2011.

• A SysML Profile for Development and Early Validation of TLM 2.0 Models Vaibhav Jain, Anshul Kumar, Preeti Panda In Robert France et al., editors, Proc. 7th Int. Conf. Modelling Founda-tions and Applications (ECMFA'2011), pages 299-311. Springer, Berlin, LNCS

6698, 2011

• A UML based framework for efficient Validation of TLM 2 Models Vaibhav Jain, Anshul Kumar, Preeti Panda Forum on Specification and Design Languages (*FDL'11*) Oldenburg, Germany, Sep-

tember, 2011

• M. Agrawal, M. Hanmandlu and K.K. Biswas, “Generalized Intuitionistic Fuzzy Soft Set and its Application in Practical Medical Diagnosis Problem”, presented at Fuzz IEEE 2011conference, June 27 – 30, 2011, Taipei, pp. 2972 –

2978.

• Richa Sharma and K.K. Biswas, “ Using Courteous Logic based representation for Requirements Specification”, 4th International Workshop on Managing Require-ments Knowledge (MaRK’11),

Aug. 30,2011, Torino

• M. Agrawal, K.K.Biswas and M. Han-mandlu, “Relations in Generalized In-tuitionistic Fuzzy Soft Set”, IEEE CIMSA, Computational Intelligence for Measurement Systems and Analysis,

Sept 18-21, 2011, Ottawa.

• Paper entitled "Reducing Dependency on Middleware for Pull Based Services in LBS Systems" by Saroj Kaushik, Shivendra Kumar and Priti Goplani was presented by Prof Saroj Kausshik, in an International Conference on Wireless Communications and Applications (ICWCA 2011) held during 13 August

2011, Haikou, China.

• P. Goyal, V. J. Ribeiro, H. Saran, A. Kumar, “Strap-Down Pedestrian Dead-Reckoning System,” IPIN, Guimaraes,

2011.

• A. K. Somani and A. Gumaste, "Light

Department News Flash

Q.1. Please tell us a bit about your

student days.

Ans. 1. My student days were pretty boring, I would say. I was a good stu-dent who studied hard and got good marks. That pretty much sums up my student life. Life is so much more in-

teresting now .

Q.2. How did you get interested in

Computer Science as a career?

Ans. 2. I was very young (about 10 or so) when my father bought a computer -- a commodore PC 40 with a color monitor. That was fascinating for me. I started reading books about com-puters and learning and programming in BASIC. And of course, playing a lot of computer games (primitive though they were). This continued for many years and finally, it was just a natural choice to choose Computer

Science as my preferred subject.

Q.3. What created a passion for Da-

tabase Systems in you?

Ans. 3. The initial interest in database systems came when I was studying concurrency control and recovery dur-ing my B.E. days. I could really see the beauty of the subject – how the theory and practical aspects inter-twined. And I had a natural aptitude for understanding the subject – I had to read something once or twice and I

would “get” it. So, that’s when I decided that this was a great subject for me (though I would go on to working in car-dinality estimation for my PhD which had nothing to do with either concurrency

control or recovery).

Q.4. It seems that you continued for

your PhD after your masters. What are

the advantages/disadvantages of the

same? In your opinion is it better to get

experience and come back or continue

and complete it in one run?

Ans. 4. This is a difficult question to an-swer. On the one hand, sometimes it does matter what your age is for certain kind of things. For example, in some places, you will not be considered “young enough” for assistant professor positions if you are over 35. And you will not be eligible to apply for certain kinds of funding, etc. So, it really depends on what you think your goals will be, how long you would like to get experience in a job and then come back. The trend seems to suggest that if you can get a PhD by the time you are in

your early 30’s, the world is open to you.

If I could do it again, I would take up a job for a couple of years after my BTech or Masters. The truth is that going through a PhD program is like being in the real world – you will have to deal with all kinds of people, some good and others nasty, and all kind of pressures, mostly bad. And it’s your degree at stake if you don’t know how to navigate in the right manner. So, I would say, it’s better to go out and get some experience in the world and come back with a little more matur-

ity.

Q.5. What would you call the turning

point of your career so far?

Ans. 5. Going to MPII has been a major event in my career so far. I had the option of either going for a job in an industrial research lab or as a postdoc at MPII. I

chose MPII. There I got to work with someone who is at the top of his profes-sion. And I got a glimpse of what it takes to be a world-class researcher (turns out,

it’s not easy!).

Q.6. How would you compare your ex-

periences at MPII to that of IIT Delhi?

Any similarities between the two?

What would you say are the main dif-

ferences?

Ans.6. I am working with a lot more stu-dents at IIT Delhi, building my own group and teaching. None of these things was required at MPII. So, this is a com-pletely new experience for me. There are a few hiccups here and there, but I am getting used to it. I even hope to enjoy it

soon .

Q.7. What made you want to come

back to India?

Ans.7. I got a good job! It was the right

move to advance my career.

Q.8. Your advice to the students.

Ans.8. Always have a plan. It could be a 6-month plan or 1-year plan, but never do anything without first thinking about your goals. For example, if you are in your final year of BTech, think about what your plan is for the final year. Is your goal to get a job – if so, what kind of com-pany? Or go abroad for higher studies – if so, what kind of university? Either goal requires a different kind of planning. If you go in without a reasonable idea of what your goals are, you are most likely wasting time. More likely, you suddenly find at the end of the final year that you actually want to join Intel, and now wish you had taken up a project in computer architecture. Eventually you will have to make longer-term plans and it is good to

get into the habit early.

Faculty Profile : Dr. Maya Ramanath

Compiled by : Aditi Kapoor

“It's not that I'm so smart, it's just that I stay with problems longer.” ~Albert Einstein

Personality Profile : Steve Jobs, The Man with the Golden I

He was an inventor and an entrepre-neur. He was the CEO of a company that r evolut i on -ized the world. He got fired from his own

company but then went on to establish another company which was hugely suc-cessful. So successful in fact, that the company which had fired him acquired this other company by him just to bring him back on board. So great was his influence, so captivating was his charisma, so fluent was his presentation, so grand was his re-turn. Steven Paul "Steve" Jobs

was his name.

He was co-founder, chairman, and chief executive officer of Apple Inc. Jobs also co-founded Pixar Animation Studios. He became a member of the board of direc-tors of the Walt Disney Com-pany in 2006, following the acquisition of Pixar by Disney. He has a total of 317 patents to his name, with a dozen more

which had been applied for.

Jobs was adopted by the fam-ily of Paul Jobs and Clara Jobs who moved to Mountain View, California when he was five years old. When asked about his "adoptive parents," Jobs replied emphatically that Paul and Clara Jobs

"were my parents."

After graduating high school, Jobs went to Reed College in Portland, Odegan. Although he dropped out after only one semester, he continued auditing classes at Reed, while sleeping on the floor in friends' rooms, returning Coke bottles for food money, and getting weekly free meals at the local Hare Krishna temple.

Jobs later said,

"If I had never dropped in on that single calligraphy course in college, the Mac

would have never had multiple type-

faces or proportionally spaced fonts."

In 1974, Jobs took a job as a technician at Atari, Inc., a manufacturer of video games, with the primary intent of sav-ing money for a spiritual retreat to In-dia. Jobs then traveled to India to visit Neem Karoli Baba at his Kainchi Ash-ram with a Reed College friend (and, later, an early Apple employee), Daniel Kottke, in search of spiritual enlighten-ment. He came back a Buddhist with his head shaved and wearing traditional

Indian clothing.

Jobs returned to Atari and was given the task of creating a circuit board for the game Breakout. Atari offered $100 for each chip that was eliminated in the machine. Jobs had little interest in or knowledge of circuit board design and made a deal with Wozniak to split the bonus evenly between them if Wozniak could minimize the number of chips. Wozniak reduced the number of chips by 50, a design so tight that it was im-possible to reproduce on an assembly

line.

In 1976, Jobs, Steve Wozniak and Ronald Wayne founded Apple, with later funding from a then-semi-retired Intel product-marketing manager and engineer A.C. "Mike" Markkula, Jr. In 1978, Apple recruited Mike Scott from National Semiconductor to serve as CEO for what turned out to be several turbulent years. In 1983, Jobs lured John Sculley away from Pepsi-Cola to serve as Apple's CEO, asking, "Do you want to sell sugar water for the rest of your life, or do you want to come with

me and change the world?"

Jobs was among the first to see the commercial potential of Xerox PARC's mouse-driven graphical user interface, which led to the creation of the Apple Lisa in 1983. One year later, the Macin-tosh was born. The rest, as they say, is history. Steve Jobs had a dynamic personality. His presen-tation style was unique. He under-stood that the difference between a good product and a great prod-

uct lay in presenting it right.

Steve passed away on Octo-ber 5, 2011. May his soul rest in peace. His life can be best summed up by his own

words :

“Our time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's

life. Don't be trapped by dogma - which is living with

the results of other people's

thinking. Don't let the noise of other's

opinions drown out your own inner

voice. And most important, have the

courage to follow your heart and intui-

tion. They somehow already know what

you truly want to become. Everything

else is secondary.”

Sources:

1. Wikipedia

2. http://typelogic.com/entj.html

Compiled by : Aayush Goel

“So we went to Atari and said, 'Hey, we've got

this amazing thing, even built with some of your

parts, and what do you think about funding us?

Or we'll give it to you. We just want to do it. Pay

our salary, we'll come work for you.' And they

said, 'No.' So then we went to Hewlett-Packard,

and they said, 'Hey, we don't need you. You have-

n't got through college yet.”

“Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only

way to do great work is to love what you do. If

you haven’t found it yet, keep looking, and

don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart,…

you’ll know when you find it.”

Q.1. Please take us through your

career journey

Ans. 1. I did my B.Tech from IIT Kharagpur in 2002 after which I fin-ished my MS and PhD from Univer-sity of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, IL(UIUC). Then I worked in Synopsis research for almost 6 months from where I moved to IBM systems and technologies lab in Bangalore by late 2007. I moved again to IBM Research Labs in Early 2009 and then joined

here as assistant professor.

Q.2. Please share some enlightening

experiences as a student at IIT

Kharagpur

Ans. 2. I couldn’t say I enjoyed my time there. My father was a professor in Kharagpur and so I was a day-scholar After missing a few classes I found it difficult to latch on to what was being taught and so I had to get the help of my classmates. Surpris-ingly helping hands were usually those who were among non topper students of the class. But still it was difficult to cop in next lectures after missing one or two of some subject. This is some-thing I try to take care here. Even if people miss classes, I try to put in some effort to give them the current

coordinates

Q.3. How was the transition from

UG to PG and PhD?

Ans. 3. It was an enlightening experi-ence culturally and academically. The competition was tough. There were

toppers from different universities from across the globe and it was a culturally diverse community. The toughest part was peer evaluation as your papers were reviewed and often rejected by peers. You ended up writing a paper, re-writing it

again and again till it was accepted.

Q.4. How did you decide Computer

Architecture as your field of specializa-

tion?

Ans. 4. Well, it was not by choice. Back in the UG years, our seniors used to ad-vice that there were two main streams of Computer Science: Theoretical Computer Science and Networking. Also, Theoreti-cal Computer Science was for smart peo-ple. At that point in life you have too much faith in your seniors. While in many situations they were more informed than we were, a lot of what they knew was half-baked. At that time there was a lot of prestige associated with RA-ship. Since the networks group didn’t have a RA slot, approached a professor who at the time was well funded in his projects. He told me to do well in a paper and then he would consider me. I got an A in that, but by then I had another offer for RA-ship. So I approached the professor again and he straightaway accepted me. I asked him about the project only then. He gave me a tough name and I was bewildered. So I asked him to explain in layman terms and I was very surprised that the field was Computer Architecture. After that there was a lot of learning and finally I did my

PhD in the area.

Q.5. How was your industry experi-

ence?

Ans. 5. I had made up my mind during my PhD period that I was going to join academics. However I didn't want to join academics at that stage and so I joined the industry to make up my mind. The pay

package of academia was low at the time.

Q.6. What pulls you back to India?

Ans. 6. I had always wanted to return to

India. While I was in US, I had a skewed and distorted view of India. The western media blamed India and China for all wrongs. 10 years back, the work environ-ment in software companies in India and the US were greatly different. As a result of globalization and easy travel, there is

some parity now.

Q.7. Was there any incident in life that

greatly influenced you?

Ans. 7. Back during my PG days, an In-dustry leader from India had visited UIUC. He was the CEO of one of the biggest software companies in India. A few of us wanted to know why none of the Indian companies attempted to bring out their own products. He told us that as long as there was money from services, there was no need to get into products. This answer from a supposed ‘visionary’ shocked us. What people fail to recognize is that even companies outside the US have brought out products that have been

huge successes.

Q.8. What are the important qualities

for someone going into teaching and

research?

Ans. 8. One should be dedicated, sensible and should be persist in trying to solve problems. Additionally, he should be thick skinned to deal with the reviews, many of which would be peer reviews. One should always be ready to learn new things. This is something I found different in India from the US. Education in the society is less. In the US people read books magazines etc when they travel but I hardly see anyone reading in Delhi

Metro.

Q.9. Message to students

Ans. 9. Just try to come with the best in you. Students should focus on both produc-

tivity and quality in their work.

Faculty Profile : Dr. Smruti Ranjan Sarangi

Compiled by :

Swati Verma & Georgy Sebastian

Q.1. How did the idea of

Flipkart come into being?

Please take us though the

journey of the beginning of

Flipkart..

Ans. 1. After IIT Delhi, both Binny and I worked with IT companies. After working for over two and a half years, we felt that we could add more value to our career by starting our own venture. The first thought was to set up a com-parison shopping website that would cater to the growing Indian e-commerce market. However when we probed this idea further, our research revealed that companies in India had still not succeeded in creating a condu-

cive ecosystem for ecommerce.

The entire category was known to have issues like delay in deliveries, wrong product deliveries, improper product description, etc and with very little focus on the customer. We sensed an opportunity and decided to start an e-commerce company, focus-ing on providing a great shopping ex-perience to its customers. That is how,

Flipkart.com was born.

Q.2. What are the important ingre-

dients towards a successful start-

up?

Ans. 2. These include:

A good idea

The first ingredient of a successful startup is a workable idea; one that is financially viable and relevant for a large number of customers. Second, the team should have the managerial and technical capability to convert the idea into reality. Although this seems very simple, this is where most of the

start-ups face problems.

A great team

Having a good team is an asset. It is essential for a start-up to have team members who are committed, have the drive and are willing to work hard to make it successful. It is good to have

several ‘entrepreneurs’ in the organization. It also helps, if the team members are from different backgrounds, a start-up like ours has to grapple with various aspects like

technology, operations, marketing, etc.

Ambition

One must want to make a difference; start off being ambitious and when the first set of ambitions is met, one must get even more ambitious! The drive could be the size of the company, the number of customers you touch, the difference that the business makes to the lives of customers, the profit-ability or whatever else. What is really im-portant is that we must keep aiming higher or wanting to do even better. That is the true

spirit of the entrepreneur.

Q.3. What are some of the key values of

the company?

Ans. 3. At Flipkart, we believe first and foremost in providing a great shopping ex-perience to our customers. Some of our key values that have led us to the position of being the leading e-commerce destination in

the country are:

Simplicity:

Everything, from navigation on our website to the buying process and delivery, has been kept simple to ensure hassle free shopping experience for our customers. This is a con-stant with us. Our internal processes also

follow the same rule.

Convenience:

We ensure convenience to our custom-ers at every step of the buying process. We have a simple-to-use search facility which can help find desired products conveniently and a payment option such as Cash-on-Delivery ensures that our customers can pay us as late as after they receive their order. We also pro-vide 24/7 customer service support so that our customers can reach us at any

time of the day.

Trustworthy:

We are a very predictable company to our customers. We ensure that the delivery reaches our customers within the promised time period and in the best possible condi-tion. We have a no-questions-asked return policy. This predictability helps build cus-tomer trust in us. We wish to be even more predictable in times to come, with faster

deliveries and a richer product line.

Q.4. Please describe the advantages of the

company over Amazon etc.

Ans. 4. In India, we are better than Amazon in many ways. Unlike Amazon, with us, you do not have to pay any delivery charge if your order is above Rs. 100. Also, our reach in India is beyond comparison. Our product range is also more suited to cater to the In-

dian audience than Amazon’s.

Q. 5. What are the future goals?

Ans. 5. Our future goal is to be the largest and most customer friendly e-commerce

company in the country.

Q.6. What kind of career opportunities

does it offer to IIT graduates and post

graduates respectively? What kind of

work would they be involved in?

Ans. 6. We are growing aggressively and that means we have to continuously scale up our systems and infrastructure to remain ahead of the curve. At Flipkart, we work in some of the most innovative and cutting edge technology areas across teams like - Engineering, Product Manage-ment, Business Development, Supply Chain Management, Logistics, and Market-ing. We have already hired more than

Flipkart in the making : Sachin Bansal, CEO & Co-founder, Flipkart.com

50 IIT graduates over the last few years, who are today holding critical responsibilities in these teams and partnering with us in this amazing growth journey. Our requirement for talent will continue to grow and we will specifically look forward to hire anything between 50-100 IIT gradu-ates over the next 2-3years. Flipkart provides an "open canvas", a fast growing and highly versatile work environment and an opportunity to directly impact the organization's growth and success. We are sure that

you should have a higher appetite for tak-ing risks because no one will doubt your capability and even if you ‘fail’, your risks are low. In fact, when we started out, we believed that it was riskier to be em-ployed than to be starting out on our own! You should use this education and the profile of the institution to your advantage and aim for goals that are bigger than

what you would normally settle for.

Flipkart in the making

24 hour hacking marathon. Students were made familiar about various tools in the Yahoo! Developer Net-work like YQL, YUI, Flickr, BOSS to

name a few.

Refreshments, caffeine and goodies were provided from time to time to keep the hackers awake and hacking ! The craze among the students was such that on the opening day, over 600 students registered to attend the key-note address by Yahoo! India R&D CEO Mr. Shouvick Mukherjee. Also, this was the first time that Yahoo! CEO visited any IIT for Hack U. In total, there were 54 teams who reg-istered for the main event and dis-cussed their ideas/hacks of which 39

Yahoo! Hack U is a time for hack lovers to team up and emerge with cool and interesting hacks. This competition is the perfect platform for people who have interest-ing features to

existing web products or have cool

new product ideas.

After successful HackUs at univer-sities like Carnegie Mellon, UC Berkeley, IITM, IITK, IITkgp; Yahoo! HackU decided to come to IIT Delhi to find more exciting ideas and enthusiastic hackers. The event was organized by ACM IITD Stu-dent Chapter in collaboration with Ya-

hoo! from 13th to 16th Oct,2011.

No doubt IIT Delhi lived upto its expec-tations and Y! HackU received an over-whelming response which broke all pre-vious records of HackUs in previous

universities.

It had all the fun stuff - interesting tech talks, hacking tips and lessons, and hands-on coding workshops and was eventually followed by the main event -

teams ultimately managed to demo their successfully running codes. Both these figures are records for any HackU in the

past.

T-shirts and participation certificates were awarded to all the team members of the 39 teams .Gift hampers were ini-tially to be awarded to the top three teams but team Yahoo! decided to give away prizes to the top five teams, as the competition and submitted hacks were

‘too good’!

Also, the number of proposed intern-ships from the campus was increased from 5 to 8 as Yahoo! found it tough to select the best five. Many pre-placement interviews were offered to final year B.Tech and M.Tech students. The complete event lasted for a total of 4 fun-filled days which opened hitherto unexplored new avenues of creativity and innovation among the participants. The event was a never-seen-before re-cord-breaking success and was enjoyed by all. Consequently, it received a huge appreciation from the Yahoo! team which left the campus with a promise to see the IITD ‘hackers’ again next year

with new exciting hacks and ideas !

ACM activities with a difference :Hack U!

this will appeal to the budding talent

pool at IITs.

Q.7. Some motivational message for

the students based on Flipkart’s suc-

cess story.

Ans. 7. All I can say is that being stu-dents of one of the best engineering in-stitutes in the country, you should aspire big. You should not restrict your dreams to just getting a good job after college but sincerely start thinking of what you wish to do in the long term. As IITians,

Compiled by:

Deepansh Agarwal (Flipkart) & Aditi Kapoor

Compiled by :

Pulkit Yadav & Swati Verma

We are grateful for the contributions made by students and faculty alike for this as well as previous issues of the newsletter and hope for your continued

support in making this a success.

We invite contributions for articles and also membership into the ACM student chapter. This could be for being 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 a variety of articles covering any noteworthy achievements, interesting projects, publica-

tions or fun section contribution in the form of poems, jokes, cartoons, and inter-esting facts. We also invite you, espe-cially the new students to join the team and be involved in all the latest happen-

ings of the department.

ACM activities with a difference :IKES

He flies alone, alone he flies;

Gliding the deep blue skies;

Like a ruler he watches the world below,

Others fade into the clouds

But not he,

As he circles his world above and mine below

I watch with wonder at this being

How alone he is,

Feel for him I do

Till I realize, enjoys his aloneness he does,

Comforting me to bear with mine

Fun Section: Black bird of the sky


He knows he will find his mates yet,

But he worries not till then

Nor does he seek company of those not dear,

He would much rather enjoy aloofness, that is clear

I watch him till my eyes tire under the glare

But he tires not,

As he teaches me the strength of hope

Oh what a glorious wise bird he is !

Black bird of the sky

On 16th October, the ACM CSE

Student Chapter, in collaboration with IBM IRL, organized IIT’s first

ever Knowledge Exchange Sympo-sium (IKES 2011) . The aim of this

workshop was to bring together researchers from all over India and

allow for an exchange of research ideas.

The participants were invited to

initially submit an abstract of their project. IKES 2011 saw a total of 46

submissions out of which 15 were fi-nally selected for poster presentation.

Reviewing committee consisted of vari-ous field experts from the IITD faculty.

We thank all faculty members who helped in the review process. The final-

ists were required to give a poster pres-entation of 7 minutes followed by a

question answer session by the panel. The

esteemed judges included Dr. Mukesh Moha-nia, from IBM IRL and Prof. M. Balakrish-

nan and Prof. Shouribrata Chatterjee from IITD. The prizes were sponsored by IBM.

The first prize, that of a Lenovo Atom Laptop was won by a team from IITD for the project

titled “Design and Implementation of the Workflow of an Academic Cloud ”.

Contributed by : Aditi Kapoor


Call for Articles

The second prize was shared between an

IITD team and a team from Lovely Pro-fessional University, Jalandhar whereas

the third prize went to a team from Ma-haraja Surajmal Institute of Technology,

GGSIP University, Delhi.

All finalists were, in appreciation of par-ticipation, given T-shirts and all posters

were exhibited in the department.

All in all, it was an enriching experience for the organizers and participants alike.

The success of the first edition of the event will motivate the organizers to

make this an annual event.

Some tit “bits”

ACM Student Chapter SponsorACM Student Chapter SponsorACM Student Chapter SponsorACM Student Chapter Sponsor—M Balakrishnan

BROUGHT OUT BY ACM STUDENT CHAPTER

Newsletter TeamNewsletter TeamNewsletter TeamNewsletter Team

Magazine inMagazine inMagazine inMagazine in----chargechargechargecharge: Aditi Kapoor ([email protected])

Assisted by ACM chapter membersAssisted by ACM chapter membersAssisted by ACM chapter membersAssisted by ACM chapter members

Chair - Savin Goyal Abhishek Gupta

Swati Verma Pulkit Yadav Aayush Goel

(Photos in above order left to right)

ACROSS

3.A program designed to carry on a

conversation with a human

5.Analyzing biological data for

uniquely recognizing humans

7.A state element,____ is the funda-mental building block of digital elec-

tronic systems.

11.The branch of linguistics and logic

concerned with meaning.

12.An attack against a computer sys-tem whereby a running process can

create another running process

13.A java program designed to be em-bedded into an HTML document trans-ferred over Web & executed in a

browser.

14.A keyboard layout which suppos-edly decreases typing errors, speeds up

typing, and lessens type fatigue.

15. The first asymptotically fast multi-plication algorithm whose complexity

is less than O(n2).

DOWN

1.The brand name of personal com-puters and an operating system from

Apple

2.According to a legend, the lifetime of the world is the time taken to solve

this puzzle with 64 discs.(6,2,5)

4.combination of 4 bits is called a

____.

5.Also known as p-code,___ is an instruction set into which Java source

code is compiled.

6.One of the early breakthroughs in

AI,___ simulated a psychotherapist.

8.The nest of a familiar insect. A popular OS also has a version by the

same name.

9.I produce my own source code.

10.An eminent computer scientist and philosopher, he has a famous algo-

rithm in graph theory after his name.

Contributed by : Pulkit Yadav See the website for answers!

october 2011 newsletter

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