Foundation Day Message

We are completing one month in the new academic session. Monthly report from units will be available soon. We shall update this blog with activities of different units.

Today, we participated in the Foundation Day program of the institute which was held at Netaji auditorium. We were sweetly surprised to note that one of the recipients of 'Nina Saxena Memorial Award'

this year for innovation was NSS, IIT Delhi. Our heartiest congratulations to our brethren from another IIT! The innovation is about a mobile application where a woman in distress at Delhi can conveniently message her location to family and friends in single push of a button. This award is given each year on Foundation Day. The other winner of the award was a team from BARC who worked on de-contamination of ground water from radio-active uranium.

The keynote speaker, Dr. Amit Chatterjee from Microsoft took us to future with some concepts that may take shape as time evolves and that depend on computing and not computer as such. A concept video developed by Microsoft Lab. was played. It showed how context sensitivity, machine learning, cloud storage and distributed computing, blending of physical and digital (virtual) world, natural way of interaction, personalization etc. are becoming key issues. The Q & A session threw queries on e-waste, privacy of individual, open source challenge, the speaker's IIT days etc.

Two questions from students drew very warm acknowledgement from the entire audience. One was if too much invasion of technology will make people not use their own faculty and thereby degenerate it e.g. people will become lazy, fat etc. The second one pointed that the concept video was aimed at 'haves', the rich and elite and not 'have-nots' and asked what is there for people who die in war, hunger, malnutrition etc. from these futuristic technologies.

Before this, our Director outlined the contribution IIT Khargpur has made and what is in store for future. And we heard him saying (youtube link), "We want to adopt 10 to 20 KM radius around this campus so that our impact can be felt all around and we make ... people prosperous by whatever we generate in science and technology." There is a message for all of us in this. It will be a privilege to participate in achieving this goal.