Posted by Apoorv Narang

Another new semester has started at IIIT-Delhi and ACM Distinguished Speaker Talks is back for the third time. Read the details below to know more about the talk:

Abstract: Integration of XML documents demands consideration of similarities in both structure and content. This talk is about the structure and content semantic similarity detection of two XML documents from heterogeneous data sources. The talk will provide a description of the overall framework of XML integration based on content and structure semantic similarity using keys. This work introduces an approach to detect XML similarity and thus to join XML document versions using a change detection mechanism. In this approach, subtree keys still play an important role in order to avoid unnecessary subtree comparisons within multiple versions of the same document and the results improvement in the XML structure and content similarity comparisons. The main contribution is to provide an approach for evaluating semantic similarity between XML path expressions from two different XML structures. Comparisons with the previous systems shows that this approach has a better performance by a big order of magnitude in terms of detection, false-positive rates and execution time.

Biography: Sanjay Kumar Madria received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi, India in 1995. He is an Associate Professor, Department of Computer Science, at the Missouri University of Science and Technology (formerly, University of Missouri-Rolla), USA.
Earlier he was Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science, Purdue University, West Lafayette, USA. He has published more than 150 Journal and conference papers in the areas of mobile computing, sensor networks, security, XML, and databases in general. He co-authored a book entitled “Web Data Management : A Warehouse Approach” published by Springer-verlag. He guest edited WWW Journal, several Data and Knowledge Engineering Sp. Issues on Web data management and Data warehousing. He won best papers awards in 2010 and 2010 in IEEE conferences. He was founding Program Chair for EC&WEB series of conferences and founding workshop chair IEEE International Workshop on P2P Data Management, Security and Trust since 2003. He served as general co-chair of mobile data management (MDM) conference held in 2010. He is serving as PC member of various database conferences such as VLDB, ICDE, MDM, and reviewer for many reputed database journals such as IEEE TKDE, IEEE Computer, ACM Internet Computing, IEEE TMC etc. Dr. Madria has given tutorials on mobile databases and XML Change Management  in many international conferences.
He is regular invited panelist in NSF, NSERC (Canada), Hong Kong Research Council and Sweden Council of Research. He was invited keynote speaker and invited speaker in Conferences and workshops. He received UMR faculty excellence award in 2007, 2009, Japanese Society for Promotion of Science invitational fellowship in 2006, and Air Force Research Lab’s visiting faculty fellowships from 2008-2011. His research is supported by grants over $3M from NSF, DOE, Army, AFRL, UM research board, and from industry such as Boeing. He is IEEE Senior Member and also a speaker under ACM/IEEE Distinguished Visitor program.

Where?: Class Room-1, IIIT-Delhi, NSIT Campus, Dwarka, New Delhi

When?: 5th August 2011, 3:30 pm

Posted by Sneha Shukla

Getting students and faculty alike excited about new technologies, and latest cutting edge ideas in the technological world is part of the culture at IIIT-D. ACM Distinguished Speaker series is a step in the direction of serving this purpose. Ever since the first talk at our inaugural event a year back, we have been getting requests for another talk. So here we are, with the second ACM Distinguished Speaker Talk.

As a part of the series, we were fortunate to have amongst us Prof. Hanan Samet, from the University of Maryland (http://www.cs.umd.edu/~hjs/). A PhD. from Stanford University, Prof. Samet is a member of the Computer Vision Laboratory at the Center for Automation Research where he leads a number of research projects on the use of hierarchical data structures for database applications involving spatial data. His recent book “Foundations of Multidimensional and Metric Data Structures” published by Morgan-Kaufmann, San Francisco, CA, in 2006 (http://www.mkp.com/multidimensional), is an award winner in the 2006 best book in Computer and Information Science competition of the Professional and Scholarly Publishers (PSP) Group of the American Publishers Association (AAP). The founding chair of ACM SIGSPATIAL, and an ACM Distinguished Speaker, the talk by Prof. Samet was attended in abundance by students and teachers alike.

In his talk, Prof. Samet gave a brief overview of hierarchical spatial data structures and related research results. There was also a demonstration of the SAND Browser (found at http://www.cs.umd.edu/~brabec/sandjava) and the VASCO JAVA applet which illustrate these methods (found at http://www.cs.umd.edu/~hjs/quadtree/index.html).

The representation of spatial data is an important issue in computer graphics, computer vision, geographic information systems, and robotics. A wide number of representations is currently in use. Recently, there has been much interest in hierarchical data structures such as quadtrees, octrees, R-trees, etc. The key advantage of these representations is that they provide a way to index into space.  In fact, they are little more than multidimensional sorts.  They are compact and depending on the nature of the spatial data they save space as well as time and also facilitate operations such as search.

I immensely enjoyed the talk, although to be honest, the ideas were a little too baffling for me at first! But the talk successfully served it’s purpose. Today, I love to get my hands onto any additional information that I can hierarchical spatial data structures! Thanks Dr. Samet and ACM!!

Posted by Divya Bansal

IIIT-D ACM Student Chapter organized its first annual Research Showcase – RS’11. The event, held over two days March 11 and 12, 2011 showcased prominent research projects at the institute – many of which were featured in leading journals and newspapers.

The projects on display were divided into two categories – Research Projects, these projects of the Research Groups at IIITD were generally ongoing and spanned a relatively complex problem, and Course Projects, done by students themselves that aimed at a smaller problem and were completed during the period of one semester. A total of 34 projects were put on display – 13 in the Research Project category, and 21 in the Course Project category.

RS’11 served as a platform to present the innovative work of students to invited guests – luminaries from places like IIT Delhi, TCS’s Innovation Labs, IBM’s T J Watson Labs and IBM’s India Research Labs. The guests weaved through the project displays and provided valuable feedback to the students. The event ended with the announcement of prizes; judges decided the best projects and demos.

Many IIIT-D students must we wondering why we had two ‘first’ Research Showcases. Actually the first one was an ACM event at a smaller level which Dr. Jalote was pretty impressed with. So, he made it a full time event of the institute which was held on March 11-12. It was a great experience for the ACM Chapter to help organizing it. We also thank Dr. Jalote for appreciating our Research Showcase idea and making it a full time institute event.

It was a learning experience to witness the projects with a diverse range of topics – some attacked real world problems while others explored new concepts, conjoint in their passion for technology and ingenious ideas. It gave an opportunity to draw critical insights, and be a part of creative and intellectual activities. Faculty, staff, business and industry leaders came together for a day of collaboration, portraying how research adds value to the community.

Check the RS ’11 website here for project details and more info.

Posted by Ankit Sarkar

The IIIT-D ACM Chapter has launched a new Special Interest Group(SIG) called Pixelate to promote student interest in images and graphics. Anyone interested in anything related to images and graphics – photography, image processing, image editing, creating abstract images, animation –  is welcome to join.

The aim of Pixelate is to provide a platform where the members can learn more about their field through discussions. It also aims to help the members share ideas and work related to the technical and non technical aspects of images. Members are also encouraged to take up research projects related to this field.

Pixelate will be organising some events and workshops in the near future. Some events in planning are a photography competition and guided workshops on the basics of digital image processing and working with SLR Cameras.

And Pixelate is not just about serious work. It is also about having fun while learning. We have a facebook page where members can post links to interesting articles and photographs. All activities and events are also updated on the page.

So if you view the world in pixels, want to learn more about images and also showcase your talent, do join Pixelate!

For more info, contact Ishita Jain, Ankit Sarkar or Samarth Bharadwaj.

Posted by Shashwat Goel
The kids of this generation do think a lot – literally!!!

The recently concluded programming event of IIIT-D - Think like a ‘C’ientist, organized in collaboration with the ACM Student chapter is a testimony of the above fact.Held on the 3rd and 4th March. it witnessed some of the best brains of our college and battle it out for the top-spot in programming and analytical skills. It was open to all students and faculty members of the institute.

Posted by Amol Verma

After the session, he was surrounded by students asking for photographs and autographs on their copies of Introduction to Automata Theory and Languages. This was the IIIT-D equivalent of a huge celebrity being mobbed by crazy fans.

Posted by Ishita Jain

IIIT-D organized a three day workshop on effective teaching at college/ university levelin collaboration with University at Buffalo (the State University of New York) from 10thto 12th February, 2011. The members of the IIITD ACM Student Chapter volunteered toorganize the event and enthusiastically participated in every domain of it. This workshopsuccessfully established a dialog between Indian academicians and their counterparts in US.

In this workshop, experts in teaching-learning and academicians from US and Indiawere invited to initiate a discussion on pedagogy at University/college level. They wererequested to give an insight into the research literature on teaching practices, andtheir experiences, to identify some best practices for that topic and discuss them in theworkshop. The workshop mainly targeted educators and researchers who discussed theR&D activities on effective teaching in their institutes, and university teachers.

Some of the topics discussed in the workshop were – what effective teaching means,the necessity of having good assessment mechanisms, how to motivate students andeffectively use technology for class-room based teaching (i.e. not distance education)and many more. In a session on “Effective Learning” conducted by ACM for students,the various hurdles that students face in their learning activities were addressed. Apanel of delegates held discussions with students and answered numerous questionsthey students had in their minds.

Eminent personalities like Rajeev Sangal (Director, IIIT Hyderabad), Ashok Jhunjhunwala(IIT Madras), Prof. NJ Rao (IISc., Infosys E&R division), Pankaj Jalote (Director IIIT Delhi)came together during the workshop from different domains like education and industry.From US, Jason Adsit (SUNY Buffalo), Dr. Lucinda (State University of New York), Dr.Todd Zakrajsek (Director – Center for Faculty Excellence, University of North Carolina)and many other people joined us.

For entertainment of our guests, a cultural event in the evening followed by a banquetdinner was organized. On the third day, all the interested delegates were taken for an all-Delhi tour.

This workshop clubbed the two sides of the coin of teaching and learning and alsobrought together different ideologies of teaching from around the globe.

Posted by Karan Kalra

The ‘Good to Great’ workshop took place on Feb 3. Some senior faculty members from IIT-Delhi were invited to share their attributes of ‘great’ students or ‘what kind of student they enjoy giving A+ or a strong recommendation to’.

This workshop was primarily aimed the ‘good’ students who would like to move towards ‘greatness’. Now, ‘good’ is a measure that is different for different people and very few people consider themselves to be ‘great’, so the attendance at this workshop was quite a lot.

The message conveyed through this workshop was that you should keep on doing things and stop worrying about the results. All of us are doing working hard and persistently. Just remember to pause and ask yourself, how can you make this ‘great’? If you are honest with your work and yourself, success will surely find your way. If not now, then it will definitely be waiting for you in the near future.

I personally benefitted a lot from this workshop. I have started looking at things from a different perspective. I have stopped worrying about the results and I just concentrate on the effort I am putting in.

Posted by Rushil Khurana

As IIIT-D gears up for another intense and riveting semester, we are proud to announce the release of the third issue of our newsletter, Kaleidoscope. This edition of Kaleidoscope brings to you numerous research projects undertaken by our faculty, Special Interest Groups (SIGs), and a dose of creativity by IIITians as usual! In a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, the students interacted with the face of Indian IT Industry, Kiran Karnik, where he stressed upon the need for more institutes on the lines of IIIT-D and why they have a huge potential in future. Featuring in this edition is an excerpt from Dr. Jalote’s blog about the origins of our Institute.

It brings all the highlights of the past semester from the technical section which is varying from an article by Sicurezza, SIG, Security giving an insight on why wireless networks are not entirely secure and what needs to be done to overcome those challenges to a research article on Image Processing techniques to detect video tampering! The news section covers all the glory and laurel in the IIIT-Delhi atmosphere.

I’ve had the pleasure of reading it before everybody else ( given my privileges for me being a part of the editorial board, though I am very lazy (though do my work)  :P ) and I found this to be one amazing newsletter brought together this time around by the very dedicated team of ours. I am quite sure most of you would find it very appealing and “pretty awesome” to read!

P.S: As customary, we still maintain a classic fun section in our newsletter for the fun lovers! Check it out here.

Posted by Apoorv Saini

Cloud computing is computation, software, data access, and storage services that do not require end-user knowledge of the physical location and configuration of the system that delivers the services. The technology is catching on and so is the institute. Considering this potential technology Microsoft Windows Azure Cloud Computing Workshop was held at IIIT Delhi for 2 days (15th and 16th January,2011).

Conducted by ACM chapter of both IIIT-Delhi and IIT-Delhi, the participants in the workshops were chosen on the basis of the abstract that they provided about there MS Azure Cloud application. IIIT Delhi got proposals from over 100 different colleges in India. The theme being  “Using Cloud to save the Earth” i.e. create a Windows Azure application that will help improve environmental sustainability, students only from 17 colleges ( comprising IIT-Delhi,BITS-Pilani, IIIT, BIT-Mesra etc.) were chosen.

The two day intensive intstructor-led workshop provided students an insight of the nature and benefits of Microsoft Azure Platform(wondering what is it? Read on).The first part of the workshop was a keynote delivered by Chandu Thekkath (Principal Researcher, Microsoft Research, USA) which mostly covered research aspects of Cloud Computing and other part of the workshop was a hands on development consisting of Demos and Programming in Cloud on Windows Azure.

Coming to Microsoft’s famous cloud platform, The  Windows Azure Platform is an internet-scale cloud services platform hosted at Microsoft data centres, which provides an operating system and a set of developer services that can be used individually or together to build new applications to run from the cloud or enhance existing applications with cloud-based capabilities.

This two day workshop was just a part of what was the  thing, application development on MS Azure platform ( But not to forget the theme on which the applications had to be focussed) that followed. The top 5 teams in the competition were given Microsoft Bags + 8GB USB Drives + Tech Resource DVDs . All the particpants got Microsoft Azure T-shirts. But again prize and winners didn’t matter, the enthusiasm of  the students shown towards this event and what they learned was the winner for them and for us.