BitStream 1.1

BitStream CSE Newsletter

Version 1.0

Ask Me Anything

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Story Of The Codetemplars

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Journey Of An Entrepreneur

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A DEEPER LOOK INTO CSE NEW BUILDING PAGE 4

Hey, We are excited to bring you the edition 1.0 of CSE Newsletter, BitStream. We hope that you enjoy reading as much as we did making it.

We are looking for constructive feedback, article ideas and any other suggestions. Feel free to contact us. Also, if you are interested in writing articles, you are most welcome to join the team!

Sai Sandeep and Raghava Sarma bitstream.cse@gmail.com

Team : Aditya Joshi, Bhavesh Singh, Jayanth Shankar, Shubham Jain, Uday Kusupati Special Thanks : Aman Gour, Eeshan Malhotra, Kapil Surve, Mihir Kulkarni Design : Pushkar Dongare

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Ask Me Anything Prof. S Sudarshan

IITs and that hampers our opportunities when we apply for Masters in foreign universities. What are your views about it?

This is a historical issue which existed even 25-30 years ago. When I did my B tech from IIT Madras and we have heard the same crib from IIT Bombay students. Though the professors here don’t intend to be unreasonably strict, the history of strict grading continues, putting our students at a disadvantage as compared to students in other departments.

Earlier, in our institute, the was no AP grade. In almost every batch, there were two or three students who performed exceptionally well and in order to distinguish them from other students, only two or three AA grades were given. Now that we have AP grade, these students can be given AP and AA can be given to a bunch of students.

I feel that the faculty have to be sensitised about it, as most the faculty members are not aware of the disadvantage faced by our department students due to a lower CPI. This would also significantly This is the first of the series of talks with professors, hamper the chances of a computer science student ‘Ask Me Anything’. In this series of articles, we get getting President gold medal. I do acknowledge that it is indeed an issue to be sorted out and can to know more about our Professors. only be done by increasing interaction between We had the pleasure of talking to an engaging pro- students and faculty. We did discuss it in an open fessor, passionate researcher, our beloved HOD, session two years back. Last semester, this issue Prof. S Sudarshan. He talks about our department, was brought up again and Prof. Ranade tried to conduct an open session, but students were not institute, life, universe and everything. motivated enough to conduct the open session.

How are things going as HOD? As far as the department is concerned, everything is going very well. We have recruited several faculty members with excellent academic/research records. The number of research scholars (PhD students) is also increasing steadily, as is their quality.

For B Tech and Masters programmes, we are getting the top students from across India, as usual.

Why doesn’t our department offer dual degree programme from the beginning?

We used to have it earlier. The main motive of that programme was to encourage students to pursue research. But by the time dual degree students reach their fifth year, they lose their motivation, leading to DD Projects that were not of the expected quality. Very few went on to pursue doctoral studies after the Dual Degree Program. So, the dual degree programme was terminated.

While other departments impose a restriction that department electives must be chosen only from that department, why is CSE different?

There is a view among some faculty that students should have the freedom to learn whatever they like to and it is not fair to make their opportunities limited. On the other hand, other faculty members (including me) felt that all department electives should be CSE courses. After much discussion, we decided that 3 out of 6 should be courses offered by cs department or any courses from other department related to CSE. The other 3 can be from any department. Students can get a better perspective of Computer Science by doing more CS courses in their final year.

There is a view among student community that grading here is very strict as compared to other

Students are getting into malpractices. Some of the visiting faculty complained about our students regarding bad ethics. This is very saddening. At the department level, we are pushing faculty to pay more attention to detecting malpractices.

What are the pros and cons of having more students per batch?

With a larger batch size, more students get the opportunity to study here. But as the number of students increases, we can’t get to know each student personally, and lectures become more impersonal.

Since there are both positives and negatives to increasing the batch size, we decided to increase the batch strength to some extent, but not by a very large number.

How do you compare research in companies versus research in Academia?

In academia, there is a lot more scope for research as compared to companies. But in industry, there is a lot of applied research going on. Companies nowadays are establishing more R&D labs in India.

What do you enjoy the most, apart from your professional activities?

I love to read a lot of stuff; I don’t get enough time to read many novels these days, but read more of technical stuff like Scientific American, technical articles in The New York Times. I am not too involved in sports, but go jogging regularly, and ocHow do you feel the interaction between students casionally play basketball. and faculty can be improved?

For new students, we have a faculty-student men- What do you think will be the next big thing in torship programme. Open sessions should be con- technology, like the internet? ducted where students and faculty talk to each oth- It is really hard to predict. The arrival of the Iner. Social events like department tea parties, sports ternet was a one-time thing, and I think nothing leagues would help. I feel that this should be driven new on the horizon is as big. But SmartPhones are already having a huge impact on the present more by students instead of the faculty. generation. I believe that technology will be used efficiently to improve service delivery and technolHow is the placement scenario changing in CSE? Placement tests being conducted during the se- ogies like computer vision and voice recognition mester were a big problem. Now, we have enforced will play a significant role in the future. some rules to minimize the duration of PPTs and tests to prevent academic conflict, which have been Can you describe one funny incident which you enforced by the Placement office. We have also always remember? made sure that our students are exempted from There was an MTech student who was very good at mimicry. In the batch farewell party, he imitated compulsory attendance to PPT rule.. a lot of faculty members and it was spot on. It was What are some things you like about our students? not only hilarious but also instructive.

Our students are among the top students in the country, and are very smart. They achieved a lot af- What is the one thing in India that you would like ter graduation, in various spheres including start- to see a change?

We need better infrastructure and better engineers. ups.

Attention in detail is lacking, although I would say What are some things you are not that happy with it is improving slowly over the last few years. about our students?

The fraction of students going to research is low. How to find the purpose of the life? What advice We would like to see more students engaging them- would you give to current students? selves in technology. Students used to learn a lot on When we are young, we believe that can change the their own. When the Web was new, our students world, discover a lot of new things. But in reality, learnt about technologies such as servlets, and ex- only very few of us achieve it. That should not mean posed professors to these technologies! We would we should lose our motivation. Have a bigger goal like to see such things happen more often. One and a set of smaller goals. Do not get disheartened reason we feel that this happening less frequently if you fail to achieve the bigger goal, but instead is that getting admission to IIT has become tough- try to turn smaller goals into reality. You should be er, students’ energy levels are decreasing once they passionate about what you are doing, have fire in the belly and should work hard. come to IIT.

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Research Series: Natural Language Processing

Aditya Joshi is a PhD student at IITB-Monash Research Academy, whose research interests mainly lie in Natural Language Processing (NLP). He has published in top international NLP forums as a MTech student at Computer Science IITB in 2011, and now as a PhD student. His homepage is at: www.cse.iitb.ac.in/~adityaj Kapil Surve is a fourth year undergraduate student from MEMS department.

Here, both of them talk about the field of Natural Language Processing and give us a glimpse of related research happening in IITB. Read on for more.

Natural Language Processing is a branch of computer science that deals with artificial intelligence and interactions between computer and natural (human) languages. Humans interact with computers by feeding input data, which gets processed and is given appropriate response to by the machine. NLP strives to bridge the human-computer gap by making computers more ‘human’.

NLP has provided many useful technological tools so far. A shining example of NLP in action is Google’s voice search. Google’s translation tools, spellcheck options, all use NLP fundamentals.

Translator tools developed using NLP help people sharing no common language communicate.

When such conversations takes place, all pre-set rules about language are broken. A sister branch of NLP, machine translation, looks at digitally converting one natural language to another (say Hindi to Tamil), and is considered one of the most challenging areas in Computer Science.

Another exciting research area in NLP is speech-

to-text summarization. Researchers use parameters such as the emphasis given on each spoken word to discern the key ideas in a piece of text and utilise that in summarizing text. Google’s search engine makes use of automatic summarization algorithms. There are many ways of summarising a text and each individual can write a summary differently and be correct.

Indian languages and English resulting in a total of 100 language pairs. Sandhaan was a cross-lingual search engine targeting tourism domain search in different languages. C-FeeL-It is a sentiment-enabled search engine where you enter a keyword and get how positive or negative people are being with respect to the keyword, based on the tweets retrieved.

Modern softwares are specifically designed to take into custom the misspells of a word. (e.g. ‘nset’ for nest) The computer knows where the user went wrong and what he meant to type.

True to the interdisciplinary nature of Computational Linguistics (another name for NLP), faculty from CSE ( computation) and HSS (linguistics) have participated in guiding students for graduate, doctoral and undergraduate projects.

A spoken sentence can have a positive or negative impact on the listener depending on what words and in what order they are used. Take the following sentence as an example, ‘It is a beautiful tree.’ It is considered valued positive because of presence of words like beautiful and tree. Such categorizing is called ‘Sentiment analysis’. Several emerging companies and startups deal with applications of sentiment analysis to understand market trends, mental health monitors and even political scenarios.

NLP: Current Research The Center is a vibrant place for research and has published consistently in top international NLP conferences with about 10+ publications a year.

Anoop Kunchukuttan, a PhD student working on multilingual machine translation, says, “My research enables overcoming the language barrier and bring down the digital divide. It also helps me understand the underlying unity in the diversity among languages in India. It is a two-pronged adNatural Language Processing at IITB vantage, and makes NLP exciting for a computer Research in NLP at IIT Bombay began in 1996 with science student and for a language lover like me.” a grant from United Nations University, Tokyo. In 2000, following a grant from Department of In- Current research at CFILT is diverse. Students formation Technology, Government of India, the work on a problem as fundamental as coreference Center for Indian language technologies (CFILT) resolution (discovering that ‘it’ in “Ram ate pizza was set up. The earliest project was related to Uni- and got a book. It is about computers” refers to the versal Networking Language (UNL) : a common book and not pizza or Ram.”) or as application-orirepresentational language to bridge the language ented as drunk-texting prediction (identifying gap. whether a given piece of text was written under the influence of alcohol). While copy-editing is The next key project has been related to Wordnet. a hugely successful industry in several non-EnThe Wordnet project started in Princeton univer- glish-speaking countries, CFILT has also worked sity, and involved creation of a graph-based dictio- on grammar correction, automatic essay grading nary of a language. In Wordnet, words are orga- and deep learning. CFILT hosts an eye-tracking nized into synonym sets called ‘synsets’ and linked device that has enabled research in studying how them to each other. Undertaking a massive effort school-going children learn concepts or how huto create Wordnets for Indian languages, CFILT mans understand sentiment in languages. first introduced Hindi and Marathi Wordnets, and now leads the IndoWordnet project: a multi-insti- With ‘Digital India’ emerging as a trending topic, tute project to connect several Indian languages.

NLP is at the forefront of connecting a linguistically diverse country as India with the rest of the Multilinguality has played a pivotal role in the ac- internet. tivities of the Center. ‘Shata-Anuvadak’ (100 trans- To know more about CFILT, visit the website at : lators) is an online system that translates between http://www.cfilt.iitb.ac.in

Excellence in TAship M.Tech 2 student Aman Madaan, for the Spring 2015 course CS 725 (Foundations of Machine Learning) taught by Prof. Saketh was awarded for his excellence in TAship. To quote Prof. Saketh, “Aman was extremely sincere and enthusiastic.

He proactively used to seek advice and prepare resources for the course. With some help, he designed and floated all the simulation assignments for the course! More than everything, his attitude and sincerity gave me immense confidence to handle a large class (~100 students).”

PhD student Rohit Gupta, for the Spring 2015 course on Embedded Systems (CS 684) taught

by Prof. Krithi was awarded for his excellence in TAship. To quote Prof. Krithi, “The UG and PG versions of the “Embedded Systems Course” have, over the last few semesters, become very handson. This migration has been possible due to many contributions from a team of TAs lead by Rohit.

His contributions include: - New infrastructure establishment for the course, involving evaluation of different hardware plat-

forms, procurement, testing of hardware for the course and coming up with project ideas.

- Training other TAs on the course hardware.

- Designing the lab exercise and assignment to cover concepts covered in the course.

- Migration of lab work from Assembly to C to increase the number of experiments and students’ exposure.

- Guiding students in the course projects performed on a wide variety of hardware platforms.

For some hardware, virtually no information was available so this required a lot of trial and error.”

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A Deeper Look CSE New Building also be used for Department social events like Tea Party. In addition to this, there are several balconies with excellent views which are accessible to us.

Why so late?(Rather, how late?)

Why a new building?

After the merger of the CSE Department and the Kanwal Rekhi School of IT (KReSIT), we had part of the department in one corner of the academic area, and the rest in another corner. The lack of proximity between faculty, and between faculty and their students, if they were in different buildings was not desirable. Hence, the institute decided to give CSE space in a new building which would also house the Computer Centre and the Application Software Centre.

Once the new building is ready, we will be vacating all the space that we currently occupy in the old CSE department and Maths department.

What’s new?

In the present labs (OSL and NSL), it is inconve-

nient for the instructor to announce something to the entire class, with the instructor generally needing to move around and announce it several times.

So, in the new lab, multiple screens are present and a PA system placed strategically for video lectures or announcements during the labs.

In place of OSL/NSL, we have 3 labs each with a capacity of 130, 75 and 75 respectively. We also have a basement lab with a capacity of about 140. There are six large research labs (capacity between 40 and 50), a few smaller ones, and an MTech 1 space with 36 desks. There are 40 faculty offices. CSE gets 3 classrooms of capacity 70, 70 and 40, while 4 classrooms are designated as institute classrooms, with a capacity of 120, 80, 60 and 60.

Any building in our institute is incomplete without a canteen. Yes, we have a canteen on the top floor of the building! This canteen is a part of the special area for the students to hang out or study. This can

The construction officially started in 2006, with Raj Mashruwala being the major donor.

But, certain differences started to surface between him and the institute which stalled the construction for quite some time.

The new CSE building construction was done by a company that went almost bankrupt sometime during the construction, causing significant delays.

The project management was outsourced to an agency called DCSEM (Directorate of Construction, Services and Estate Management), which is part of the Department of Atomic Energy. This agency didn’t do a very good job in handling the contract of the building, giving the contract for each sector of the building (i.e. Electrical, Plumbing, etc.) to different agencies after the previous stage was completed, instead of having them done in parallel. And they didn’t pay enough attention to getting things completed in time, causing further delays.

Present Scenario The inauguration was planned on October 6th with Smriti Irani being the chief guest. As she could not find time on that day, the inauguration has been postponed.

Currently, the internal work has started. Furniture has been ordered and will be delivered by early December. Structural and electrical work is completed. We hope to start moving by the end of December, in parts. So, if all goes well, we may be starting the next semester in the new building!

Story Of The Codetemplars International Collegiate Programming Contest(ICPC) is an international Algorithmic Coding contest for college students held every year. There are 3 stages- Online, Onsite and World Finals.

Teams from IIT Bombay have been representing India every year in the World Finals. This year, it was held in Marrakesh, Morocco. 7 teams from India were selected in which the team ‘codetemplars’ was from our department. The teams consisted of Navin Chandak, Vipul Harsh and Nisheeth Lahoti.

From their own words, “We brushed up on important data structures and standard algorithms. Also, there are several blogs which have pointers to tutorials for some less frequently used and lesser known algorithms and data structures. We practiced previous year questions with the team in the competition format.

World Finals is very different from the onsite lev-

els. The questions are much more challenging. One should be able to write any standard algorithm quickly(Flow, DFS, Convex Hull, Least Common Ancestor, KMP etc.). One competes against the best teams in the world. Many of them come thoroughly prepared for the competition and ultimately they are the ones who bag the top positions.

Practice is everything. Teams who get the top positions have very skilled coders.

Preparing for ICPC will tremendously increase proficiency in algorithms and programming. That itself is the biggest reward, more than the awards.

Also, once you get the hang of competitive programming, it is very addictive.

There are several online coding platforms. Codeforces, Spoj, Codechef, Topcoder. Just start coding in any of them. Preferably use an online platform which provides solutions like Codeforc-

es. Brush up on data structures, graph algorithms and learn some new ones. The best way to learn a data structure is to read a tutorial/book/lecture and code problems which use that data structure.

Just googling “Codeforces Binary search tree problems” would fetch problems that are related to binary search trees. Prepare a list of important data structures and algorithms(ask a senior to review it) and revise all of them. There are also several live contests on Topcoder, Codechef and Codeforces.

All of previous year regionals and world final problems are available on ICPC Archive webpage. If you participate in ICPC, then team practice can be very beneficial. Always code a problem, no matter how difficult it is. If you are not able to solve a problem, look up the solution(but not before, trying for a week at least) and code it yourself.”

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Journey Of An Entrepreneur From IIT Bombay To Pulse Ankit Gupta is a CSE, IIT Bombay graduate of 2008 batch. After doing masters from Stanford, he cofounded Pulse which eventually got acquired by LinkedIn. He talks about his life at IIT Bombay, at Stanford and about entrepreneurship.

How was your experience at IIT Bombay?

I feel that the four years of my stay at IIT Bombay is the most rewarding period of my life. I stayed in Hostel 3. Apart from academics, I was also an active participant in cultural activities in the institute. I had taken part in PAF every year and was music director of our PAF from my second year onwards, with my friend Amit Golani being dram director. My favorite PAF was the one in freshie year, based on mill workers, which we won.

How do you describe your stay at Stanford?

Initially, I thought that Stanford would be more of courses and I would be doing courses there just as I did in IIT Bombay. But the way things are taught at Stanford made me change that perception. Courses are taught at Stanford in a very practical manner.

You learn things that you can go and start applying right away. I could learn a course, during which I could do a project which could turn into a company. And that’s crazy. You get to do 3 courses a quarter, which means 9 courses a year, and may be Why did you decide to do Masters?

3 projects per course. So there are 20-30 projects each could potentially turn into a company. I have I got into Computer Science department because done Machine Learning course, taught by Andrew of my liking, unlike many others who just do it be- Ng. Though I have done Machine Learning course cause they can get it with their rank. During our time, most of the high-profile jobs are not related to computer science, mostly related to finance or For Masters, not just Stanford, consulting. I got a consulting job too, but I had apany good university is fine, as plied for Stanford, along with two other universities just because many of my friends did. I got a job long as you have the passion to in a consulting firm. Stanford is the only university take the most of it that accepted me. In my last year, I took part in a google product development competition and won it.After that, we had a dinner with google head of Asia, where he was quite surprised knowing that in IIT with similar contents, I felt that I actually all of us are wasting our talent by choosing invest- understood concepts of Machine Learning at Stanment banking. On the same day, I got an offer from ford and it felt simple and much better. At our Stanford. On one hand, I had Stanford offer where time, there are limited opportunities in India but at I can continue being a computer scientist and con- Stanford. I felt that there are endless opportunities. tinue actually making stuff. On the other hand, it’s In fact, I took some classes in Design school and I was thinking of changing my degree to Design. I took some courses in Music school as well.

Pulse was never meant to be a huge company but in the end, it turned out to be quite successful

Given that there are a lot of good cse related jobs after B Tech now, what would you have chosen now, Stanford or job at google/facebook?

just what the society is telling you to do. So, I chose Stanford because I felt like I could keep doing things that I like, making products, learning new things and more importantly, being in technology.

I am glad that I had chosen Stanford.

If had to take this decision while I am college, I would have chosen the job. But now, as I already know the advantages of Masters at Stanford, it is a no brainer and I would definitely go with Stanford offer. We don’t understand how well things can be taught and how much you can grow by doing a

masters program. This experience adds to your career, especially if you want to stay in the industry.

Can you briefly talk about Pulse and how did you convince yourself to start a company which involves risk as compared to taking up a job?

I was always interested in starting a new company. The idea of pulse came up when I was in an entrepreneurship class. Along with my cofounder, I wanted to solve the problem of news reading in mobile phones.It was never meant to be a huge company but in the end, it turned out to be quite successful and already more than 50,000 people are using the app.Steve Jobs talked about the app at the worldwide developers conference. I also had a backup job offer at facebook and would have accepted that if pulse wasn’t successful.

When is the ideal time to start up ?

There is nothing like correct time for a startup.

Whenever we feel that there is an idea which can solve a problem which is faced by a significant number of users, that would be the ideal time to go for it. There is no reason to think too much about it. Being an entrepreneur is a unique experience.

People give you advice. It should be taken with a grain of salt unless it’s coming from an entrepreneur you respect. For me, there are many things I didn’t know before starting pulse. I didn’t know how to manage people, how to hire, how to sell, how to raise money. But all these skills are easily learnable. The skills that are not easily learnable are perseverance and willpower i.e. sticking to your company and making it work when a lot of people say that it’s not going to work.

What are the things that you remember the most from your stay at IIT? Working for PAF all night and then eating at maddu mess during the entire two months of PAF. What is the advice that you will give to current students?

There is so much to do at IIT.Go play something, take classes in Design school, do whatever fascinates you. People should be free to do whatever they want to do. Regarding startups, do something unique or do something much better than everyone else. When we started Pulse, every week, a new news app would come. But pulse was better than most of them. Having a good cofounder is also very important. For Masters, not just Stanford, any good university is fine, as long as you have the passion to take the most of it. Even at Stanford, some people just come to classes, go back home, watch TV and eventually find a job at Google.

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Smart Energy Informatics Lab

Smart door which can recognize the members of the lab Computer Science, in its early days, was an inward-looking discipline. Computer scientists solved problems related to Computer Science e.g Compilers, Databases, Computer Architecture, the areas that we study as courses today.

In the early nineties, there was a shift to solving problems from other domains. The kinds of questions asked were, “How can Computer Science help to solve problems related to other areas?�. The Smart Energy Informatics Lab (SEIL, pronounced sail) was set up by Prof. Krithi Ramamritham about two years ago to answer such questions in the domain of Energy Systems. The lab currently has two research scholars, three research assistants and three M.Tech students pursuing their MTP, apart from the staff and Prof. Krithi himself.

The lab works on interesting problems related to smart energy. The hard part, says Prof. Krithi, is to define the problem boundaries precisely and figuring out how Computer Science can help solve the problem. Real-world problems cannot be categorized into areas of Computer Science and often require application of multiple areas which include Algorithms (optimization, data analysis, state estimation), Artificial Intelligence (machine learning, forecasting, planning, reinforcement learning), Embedded Systems (low energy devices, sensors), Networking (data delivery, light-weight protocols) etc.

Some problems that SEIL has worked on are: Avoid/Reduce Consumption Can there be a smart way to reduce consumption of power? People at SEIL are trying to figure out user behavior with respect to various appliances. For example, a user coming into a room might turn on a particular AC/fan/light that is near her location.

If a smart energy system can forecast this behavior and turn devices on/off at particular times, this would help decrease load.

While trying to solve this problem, SEIL worked on a related problem of recognizing the user. For this, they explored various techniques like a simple laser-photodiode pair (to count the number of users), an ultrasound sensor (to detect the height), a weight mat, a Kinect (yes, Microsoft Kinect! to identify body parameters like torso height, shoulder width) etc. Standard machine learning classification algorithms helped achieve a 92% accuracy in recognizing people. They created a Smart Door that’s installed in SEIL, which can recognize members of the lab.

Load Disaggregation An interesting problem is figuring out which devices are currently running given the total load for a building. This is a hard problem as the load signatures of appliances vary over time as their quality degrades and multiple devices might have similar load signatures. Machine learning algorithms for clustering and classification are useful here.

Smart Cap Batteries/renewable energy sources can be used to supply power during peak periods, thus reducing pressure on the grid and lowering the resulting electricity bill. The real challenge is to optimize battery usage while reducing the number of charge-discharge cycles and sharing of the batteries among appliances of different users. The project also evaluates the algorithm against different electricity pricing schemes.

Thermal Comfort Band Maintenance Appliances like ACs can be scheduled to maintain optimum comfort levels of temperature. The peak load can be capped by shifting the time of operation of loads. For example, when multiple ACs start there is a sudden spike in the load which can be capped by starting them sequentially. This helps to save energy and prevent overwhelming the supply.

WAMS Network The Wide Area Measuring System Network is a network of sensors spread across the grid in each power station. The sensor data, including current load, voltage etc is aggregated and processed. The real challenge is to develop efficient filtering algorithms to send only the data that is most crucial, thus reducing the network latency and improving response times of the applications, like State Estimation, Angular Stability of the system.