Talk by Prof. Frans Kaashoek, MIT, at TechVista 2012, Kolkata, India.
Anstract:

Multicore chips with hundreds of cores will likely be available soon. Although many applications have significant inherent parallelism (e.g., mail servers), their scalability on many cores can be limited by the underlying operating system. In five years, will we need a new operating system design to support such applications or can we find new techniques that allow existing designs to scale well? This talk puts that question in the broader context of how to find exciting research problems in computer systems and explores the question based on our research with scaling system-intensive applications on Linux.

Joint work with: S. Boyd-Wickizer, A. Clements, Y. Mao, A. Pesterev, R. Morris, and N. Zeldovich

Special session at TechVista 2012 involving the Guests of Honor Sri Rabiranjan Chattopadhyay, Hon’ble Minister for Science and Technology, Government of West Bengal and Sri Partha Chatterjee, Hon’ble Minister for Information Technology, Government of West Bengal.

Talk by Prof. Katsushi Ikeuchi, University of Tokyo at TechVista 2012, Kolkata, India.
Abstract:

We have been conducting e-Heritage project, which converts assets that form our cultural heritage into digital forms so that we can utilize such forms 1) for preservation in digital form of our irreplaceable treasures for future generations, 2) for planning and physical restoration using the digital forms as basic models from which we can manipulate data, 3) for cyber archaeology, investigation of digitized data through computer analysis, and 4) for education and promotion through multimedia contents based on the digital data. This talk briefly overviews our e-Heritage projects in Italy, Cambodia, and Japan, and explains what were hardware and software issues, how to overcome them by designing new sensors and software, and what are future directions. Also, we explain how to use such data for analysis, and display. In particular, we emphasize a new way to display such digital data by using the mixed reality systems, i.e. head-mount displays on site.

Talk by Dr. Ravi Kannan at TechVista 2012, Kolkata, India.
Abstract:
Modeling each data record in a problem as a vector is an important tool in modern computing, striking recent examples being Web Search and Recommendation Systems. The vectors are in very high dimensions (1000’s or more). Basic concepts from Linear Algebra such as best-fit directions turn out to play an important role in Data Analysis. The number of data records can be enormous – often in the millions or more and Random Sampling is crucial to any algorithm dealing with such massive data. The sampling has to be done on the fly. The narration here will be elementary and is intended to provoke a broad study of the Mathematics and Algorithms rather than any particular application.

Q&A session at TechVista 2012, Kolkata, India.

Rick Rashid's talk at TechVista 2012, Kolkata, India.

Talk by Prof. Narendra Ahuja at TechVista 2012, Kolkata, India.
Abstract:

A Government of India, Department of Information Technology Program to Enhance the Quality of IT and Related Advanced Education

ITRA is a National Programme aimed at building a resource for enhancing the quality and quantity of R&D in Information and Communications Technologies and Electronics (IT) and its applications at a steadily growing number of academic and research institutions. The core areas of IT lie in various engineering disciplines, notably computer science and engineering, and electrical engineering, although applications may come from almost any discipline. Quality is measured in terms of curriculum and instruction, research, societal sensitivity and problem solving, and entrepreneurial activity. ITRA plans to enhance the quality of academic institutions, called ITRA institutions (IIs), by sponsoring and facilitating R&D in different focus areas by closely collaborating teams of IIs, working with non-academic institutions such as research labs, industry, Government organizations and NGOs. Each focus area is either a part of IT, or aimed at applying IT to an important problem domain. ITRA plans to work with the IIs in identifying ways to improve quality, and helping with financial support, mechanisms and other resources needed

Details about ITRA are available at its home page: http://medialabasia.in/itra/itra/index.php.

Stratus enables efficient connectivity to mobile devices by reducing bytes transferred as well as saving energy during cellular data communication. Stratus leverages resources in the cloud to achieve energy savings by modulating incoming and outgoing data traffic to better adapt to the energy characteristics of the cellular interface. The optimizations include message aggregation, asymmetric data compression, and opportunistic packet scheduling based on dynamically varying signal quality.

While many technologies remain out-of-reach for households in the developing world, one exception to this rule is that of entertainment technologies. Even in poor communities, there is a strong drive to own devices such as TVs and, increasingly, DVD players. Though they are typically used for video content, ordinary DVD players also support rich interactivity and programmability, including the capability to browse over 100,000 menus using the remote control.

In this work, we have stretched the limits of the capabilities of DVD players by mapping a large subset of Wikipedia to a TV-DVD. Our disc contains the entirety of schools-wikipedia.org, encompassing almost 6,000 articles and 250,000 screens on TV. Using the interactive capabilities of DVD players, we have preserved all of the major functionality of Wikipedia, including indexing, search, hyperlinks, and forward/backward navigation. We expect that such DVDs will have a large audience in poor communities that often lack access to rich educational materials.

P. Anandan, managing director of Microsoft Research India, gives an overview of Microsoft Research’s mission. The organization’s foremost goal is to advance the science in areas such as cloud computing, computer science, and computing, and to advance the state of science. Investing in basic research provides room for long-term research instead of simply focusing on computing and computer science.