Why it pays to be geeks

SHAASTRA 2001 at IIT was a tech fest that was fully wired and the participants were hooked up across the globe to University Professors in America, by videoconference.

The ivy league leader of education institutions showed the others some high tech stuff on how to do more with a conference:

The video event was put together by IIT's Computer Centre and the Videsh Sanchar Nigam Ltd (VSNL). It took the technical staff from both the agencies six days of toil to set up the necessary infrastructure for the event, which involved ISDN connectivity. A single air ticket to America costs about Rs. 55,000, but in the three sessions at IIT professors and several students were face to face-a virtual meeting at only Rs. 1.2 lakhs (will it get cheaper with time ?).

In the first of the series on Thursday by Prof. David E. Goldberg, Director, Genetic Algorithms Laboratory, University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign told the participants how technologists and scientists had their roles in advancing the frontiers of human activity.

If anyone says engineers are just designers of material things using science, compared to pure scientists who go into the fundamentals, Prof. Goldberg replies that engineers and technologists strike a balance of using the limits of science for practical application.

The IC and SR auditorium, two lecture halls and the lobby at IIT had a full audience. While the active videoconference was held at the auditorium, projection was also done in the lecture halls and the lobby.

On Friday, the topic for the lecture was Future of Aerospace Technology by Dr. Ajay Kumar, Director, Aerodynamics, NASA, USA. At the end of the highly technical session, he answered questions from the participating students.

``Will the advancements in the field of aerospace make warfare deadlier?'' a student asked. Dr. Kumar said warfare would be made ``simpler'' with the advent of unmanned aircraft. Saturday's lecturer was Prof. Raj Reddy, Professor of Computer Science and Robotics, Carnegie Mellon University, on Recent Trends in IT and Robotics.

Then there were hands-on sessions including CHIP magazine's workshop on Assembling, Networking and Upgrading on Friday, which attracted some 300 participants. The UGC will telecast the lecture series, some of the workshops and the videoconference sessions on its countrywide classroom programme.

By Saptarshi Bhattacharya

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