Volume 6, Issue 2 November 2013

Editors Column
Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there, wondering, fearing, doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before. - Edgar Allan Poe As another semester comes to an end, we take a break from our regular schedule and look towards the welcome winter break. This issue of the departmental newsletter provides some food-for-thought with some interesting articles and a summary of departmental activities and achievements this semester. Another batch of enthusiastic students joined the department this semester, who were welcomed by organizing a funfilled interactive session and a technical orientation to make this transition process comfortable. In one of the few other key developments this semester, Coding Club was started by the ACM Student Chapter to promote the coding culture at IIT Delhi. We heartily welcome two new faculty Dr. Mausam and Dr. Shweta Agrawal to the department, who have joined us this semester. Y ahoo! Hack U, which has become a regular annual event again marked the ACM activities this semester. We discuss the success story of IIT Delhi alumnus Pranav Chulet whose startup Quickr has gone on to become Indias largest online classifieds portal.
1 4 4 5 7, 8 9 11,12

The Mobile phenomenon

By Pulkit Yadav
The mobile web initiative is important - information must be made seamlessly available on any device. -Tim Berners Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web The last decade has seen a lot of development in the field of smartphones and tablets. Mobile is the buzzword in the industry and rightly so, as the mobile handset industry is currently a multi-billion dollar enterprise. Mobile devices have come a long way from being virtually non-existent a decade ago to being almost ubiquitous today. Smartphones provide the functionality of a feature phone combined with wireless internet connectivity and various advanced features in a compact, pocketsized device. Smartphones have been a complete game-changer and have shifted paradigms in the mobile industry. The first smartphones combined the features of a personal digital assistant (PDA) with a mobile phone. However, they remained too expensive and were far out of reach of a common man. The release of Apples iPhone in 2007 was the first major breakthrough in the smartphone world. It was followed by release of Android phones in the successive year. In the following years, the smartphone industry has witnessed tremendous growth because of fierce competition between the leaders Apple and Android with new players like Windows Phone recently joining the fray. The mobile device industry is a very competitive one and it is this competition among the manufacturers that has made several innovations possible alongwith making the devices cheaper and bringing them within reach of every user. Hand-held devices with large multi-touch screens supporting full-HD resolution, running on extremely powerful processors alongwith other features like fingerprint scanners and intelligent vocal personal assistants are nothing less than technology of the future. The impact of smartphones on users have been immense. To say that they have transformed lifestyles of people in a major way would not be an understatement. Mobile devices have fundamentally changed how people communicate with each other now people can remain connected all the time via social networking and instant messaging applications. The immense success of social media can also be attributed in part to mobile devices. Many websites now support a mobileversion to make browsing on a phone a much more user-friendly experience. The mobile revolution has also given birth to a parallel, yet complementary industry of mobile applications. Programmers can now publish their applications easily on the app store of their mobile platform and earn revenue from their homes. Creating a good application has the potential of making a huge impact in the form of reaching out to millions of mobile users. Several startups specializing in mobile app development have also mushroomed up, with many of them being quite successful. The concept of tablet computers is yet another innovative concept which aims to strike the right balance between the comfortable browsing on large screens and the portability of smartphones. Increasingly, smartphone vendors are coming up with phones with larger screens which further bridges the gap between a phone and a tablet. These hybrid devices, also known as phablets have also become popular among users. With mobile currently touted as the next big thing, it would be interesting to see how innovations in the mobile industry will shape the coming years.

B U S I N E S S

N A M E

Inside this issue:

The Social Phenomenon Gram Vaani Freshers and Tech Welcome Faculty Profile ACM activities An alumnus with a difference Pranay Chulet Fun Section

CSE Newsletter

In the subsequent columns, we also go through the inspirational life of the internet activist Aaron Swartz and the promising IIT Delhi based social startup Gram Vaani. This is my first edition in the role of Chief Editor. I hope this issue and the coming ones would be enjoyed by all. Pulkit Yadav, Chief Editor

Department Newsflash
Publications

Sandeep Chandran, Smruti R. Sarangi, Preeti Ranjan Panda: Space sensitive cache dumping for post-silicon validation. Design, Automation, and Test in Europe (DATE), Grenoble, France, Mar, 2013 Pooja Aggarwal, Smruti R. Sarangi: Lock-Free and Wait-Free Slot Scheduling Algorithms. International Parallel (and Distributed) Processing Symposium (IP(D)PS) , Cambridge, USA, May, 2013 Manish Agarwal, Madasu Hanmandlu, Kanad K. Biswas: Choquet integral vs. TOPSIS: An intuitionistic fuzzy approach. IEEE International Conference on Fuzzy Systems (FUZZ-IEEE), Hyderabad, India, July 2013 Rudra M. Tripathy, Amitabha Bagchi, Sameep Mehta: Towards combating rumors in social networks: Models and metrics. Intelligent Data Analysis Volume 17, 2013. Sebastien Ardon, Amitabha Bagchi, Anirban Mahanti, Amit Ruhela, Aaditeshwar Seth, Rudra Mohan Tripathy, Sipat Triukose: Spatio-temporal and events based analysis of topic popularity in twitter. International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM), San Francisco, USA, Oct, 2013 Rahul Goyal, Ravee Malla, Amitabha Bagchi, Sameep Mehta, Maya Ramanath: ESTHETE: a news browsing system to visualize the context and evolution of news stories. International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM), San Francisco, USA, Oct, 2013 Amitabha Bagchi, Cristina M. Pinotti, Sainyam Galhotra, Tarun Mangla: Optimal radius for connectivity in duty-cycled wireless sensor networks. Modeling Analysis and Simulation of Wireless and Mobile Systems (MSWiM), Barcelone, Spain, Nov, 2013

Dhruv Jain, Akhil Jain, Rohan Paul, Akhila Komarika, M. Balakrishnan: A path-guided audio based indoor navigation system for persons with visual impairment. International ACM Conference on Assistive Technologies (ASSETS), Bellevue, USA, Oct, 2013 B. Sharat Chandra Varma, Kolin Paul, M. Balakrishnan, Dominique Lavenier: FAssem: FPGA Based Acceleration of De Novo Genome Assembly. Field-Programmable Custom Computing Machines (FCCM) Seattle USA April 2013 Ankit Aggarwal, Anand Louis, Manisha Bansal, Naveen Garg, Neelima Gupta, Shubham Gupta, Surabhi Jain: A 3approximation algorithm for the facility location problem with uniform capacities. Mathematical Programming Volume 141, October, 2013

S. Anand, Karl Bringmann, Tobias Friedrich, Naveen Garg, Amit Kumar: Minimizing Maximum (Weighted) Flow-Time on Related and Unrelated Machines. International Colloquium on Automata, Languages and Programming (ICALP), Riga, Latvia, July, 2013 Manu Agarwal, Ragesh Jaiswal, Arindam Pal: k-means++ under Approximation Stability. Theory and Applications of Models of Computation (TAMC), Hong Kong, May 2013 Ragesh Jaiswal, Prachi Jain, Saumya Yadav: A bad 2-dimensional instance for k-means++. The Computing Research Repository (CoRR), June 2013 Davis Issac, Ragesh Jaiswal: An O(1.0821^n)-Time Algorithm for Computing Maximum Independent Set in Graphs with Bounded Degree

3, The Computing Research Repository (CoRR), August 2013 Nivedita Yadav, Santanu Chaudhury, Prem Kumar Kalra: Most Discriminative Primitive Selection for Identity Determination Using Handwritten Devanagari Script, International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition (ICDAR), Washington DC, USA, August 2013 Sunita Tiwari, Saroj Kaushik: Mining Popular Places in a Geo-spatial Region Based on GPS Data Using Semantic Information, Databases in Networked Information Systems (DNIS), AizuWakamatsu, Japan, 2013 Shivendra Tiwari, Saroj Kaushik: Scalable Method for k Optimal Meeting Points (k-OMP) Computation in the Road Network Databases, Databases in Networked Information Systems (DNIS), AizuWakamatsu, Japan, 2013 Shivendra Tiwari, Saroj Kaushik: Scalable Method for k Optimal Meeting Points (k-OMP) Computation in the Road Network Databases, Databases in Networked Information Systems (DNIS), AizuWakamatsu, Japan, 2013 Amit Kumar, K. R. Manjunath, Meenakshi, Renu Bala, R. K. Sud, R. D. Singh, Sushma Panigrahy: Field hyperspectral data analysis for discriminating spectral behavior of tea plantations under various management practices, International Journal of Applied Earth Observation and Geoinformation, August, 2013 Manjot Kaur, Amit Kumar: Method for solving unbalanced fully fuzzy multi-objective solid minimal cost flow problems. Applied Intelligence Vol. 38, 2013 Manjit Verma, Amit Kumar, Yaduvir Singh, Tofigh Allahviranloo: Application of non-normal p-norm trapezoidal fuzzy number in reliability evaluation of electrical substations. Neural Computing and Applications, July 2013 Parmpreet Kaur, Amit Kumar: Modification in Chen and Tsai's
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Albert Gu, Anupam Gupta, Amit Kumar: The power of deferral: maintaining a constant-competitive steiner tree online. Symposium on the Theory of Computing (STOC), Palo Alto, USA, June 2013 Amit Kumar, P. R. Chadha: U shaped multiband microstrip patch antenna for wireless communication system and parametric variational analysis. Int. Conf. on Wireless and Optical Communications Networks (WOCN), Bhopal, India, July 2013 U. Nidhi, Kolin Paul, Ahmed Hemani, Anshul Kumar: High performance 3D-FFT implementation. IEEE International Symposium on Circuits and Systems (ISCAS), Beijing, China, May 2013 Manish Gaur, S. Arun-Kumar: On Efficiency Preorders. Fundamentals of Software Engineering, Tehran, Iran, 2013 Shibashis Guha, Shankara Narayanan Krishna, Chinmay Narayan, S. Arun-Kumar: A Unifying Approach to Decide Relations for Timed Automata and their Game Characterization. Electronic Proceedings in Theoretical Computer Science, (EXPRESS/SOS) 2013 Chinmay Narayan, Shibashis Guha, S. Arun-Kumar: Inferring Fences in a Concurrent Program Using SC proof of Correctness. The Computing Research Repository (CoRR), April 2013 Sandeep Chandran, Smruti R. Sarangi, Preeti Ranjan Panda: Space sensitive cache dumping for post-silicon validation. Design, Automation, and Test in Europe (DATE), Grenoble, France, Mar, 2013 Namita Sharma, Tom Vander Aa, Prashant Agrawal, Praveen Raghavan, Preeti Ranjan Panda, Francky Catthoor: Data memory optimization in LTE downlink. International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP), Vancouver, Canada, May 2013 Preeti Ranjan Panda, Manoj Jain, Anubha Verma, Dipankar Sarma, Vaidyanathan Srinivasan: Power Supply Efficiency Aware Server Allocation in Data Centers. VLSI Design, Pune, India, 2013

Pradeep Kumar, Nitin Rakheja, Aparna Sarswat, Himanshu Varshney, Prerna Bhatia, Sandeep R. Goli, Vinay J. Ribeiro, Manish Sharma: White space detection and spectrum characterization in urban and rural India. International Symposium on a World of Wireless, Mobile and Multimedia Networks (WOWMOM), Madrid, Spain, June 2013 Sebastien Ardon, Amitabha Bagchi, Anirban Mahanti, Amit Ruhela, Aaditeshwar Seth, Rudra Mohan Tripathy, Sipat Triukose: Spatio-temporal and events based analysis of topic popularity in twitter. International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM), San Francisco, USA, Oct, 2013

Rajesh Gupta, University of California, San Diego, Compiler-Directed Strategies to Combat Microelectronic Variability, 16th September, 2013 Prof. Arijit Bishnu, ISI Kolkata, "Computation of Spatial Skyline Points as Weighted Voronoi Diagrams", 5th September, 2013 Christo Wilson, David Choffnes and Alan Mislove, Northeastern University, Boston, Personalization in web search, 19th August, 2013 Prof. Kaleem Siddiqi, McGill University, Montreal, Canada, Building Atlases of Heart Wall Fibers, 7th August 2013 Gurulingesh Raravi, University of Porto, Real-Time Scheduling on Heterogeneous Multicores, 6th August 2013

Talks and Seminars

Deepti Pachauri, University of Wisconsin MadiSon, Solving the multiway matching problem by permutation synchronization , 15th November, 2013. Dr. Shweta Agrawal, IIT Delhi, How to keep a secret : the art of cryptography, 29th October,2013 Dr. Mausam, IIT Delhi, Recent Advances in Open Information Extraction, 15th October, 2013 Siddhartha Chaudhuri, Princeton University, Content Creation with Semantic Attributes, 17th October, 2013 Xavier Fouger, Dassault systems, France, "CAD/CAM, Product Development and Global Employment Opportunities, 8th October, 2013 Dr. Ashutosh Gupta, IST, Austria, Verification of Concurrent Programs, 1st October, 2013 Anand Srivastav, University of Kiel, Germany, Combinatorial Discrepancy of Arithmetic Progressions, 24th September, 2013 Nikhil Devanur, Microsoft Research, Bangalore, Primal Dual Gives Almost Optimal Energy Ecient Online Algorithms, 23rd September, 2013

Departmental Updates

Pratibha Jagnere defended her MS (Research) thesis on 17th August, 2013. G. Krishnaiah defended his PhD thesis on 23rd August, 2013. Rajkumar Vishwakarma defended his MS (Research) thesis on 4th September, 2013. Ruchin Kansal defended his MS (Research) thesis on 12th September, 2013. Kinshuk Sarabhai defended his MS (Research) thesis on 28th October, 2013. The following students were awarded Outstanding Teaching Assistants award for the semester-II, 2012-13: 1. Chinmay Narayan for the course CSL101 (Introduction to Computers and Programming). 2. Sandeep Kumar Bindal for the course CSL373 (Operating Systems). 3. Ravee Malla for the course CSL373 (Operating Systems).

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Gram Vaani
Ever thought about an unknown person from Jharkhand questioning the Union minister of Education. RTE: W here will children go after class 8th?Why doesnt even a single Indian University figure in Worlds Top 100? or a singing talent hunt being run on community radio and IVR similar to Indian Idol. Ever heard of a social media platform equivalent to Facebook/YouTube/Twitter for rural areas. If not then you need not go too far than our own IIT. Gram Vaani meaning 'voice of the village' is a social tech company based at IIT-Delhi. With the Vision of building citizen-driven media platforms that give communities a voice of their own this company pioneers in building innovative voice-based technologies that are in use with more than 40+ organizations in India, Africa, and Afghanistan. Gram Vaani was founded by Aaditeshwar Seth, professor in computer science department at IIT Delhi and Mayank Shivam, an IIM Lucknow alumnus in the year 2009. The idea got wings when it first won the Knight News Challenge in 2008. This gave them $200,000 to start Gram Vaani in India. GRINS (Gramin Radio InterNetworking System) is an integrated software solution for running a community radio station that allows program scheduling and play-out, full telephony and SMS integration, Internet streaming, content management and statistical analysis of play-out history. Stations have used GRINS to do live broadcasts of NREGA and Panchayat meetings. Schools have played Antakshari over the phone and broadcast it on radio, via GRINS. ernment schemes, and discussions about topics of importance including the state of education and health in rural areas. First implemented in Jharkhand as the Jharkhand Mobile Vaani (JMV) it got a great response, with around 60,000 monthly calls logged by regular users each month. Anil Kumar, a school teacher in Godda district, uses the mobile vaani service regularly. One of his updates on JMV was on the electricity crisis in his district. He has also been updating about the weather conditions as well as his opinion on the course structure in schools. Recently mobile vaani was set up for community radio stations in Uttarakhand to help flood victims where they could just give a miss call for help. Another flagship program, Mobile Vaani is an intelligent IVR (interactive voice response) system that allows people to call into a number and leave a message about their community, or listen to messages left by others. These messages range from updates about local village events, to folk songs and cultural updates from the communities, feedback on govSocial start-ups like these go a long way in making the world a better place to live in. A great idea can bloom in anyones mind. All that is needed to give it wings is conviction. Compiled by: Abhishek Verma

Freshers and Tech Welcome

The department began its activities for the current academic year with a welcome session for the latest addition to the CSE family, the first year students of the department. The ACM Chapter conducted its own freshers welcome, a technical orientation session to guide them through the intricacies of the computing world. The events turned out to be successful largely as a result of the energy and enthusiasm with which the freshers eagerly came forward to showcase their talents and participate. The Association of Computer Engineers and Scientists (ACES) freshers welcome began with an introduction about the role of ACES in a students life at IITD. This was followed by informal introductions given by some enthusiastic freshers who also came forward to showcase their talents with confident music and dance performances.All the freshers were given informal forms wherein they expressed
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creativity in an attempt to stake claim on the much coveted Mr. and Ms. Fresher awards which was followed by impromptu drama performances by the freshers. Freshers could be seen eagerly interacting with the seniors who talked of various aspects and experiences of college life at IITD. The event culminated with a dance party on the Bharti balcony where refreshments and loud music helped set the mood as people returned to their hostels having had an immensely enjoyable time. The ACM tech welcome, better known as the FROSH WELCOME was the first formal event of the session for the ACM. The session saw a packed audience with almost the entire batch turning up. It is traditionally an effort on the part of the seniors to help freshers familiarise themselves to the Department better and channelizing them in right direction from the very beginning.

Several ACM team members initiated and welcomed freshers into the department and gave brief introductions of linux, web designing, app development, coding competitions like topcoder and codechef, photoshop and lots more. For instance, unix commands, advantages of linux and cloud computing used at GCL/ CSC, not to mention a basic introduction to android app development besides other topics were discussed as part of the orientation. The freshers showed keen interest in gaining insights into the fields pertaining to computer science. The explanation of each topic was followed by a quick demo, leaving the students to experiment and explore later on their own. All in all, the

event surely ended up being a great learning experience for all freshers. - Compiled by Amritansh Sharma
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Faculty Profile Dr. Shweta Agrawal

under the sun. I was never single minded about acads -- I still view life, especially student life, as an exploration and I was happy to try anything that took my fancy. I was lucky to have several close, like minded friends, and the bonds I developed with them are very precious to me Q. 3. How did you get interested in computer science as a career? Ans. 3. It happened gr adually. CS is a rich and interesting field, with lots of potential to impact both science and society. I like that its young and there is still lots to do. I took a class in combinatorics in my first year in grad school, and it was so elegant, I got hooked to theoretical CS. That said, I never planned my career too much, I allowed things to take their course. My enjoyment of theoretical CS is deep, and it led me very naturally to getting more and more serious about it. But I don't feel that CS was "it" and I was "meant" to do it. There are many interesting things that I was excited by, and CS happened to be the one that worked out. Q. 4. What created a passion for cryptography in you? Ans. 4. Cr ypto is so much fun. Its like a game of chess, or a book of puzzles. Making and breaking cryptosystems mathematically is both very enjoyable and very challenging. I like that its about hands on problem solving but has deep mathematical underpinnings too. Crypto can achieve such surprising and cute things, such as proving to someone that you know something without telling them what you know. I like the idea of distilling hardness assumptions to a minimal and then building new things from it. Its fun to ask "if I assume this math problem is hard, what can I do with it? is this a good assumption? Whats the least I need to assume?". Usually, one imagines that things are useful if they are solvable -- I like that crypto gives you a way to make use of things that are hard to solve. Q. 5. How was the transition from UG to PG and PhD? Ans. 5. Looking back, the UG to PG transition made me more serious about my time I think, in managing it better for all the things I wanted to do. PG+Ph.D. also led to me living abroad for the first time, and this was life changing in many ways. I acquired a lot of perspective seeing things from the outside. It reset my mental models and made me think afresh about what I was doing, what things mattered to me and what my role should be. I watched a lot of documentaries during that time, and attended many lectures in the school of journalism, south east Asian studies and gender studies. For the first time, I grew so aware about the difficulties that people face around the world, and it humbled me a lot. I realized how extremely fortunate I have been. I also made friends with people from around the world, and saw how different cultures are, how different perspectives can be and what different challenges people face. This was also eye opening. I think my PG+Ph.D. experience led to a much greater awareness in me of life outside "me, my family, my country". Q. 6. What would you call the turning point of your career so far? Ans 6. Ther e hasn't been any one big turning point but rather several small nudges. For example, post undergrad I was very confused about PhD/MBA/job and decided to go with a job while I figured it out. I realized pretty quickly that my programming job was not satisfying to me. During that time read a lot of popular science books by Brian Greene, Stephen Hawking, Roger Penrose and the like. I remember being floored by Greene's explanation of relativity in his book "the fabric of the cosmos". He was able to convey the essential concepts behind such a complicated phenomena with so much clarity and elegance. That was one turning point -- it made me feel

Q.1. Please take us through your career journey. Ans. 1. My car eer jour ney is r ather straightforward for an academic : After I finished my undergrad in computer science, I worked in industry for a year while deciding what to do next. I decided to go to grad school and went to UT Austin where I got my masters and Ph.D. in the areas of Cryptography and Information Theory. While at UT, I went to Stanford for a 2 week project and thats when I got interested in crypto. The 2 week visit expanded to almost 2 years, and I was hooked to crypto by then. PostPh.D., I went to UCLA for a postdoc. UCLA has a strong group in cryptography, and more importantly, I married someone who was then based in LA. So it worked out very well. After 2 years there, we decided to come back, and here we are. Q. 2. Please tell us something about your student days. Ans. 2. My student days wer e ver y formative and very enjoyable. It better be, because I've spent most of my adult life as a student! Starting from bachelors, masters, Ph.D and then postdoc (which is also essentially student), I've only not been a student for one month now. I loved my student years -- I had lots of friends, and we'd do lots of things together -- watch movies, attend concerts, theatre, public lectures, documentaries and have long discussions about everything
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like I needed to get out of programming and go into science. During grad school, there were other turning points, such as courses like combinatorics and abstract algebra which nudged me into theoretical CS and the Stanford visit which nudged me into Crypto. Q. 7. What made you decide to come back to India? Ans. 7. It wasn't a calculated decision but a gut feeling that both Uday (my husband) and I had right from the time we left India. India is home, and that never changed. Plus, I think our contribution can have much greater impact here. I feel that all of us together need to collectively solve the problems we see around us. There is so much potential in India, and we must tap it together. We should all work together to improve the global position of science in India. I also feel, like I mentioned before, that I have been extremely fortunate and received the best of what the country could offer. Here, where every second child faces malnutrition, where girl children in particular face so many problems, where access to high quality education is still

not widely available (although things are really improving now), I felt like I got the best possible, and would like to give back to the extent I can. Q. 8. Please tell us a bit about some of your interests apart from academia Ans. 8. I love ar t, I am a semiprofessional painter and have even had gallery exhibitions. I make large oil paintings, about culture, people, nature and anything else that takes my fancy. I also learn hindustani classical music in my spare time. I also like to travel, read, watch movies, theater and spend time with friends. My husband shares many of my interests and weekends are often more packed than weekdays. Q. 9. Your advice to the students. Ans. 9. I don't know that I can give advice, but let me share some thoughts. Firstly, I think it is important to always keep the enjoyment alive, whether work or non-work. The curiosity and fun of science should never get buried under the pressure to perform. Reading popular books on science, even outside one's im-

mediate area of interest can help with this and be very rewarding. Watch lots of TED talks, they can be life changing. Always stay in touch with what inspires you, for example read about Salman Khan's breakthrough initiatives in education in "The one world schoolhouse", read "The element" by Ken Robinson, "I have a dream" by Rashmi Bansal (to name very few). Look around you, and think "How can I solve this?". Think big. Don't think of just working for Google or SpaceX, but of starting one yourself. We need to take things in our hands and build things in India, we need to do start-ups not just offer services. We need to be creative and take risks. Don't be conservative! Have faith in yourself and dream big. And of course, work hard, nothing can be achieved without it, in any field.

Compiled by: Pulkit Yadav

Don't compare yourself with anyone in this world...if you do so, you are insulting yourself.
- Bill Gates

FUN FACTS

The most powerful processor in your computer is probably the graphics processor. A new graphics processor might have up to 700 million transistors, a new CPU (the main processor) might have up to 300 million transistors. The name iPod was proposed by Vinnie Chieco, a freelance copywriter. After seeing the prototype, he thought of a phrase from the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey, open the pod bay door HAL. It referred to the fictional spacecraft used for extra-vehicular activity seen in the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey. Googlewhack is a type of a contest for finding a Google search query consisting of exactly two words without quotation marks, that returns exactly one hit. The first computer mouse was invented by Doug Engelbart in around 1964 and was made of wood. Bill Clinton's inauguration in January 1997 was the first to be webcast. Compiled by: Shivani Sen

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ACM, a plethora of activies : Coding Club

There are two ways of constructing a software design: One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies, and the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies. The first method is far more difficult. ture and the activities of the club. The event finally culminated in a problem set being presented to the participants so that they can get a taste of the competitions in the club. The participants actively took part in it though it was not meant to be evaluated. One gains mastery over programming after practising it over a period of time. With this motivation the club intends to host a weekly hour long lecture session that will be taken by a senior, professor ar guest who has a good grip on that particular topic. The topics will mainly be from the field of algorithms and techniques of coding. This will be followed by a coding competition that will be evaluated. This competition will be held online and submissions will be open to all members of the coding club. In this way the club intends to strengthen the basics and concepts of students at one level while giving them a platform to practise and sharpen their programming skills at the other. The submissions will be evaluated and scored. Rankings and score cards of the participants will be maintained and one can track his progress, both against himself as well as others on the campus. This will uphold the competitiveness of the club. The highest scorers will get some exciting prizes. According to Himanshu,It was always hurting to see lack of programming culture in a premier institute like IIT Delhi., pointing to the basic motivation behind the birth of this club. One of the aims of this club is to prepare the students for programming competitions like ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC). Good coders will be identified and trained for ICPC. It has been traditionally noticed that in IIT Delhi only a handful of people take part in programming activities and competitions. The club has taken the responsibility on its shoulders to challenge this scenario and take the programming culture to a larger audience. The funding of the club will be finalized in the course of the year. ACMs past record, however, speaks in its favour, having successful sponsorship from Yahoo!, Google and Qualcomm in the past. Warmed by the overwhelming response shown to the inaugural session of the coding club, the club had its first session on 16th October. One of the features of this session, was only some basic ground was covered in the lecture so as not to alienate the new arrivals, while at the same time ensuring that the 'know-itall's dont get bored. The subsequent online coding competition was partly based on the lecture. Some of the USPs of this club are that it has no restriction on the department that one belongs to and also the lectures actually intend to augment ones programming skills. This club is meant for all the coding enthusiasts who are passionate about coding and enjoy it. Come and get equipped with all the tools required for job interviews, programming competitions and computer science assignments! Compiled By: Abhishek Verma

-C.A.R. Hoare
Programming is the art of solving problems with creativity. It is the process of writing instructions for computers. In a premier institute like IIT Delhi many people aspire to be good coders and programmers. For many, programming is a fun filled and recreational activity. In order to cater to such an audience and with the objective of promoting the competitive programming culture in IIT Delhi the IIT Delhi chapter of Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) has come up with the novel initiative of the Coding Club. This club intends to not only give one plethora of opportunities to code through programming competitions but also prepare one for bigger stages. This club has the distinction of being the first of its kind in IIT Delhi. The Coding Club was inaugurated on 25th September. With preparations running months, the event turned out to be a gala affair witnessing a huge participation from students across the years as well as departments. The inaugural session began with a short introductory presentation about the club by Himanshu Gupta, ACM head wherein he presented a blueprint for the club as well as his idea of the same.This was followed by a presentation by Shubham Jindal, technical head, ACM outlining the struc-

QUIZ QUESTION 1
Les Horribles Cernettes is an all-female parody pop group founded by employees of CERN which performs at CERN events. The initials of their name, LHC, are the same as those of the Large Hadron Collider which was later built at CERN. What is this image famous for?

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ACM, a plethora of activities: Yahoo! HackU

Yahoo! HackU is a coding competition conducted by the internet giant Yahoo! at a few select campuses around the world. The event comprises of tech talks, hacking workshops, interesting tips and a 24hour long hackathon where the teams get the chance to breathe life into their unique ideas. ACM IIT Delhi successfully conducted the coding extravaganza this year too. The annual four day long coding festival took place in the seminar hall and 4lt3. The event got off to a great start at the campus on the 8th of August and the first day witnessed talks from representatives from Yahoo ! who gave an introduction about the event and briefed the audience about the technical aspects of the same. A few enthusiastic members had interesting questions up their sleeves which were promptly answered by the Yahoo! Team. The team made sure to make it fun for everyone with a few audience prizes and a lot of well timed jokes. The second day was dedicated to preparing the teams for the hacking marathon coming up. Various technical details pertaining to the event, such as YQL, YUI library and BOSS, the APIs etc were discussed. The third day was the day of the showdown when the teams were given a time of 24 hours to build and demo their ideas. The teams had been instructed to bring their own computers for the event. This year saw enthusiastic particiwere able to come up with a lot of interesting new hacks. The fourth and the final day was the judgement day. Each team got the opportunity to show their work to the judges and finally, the team A utobots was announced the winner of Yahoo! HackU 2013. They made Polariser, an application that can be used to automatically classify comments into PRO-CON categories and the user is presented with the overall mood of people for the debate topic. The second position was secured by Hackologists who made Picthinker, that generates images relevant to a particular text, followed by the Spoilers who made Spoiler Filter, a browser extension (for Google Chrome) which automatically filters the spoilers on Facebook through crowd sourced data and online learning algorithms. Yahoo HackU 2013 was a successful event which not only witnessed participation from diverse backgrounds but also served as a great platform for learning and for preparing for other similar events. Compiled by: Shivani Sen

pation from students of all years and departments. The response from students not from the computer science department showed how much interest the students are harbouring in the field of programming and problem solving. In total 53 teams participated in the event resulting in a close fought contest for the prizes which included an iPad mini, Samsung Galaxy and 1TB hard disk. The teams worked fervently all day and night and

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An alumnus with a difference Pranay Chulet

The changing media consumption habits of people around the world as they gravitate more and more towards digital media, created opportunities for those who have a new way of looking at things, and Quikr is definitely a fine example of that. Quickr has brought to the people of India a new and much more effective way of selling, buying, renting and finding things vis--vis traditional print classifieds. With better quality of ads as well as the far superior responses generated for these ads compared to the other players in the field, Quickr is considered the most successful amongst classified websites. With people becoming more and more affluent leading to a rise in the average consumers purchasing power, the average consumers purchase cycles are getting shorter, they are buying more and selling used goods that arent that old. Quickr touches all this and even more, focusing on the mass market consumer and not a niche segment. Quikr is the market leader in terms of both quality and quantity and has become Indias largest horizontal classifieds company with over 2 crore monthly users from different corners of the country. Simplicity is something at the core of the company, which is evident from its simple and easily navigable website to the internal processes of the company helping involve those users who are less familiar with digital medium thereby expanding their reach. In addition, they focus on providing a convenient and hassle free experience for the users besides having an impeccable reputation of being trustworthy. These are some priceless lessons to be learnt for all budding entrepreneurs. Like every start-up, Quickr faced several challenges at the start like retaining the

Pranay Chulet is the founder and CEO of Quikr, Indias largest online and mobile classifieds portal based in Mumbai. Quikr was launched in 2008 and is currently present in 900 cities across India. It provides people with a platform to help them buy, sell, rent and find something and address needs across many categories ranging from mobiles, real estate, cars, services, jobs, entertainment, electronics, furniture and many more. Quikr is funded by some of the best names in business including Matrix Partners, Omidyar Network, Norwest Venture Partners and eBay amongst other shareholders. Pranay Chulet has had a background of strategy consulting and entrepreneurship, and his experience includes stints at firms like Booz & Co and Mitchell Madison Group to building a couple of ventures from grounds up. He went to IIT Delhi and IIM Calcutta following which he spent over a decade in the US where he saw the rise of digital media from its very early days, both as an advisor to large media companies and as an entrepreneur. The idea and inspiration behind Quickr came from the resounding success of Craigslist as a classified advertisements website in the US.

simplicity of the site and improving user experience as the scale of the business grew. They instead saw the opportunity to create and innovative solutions that could make life easier for every Quikr user through interesting features and applications that dont compromise the simplicity of usage. The company sees enormous room to grow in the coming days by reaching out to the large portion of the population that is not using digital classifieds today and proving to them the value of this medium. Staying focused on their job to help people buy, sell and rent anything quickly and simply for example, by not getting swayed by every other cool feature that keep going around in the digital media underlines their great discipline and professional astuteness. To conclude, Pranay is an entrepreneur who knows his game plan well and is his example indeed serves as an inspiration for all aspiring entrepreneurs. - Contributed by Amritansh Sharma

QUIZ QUESTION 2
Prior to a major homepage redesign back in 2007, Facebook's front page used to feature this face. Dubbed the "Facebook guy," it was not known who the mystery man was until recently. David Kirkpatrick has revealed in his identity in his book The Facebook Effect. Who is he?

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Personality Profile: Aaron Swartz

Aaron Swartz was an American computer programmer, writer, political organizer and internet activist. A child prodigy, at 12 or 13 - he set up theinfo.org, a sort of Wikipedia before the fact, which was going to contain all the worlds knowledge on one website. At 13 he won an ArsDigita Prize, given to young people who create "useful, educational, and collaborative" non commercial websites. A mere year or so later he was working with Tim Berners-Lee, creator of the world wide web, to launch the Semantic Web to improve data-sharing, and developing RSS 1.0 to distribute videos and news stories. He helped set up Creative Commons, too, which made copyright licensing simpler. He became wellknown in many online communities and was also known early on for a number of other software innovations, but primarily as an early contributor to the website Reddit. As early as 2006, he became involved in efforts surrounding information freedom. On one hand, he became involved in Wikipedia, and made an unsuccessful bid to become a board member. On the other, in a move that was to set the tone for his future activism and which would set him on the path that would ultimately lead to his arrest and prosecution in the JSTOR case. He (legally) obtained the complete (non-free, but non-copyrighted) bibliographic dataset of the Library of Congress, and posted it online via the Open Library website. In 2008, some 17 libraries were conducting a free trial of this system, and so over an almost three-week period, Swartz ran an automated program to download documents from the PACER system from one of these libraries, in the end collecting almost 2.7 million court records (amounting to about 20% of the total according to some reports), which were then freely released. Most recently, Swartz and the non-profit organization he founded, DemandProgress, were instrumental in the successful campaign to stop the passage of the much criticized Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA). In November 2011, Swartz was indicted on state charges of breaking and entering with intent, grand larceny and unauthorized access to a computer network. On September 12, 2012, federal prosecutors filed an indictment adding nine more felony counts, which increased Swartz's maximum criminal exposure to 50 years of imprisonment and $1 million in fines. On the evening of January 11, 2013, Swartz was found dead in his Brooklyn apartment by his partner. A spokeswoman for New York's Medical Examiner reported that he had hanged himself. No suicide note was found. A brilliant programmer met a really sad end. His death was met with worldwide criticism of the prosecutors and MIT. Hundreds attended a memorial at the Great Hall at Cooper Union. After Swartz's death, more than 50,000 people signed an online petition to the White House calling for the removal of U.S. Attorney Carmen Ortiz, "for overreach in the case of Aaron Swartz." A similar petition was submitted calling for prosecutor Stephen Heymann's firing. In 2002 he posted instructions for after his death (though Im not dead yet! he added). To be in a grave would be all right, as long as he had access to oxygen and no dirt on top of him; and as long as all the contents of his hard drives were made publicly available, nothing deleted, nothing withheld, nothing secret, nothing charged for; all information out in the light of day, as everything should be. Aaron Swartz will always be remembered for his great contribution to the internet and for making it a better place for everyone.

According to state and federal authorities, Swartz used JSTOR, a digital repository, to download a large number of academic journal articles through MIT's computer network over the course of a few weeks in late 2010 and early 2011. At the time, Swartz was a research fellow at Harvard University, which provided him with a JSTOR account. Visitors to MIT's "open campus" were authorized to access JSTOR through its network. On January 6, 2011, Swartz was arrested near the Harvard campus by MIT police and a U.S. Secret Service agent. He was later indicted by a federal grand jury on charges of wire fraud, computer fraud, unlawfully obtaining information from a protected computer and recklessly damaging a protected computer.

- compiled by Shivani Sen

QUIZ QUESTION 3
The first known existence of these two words together in computer literature occurred in 1972 in Brian Kernighan's book Tutorial instruction to the Language B. They are often used for 'sanity tests' for languages, which make sure that the compiler, development environment, and run-time environment are correctly installed. What are these words? Keep checking the ACM IITD website for answers !
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Call for articles

The ACM CSE Newsletter was started as a vehicle for displaying the departmental achievements and activities at a common forum for all to visit and revisit. Through this newsletter, we share news and views among ourselves. We take pride in presenting the work undertaken by our department as well as ACM in diverse fields to the world. Students are invited to get involved in the ACM Chapter activities by providing articles and by participating in the various upcoming events of the Chapter. Suggestions and inputs for the improvement of the newsletter are most welcome and contributions are invited from the faculty and students of the department. Contributions can be from any of the whole gamut of activities in the department like any special achievement, an admirable project, a publication or even the fun section material like jokes, cartoons, interesting facts or poems. You can also report any interesting workshops or talks taking place in the department. Contributory material can be handed over to any member of the Editorial Board or mailed at cs1100234@iitd.ac.in. Pulkit Yadav, Editorial Head

Fun Section: If The Beatles were programmers

Eleanor Rigby Sits at the keyboard And waits for a line on the screen Lives in a dream Waits for a signal All the lonely users, where do they all come from? All the lonely users, why does it take so long? Eleanor Rigby Crashes the system and loses 6 hours of work; What is it worth? Guru MacKenzie Wiping the blood off his hands as he walks from the grave; Nothing was saved. All the lonely users, where do they all come from? All the lonely users, why does it take so long?

Finding some code

That will make the machine do some more. What is it for? All the lonely users, where do they all come from? All the lonely users, why does it take so long? Guru MacKenzie Typing the lines of a program that no one will run; Isn't it fun? Look at him working,

Munching some chips as he waits for the code to

compile; Where is the style?

Contributed by: Abhishek Verma

The best programs are written so that computing machines can perform them quickly and so that human beings can understand them clearly. A programmer is ideally an essayist who works with traditional aesthetic and literary forms as well as mathematical concepts, to communicate the way that an algorithm works and to convince a reader that the results will be correct. Donald E. Knuth, Selected Papers on Computer Science
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Brought out by ACM Student Chapter ACM Student Chapter Sponsor: Dr. S.Sarangi Newsletter Team Newsletter in-charge: Pulkit Yadav (cs1100234@cse.iitd.ernet.in) Chief Editor: Shivani Sen Assisted by ACM chapter members Abhishek Verma Amritansh Sharma (Photos in above order from left to right)

CROSSWORD
method for solving timecost trade-off problems of project networks in fuzzy environments. Neural Computing and Applications, July 2013

Down
1.Like our nervous system. 3.Try before you buy. 4.Can create havoc if so minded . 6.Data or text altered to become meaningless. 8.Don't do this if you need the data. 10.Nineteenth-century mathematician gave his name to this process of narrowing or expanding a search. 11.This device allows your computer to talk to other computers over a telephone line.

Across
2.Small program that can cause big problems. 5.Without this most devices will not work . 7.Your key to success, can be musical. 9.Now associated with poor design 12.Mobile but not furry. 13.Do this to stop others acessing your data.

Contributed by: Abhishek Verma

Check the ACM IITD website (www.cse.iitd.ac.in/~acm) for solutions!