Msit Voice January, 2009

Volume : 2 Edition : 1 January 2009

Learning is a life long continuum!! ‘I have never let my schooling interfere with my education’ –Mark Twain In a global knowledge economy, the ability to succeed depends on the capacity of individuals to learn. With phenomenal market breakthroughs of disruptive technologies, it has become imperative for intellectual capital to continuously hone, re-focus, and re-orient to changing business needs. Corporate today would rate self learning skills of an individual on top of their priority list. Learning is a natural phenomenon! Human beings are endowed with a body-mind-intellect apparatus that enables them to create conditions for survival in the stiffest of challenges; be it personal, social, corporate, global or environmental. Tony Buzan, an expert in the concept of ‘Mind Mapping’, through his study has reported that thinking tools (aka creativity) used by children are as high as 98%, which by the time one acquires a university degree reduces to 25%, and in grown up adults, diminishes to as low as 10%. True education is caught, than taught. Are we ready to change the learning paradigm? That’s the moot question. If only exposure to facts is the edifice of education, students cannot be prepared for life. Students need to understand that life long learning with a solution conscious mind and right attitude is the key to retain the competitive edge. Active learning has shot into significant prominence in recent times and educational institutes are trying to catch up with the change to make learning better. While in the educational institutes, the students should improve their reading habits and develop a guided thinking pattern. An active application of skills based learning, improving capacity to reflect, augmenting the desire to learn more, willingness to learn new material on their own, reflecting on their learning process, participation in professional body activities, attending / taking professional certifications are a few demonstrative factors of active learning. Interacting with people who invest time in learning new skills, initiating new projects and seeking challenging jobs would also help convert life long learning into a habit. Life long learning has two attributes, firstly the need to develop further and secondly the ability to engage into it. Internal commitment is a hall mark for learning and students today need to embrace this attitude to survive and progress in market places engaged in intense competition and constant renewal. Designing learning interventions and pedagogical constructs with the help of high end robust technology can help disseminate knowledge to learners in a better and efficient manner. A course like MSIT, with its pedagogical shift in place, offers a holistic learning experience. The course while improving positive attitudinal dimension facilitates a seamless transition of a student into a professional. Talking about the next phase of a students’ career, i.e., learning on job, a learner needs to solve problems as they crop and it is active learning, which can provide the platform to assimilate nuggets of necessary information to solve task at hand. Therefore the learning process continues to have its relevance through out one’s career. Our ability to compete as a nation today requires a fresh approach to education by constantly improving value adding learning potentials of student community. ‘All of the top achievers I know are life long learners. ….looking for new skills, insights, and ideas. If they are not learning, they are not growing… not moving toward excellence!!’ quotes Denis Waitley. -- Padmaja M Principal Mentor- Soft Skills, MSIT

Know Your World : nVIDIA Full Company Name: nVIDIA CEO: Jen-Hsun Huang Head Quarters: Santa Clara, California Target Customer base: Graphical processors for personal computers, workstations and mobile phones Net Value: $20 billion Annual Turnover: $4.1 billion No of Employees: appx. 5000 If the very sound of the word ‘nVIDIA’ sends a thrilling sensation through your body, then you are either an avid gamer or employed in producing high-quality 3D animation content like movies and games. If you cannot find yourself in the above listed categories, then you might be either dreaming of having a system with an nVIDIA graphics card in it. Unless of course, you haven’t heard of the company itself!! Don’t worry, this article is primarily meant for YOU! Early Days: The story of NVIDIA’s early days is a lot similar to that of many other recent startups. The company was established in 1993 by the combined efforts of Jen-Hsun Huang, Curtis Priem and Chris Malachowsky. Sequoia Capital which funded several iconic companies including Cisco Systems, Oracle and Apple, provided the initial funding to NVIDIA. Initial Failures: The company made big mistakes initially, with its choice of making the design dependant on the concept of ‘quadratic surfaces’. The company’s first graphics card went largely unnoticed in the market, because it followed a new proprietary format and most of the graphic buyers preferred sticking to the established names, rather than try out something new. Following Microsoft’s footsteps after the latter’s release of DirectX multimedia specifications turned into another disaster, with Sega, the company funding the project, deciding that the working on the concept of ‘quadratic surfaces’ was a bad idea after all! Re-starting from the square one: With the company’s legacy reading as “one dud + one abandoned”, NVIDIA’s CEO, Huang knew that the company had to make some drastic changes, in order to survive. Huang’s decision to appoint Dr. David Kirk as its Chief Scientist was the first right step on its road to recovery. It then revised its strategy to support DirectX standard, instead of its own new standards. It also set into implementation, a 6 month-product cycle. The benefit of the latter strategy is the ability of cushioning the effect of any of its products on its survival. The sweet taste of first success: NVIDIA came into limelight with the introduction of RIVA 128 into the market. A company which was written off as an “also-ran”, had torn apart the specifications and speed of the industry leaders, by delivering unbelievably fast graphical processing units. GeForce: Its success march continued with GeForce 256, with the company gaining a larger market footprint, while leaving all the existing competition several miles behind.Its successors, including GeForce 2 MX and GeForce 3 only helped it in further expanding its market presence and out beating its competitors, time after time. Agreement with Microsoft and dealing with new headaches: Microsoft, impressed with NVIDIA’s success, chose NVIDIA as the preferred graphics hardware provider for its yet-to-launched Xbox consoles. The pricing of the succeeding NVIDIA models turned into the bone of contention between the two giants. It eventually led to NVIDIA Vinay Babu V V I Year, IIIT

Where does the regression in Economy cart to? If I were a diplomatic critic, then I would attribute major chunk of India’s incompetency in lagging behind the supreme nations, to its economy! My point in saying so is to provide a lucid vision on the economy of a nation and the influential role it plays in showcasing a nation’s strength to the world. To put in one sentence, a nation’s economy is one of the imperative factors in deciding it’s stature in the world. Just imagine what beckons on the world if the economy of a supreme nation in the world is in shackles! The spotlight on the US economy which is treading the path of recession is creating tremors in the world. Treading the path of decline enumerate to ‘n’ number of reasons of which, the tenuous state of housing market is the front runner. Of late, the decline in the housing market is ringing alarm bells on the economy of US. If one explores the reasons for this slump, one will end up with a large number of reasons which include the stake of shareholders, houses in the outskirts, etc. Various solutions like cutting down the interest rates have been explored but in vain. On the other hand, this problem has many indirect and often unexpected repercussions. These threaten to relegate the control of low income groups into the hands of more efficient divisions. This is indeed a commendable effort of the nation. The ideal solution would be to zero in on an implication at the expense of spending in the future. The deterioration in the economy acts as an ice-breaker for the opponent nations to cash in the opportunity. To support the statement, there is one famous quote related to the economics, which says that, “Once you are compromising on your economy, you are indirectly providing the stance for a blissful opportunity to your opponents!” The Government has to identify the constraints and try to sort them out of the way. The nation’s government has to annul the impending factors affecting the economy of the nation. This has to be the foremost factor to be in consideration for any nation. It is as simple to say that only if the nation gives utmost priority to its economy, it prospers. ——Raghav MSIT, JNTU (II Year)

Origin Of Words

·

Teddy bear- Interestingly the word originated in 1902 when President Theodore Teddy Roosevelt was taking a break on a shooting trip in Mississippi. In order to impress him locals caught hold of a bear cub and handed it to him, but he declined to sport with it. This kind act was caricatured in the following day’s Washington Post. Morris Michtom, a New York sweet shop owner asked his wife to make a toy teddy bear and the rest is history. They shut up the sweet shop to start “Novelty and Toy Company”-the fancy of the young and old alike the world over.

·

That’s Cool - Unbelievably true but the actual meaning of the phrase was “excellent” first evidence of which was in England in 1930’s. It has been there in the slang since World War II and is used in French and German too.

·

Limelight - The actual context of the word was lemon would be burnt to create a strong lighting in theatres and light houses so that it would be brightly illuminated. As ages passed by the expression shifted to “in the limelight” meaning the cynosure of all eyes!

New Year Party 2009 MSIT - IIIT

Goofy -- Bhargav MSIT IIIT

Poornima, MSIT IIIT I Year by Rajesh MSIT IIIT I Year

Freshers Party MSIT JNTU

TAP THAT ENERGY!! A big advantage of being young is the opportunity that we have to explore beyond the boundaries. Youth is the best time. The way in which you utilize this period will decide your future. Your happiness, your success, your honor and your good name depend upon the way in which you live now- in this present period. Majority of our population consists of young people with a lot of energy and enthusiasm. Unfortunately, most of it is going untapped. Young minds develop as fast as mobile companies introducing a new brand of mobile phones. We even have access to a lot of resources. Thanks to the internet, we have access to unlimited knowledge with a single click. We are more intelligent because of the technologies that we are exposed to and have access to. It is good to cultivate the habit of writing down all the wonderful ideas that our brain generates. Maybe one of them can make your I-want-to-be-an-entrepreneur-dream come true. Entrepreneurs are great thinkers and so they must be spending most of their time thinking of what new things they can offer to the world. Being young does not mean you have to aim and act small. Live to conquer. Start with something so that you will end with something. Swami Vivekananda once said a fantastic truth about life-”When you talk of success with reference to life, it does not merely mean succeeding in everything that you undertake or do; it does not merely mean succeeding in fulfilling all wants or getting whatever you desire; it does not just mean acquiring a name or attaining a position or imitating fashionable ways appearing modern or up-to-date. The essence of true success is what you make of yourself. It is the conduct of life that you develop, it is the character that you cultivate and it is the type of person you become.” This is the central meaning of successful living. — Priyanka K. MSIT(I Year) IIIT. BLOG : The Journey of the Journeys It first started as the “Corporate” exposure to the “Frogs in the Well”. Some MSIT alumni coming to talk how MSIT shaped their lives. Everyone was so very excited. Everyone wanted to use this opportunity to see themselves in the speakers shoes two three years down the line. With the speakers, the talk was casual, used MSIT slang, contained Hyderabadi Lingo. Post this came the idea to name these interactive sessions. Loads of nomenclature was thought of. Finally we were introduced to “Journeys”. Padmaja madam can take the royalties if the plan gets a global exposure. As the speakers shared their Journeys, we could learn a host of things. From team work in preparing for placements to using it in counterstrike. Learning the importance of life skills, overlaying the need to be up to date with technology and technological updates.

Language Technologies Specialization The term Language Technology or The Human Language Technology is defined in several ways. Hans Uszkoreit in his study of “What is Language Technology?” published in 2007; defines LT as follows: “Language Technology -sometimes also referred to as Human Language Technology- comprises computational methods, computer programs and electronic devices that are specialized for analyzing, producing or modifying texts and speech. These systems must be based on some knowledge of human language. Therefore language technology defines the engineering branch of computational linguistics.” The Language Technology Document Centre in Finland has the following definition: “Language Technology is a multidisciplinary field, which studies technical means and methods that can be used to process natural language with computers. Some well-known applications of language technology are for example automatic authoring tools (such as spell checking) and speech recognition. Language technology has also many other application areas, which are introduced in the technologies section and in Language Technology World.” University of Arizona has the following explanation for the course Human Language Technology: “Human Language Technology is a developing interdisciplinary field that encompasses most sub disciplines of linguistics, as well as computational linguistics, natural language processing, computer science, artificial intelligence, psychology, philosophy, mathematics and statistics.” Language technology has Natural Language Processing and Speech recognition and processing at its core. It also comprises of various other fields of research like Information Retrieval, Machine Learning, Text mining and Knowledge representation. The LT specialization track of MSIT is offered by Prof Kishore Prahallad and Mr. Vamshi Ambati. The following courses are offered during the specialization ·

Text to speech systems

·

Automatic Speech Recognition

·

Dialog Systems

·

Machine Translation

·

Information Retrieval

The courses are then followed by practicum in an area that the student is interested in. Many R&D companies focus on the research on LT products. Companies like Google, Amazon, IBM etc focus on various areas of LT like Machine Translation, Information retrieval, Question Answering, Text Mining, Recommendation Systems etc. Students also can pursue PhD programs in various Indian and International Universities.

A Social Intitiative : ASRA The word ‘asra’ in telugu language means a helping hand. Asra, a non-profit organization aims at providing the needy with basic amenities to make them feel that there is someone who cares for them and there is someone with them always. The idea took shape on 25 July 2007 during a discussion amongst a group of friends regarding humanity and its present shape. The objective was conveyed to many people thereafter and the number of people interested in the initiative was unprecedented. We at ‘Asra’ hope to carry on this journey forward breathing life into humanity. Anybody interested in lending a helping hand are welcome to join ‘Asra’. You could reach us at [email protected]. For more details you could visit our blog http://asra-friends.blogspot.com/ For further information regarding ASRA you could reach Sweta Padma : [email protected] Bhanu Prakash: 9949812515 [email protected]