Collaborative Tools

http://docs.google.com provides a mechanism of sharing doc and excel files among the team members of a project and also to perform collaborative work across the learning centers. We could use google-docs for all course/project reports and for combining teams from various learning centers.

http://www2.blogger.com allows posting a topic and receiving comments. We could create http://msitsoftskills.blogspot.com and allow the students to post their 1-page writing assignment. The soft skills mentor can comment on them and it would also be easy to do a peer-reviewing by others. Using msitsoftskills.blogspot we can also involve mentors (remotely and probably larger in number) to provide comments on the writing assignments in a short time.

http://calendar.google.com allows sharing the calendars and thus could include MSIT almanac, course's start-end date, holiday lists etc.

http://vyew.com is about sharing the desktop and the screen for making remote presentations using PDF, PPTs etc. It is browser based, and also provides tools to draw and annotate on the screen during presentation (which is viewed/shared on the other side). Speech-Lab, IIIT and CMU have been using this tool for remote presentations on what they call wednesday-meetings. http://www.gotomeeting.com is another such tool.

pls feel free add some more ....

Google Research

Google research seems to have picked a set of videos on a wide range of research and technical issues seemingly relevant to most of us. Pls find them at Google's Research Videos

If you are further interested you can also look at Google's Research Publications.

MSIT-Curriculum

This is a proposal to integrate Search-Engine story into MSIT curriculum.

In the II-Mini students are posed with the problem to build THIS (The Hindu Information System) and thus learn and implement algorithms and data-structures.

From the III Mini, students learn several aspects such as UI, DB etc, which can applied to THIS - thus THIS could act as linking story across the several minis.

Following are a few points top-off my head weaving THIS over several minis.

We can have the courses with the toy-problems specific to each course, but THIS could be the actual-project where they are supposed to implement many of these concepts during the last 1-2 days of each week.

• II Mini:
  
• Algos. and DS for THIS
• III Mini:
  
• User Interface (application to THIS)
• Computer Graphics (?)
• IVMini:
  
• Databases for THIS (inverted index files in THIS could be stored/retrieved using databases)
• Advance Programming (perl/phyton for text processing andnatural language query in THIS)

• V Mini:
  
• Data Mining (Text categorization, Query expansion in THIS)
• Computer Networks (Client - Server Implementation for THIS)
• VI Min:
  
• Practicum
• II Year, I Mini:
  
• SE Foundation (Design aspects for THIS)

CMU-Portugal Research Exchange PhD Program

CMU and Portugal universities have started a research exchange PhD program in Language Technologies (www.lti.cs.cmu.edu) Click Here for full details.

"The Language Technologies Institute (LTI) of the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) offers a dual degree Ph.D. Program in Language and Information Technologies in cooperation with Portuguese Universities. ...."

"Each Ph.D. student will receive a dual degree from LTI and the selected Portuguese University, being co-supervised by one advisor from each institute, and spending approximately half of the 5-year doctoral program at each institute. Most of the academic part willtake place at LTI, during the first 2 years, where most of the required 8 courses will be taken, with a proper balance of focus areas (Linguistic, Computer Science, Statistical/Learning, Task Orientation). The remaining 3 years of the doctoral program will be dedicated to research, mostly spent at the Portuguese institute, with one or two visits to CMU per year."

.... Since 2003, there exists research exchange program between MSIT-CMU, IIIT-CMU and other institutions such as Upenn through which many research scholars at IIIT and mentors at MSIT have visited CMU.

MSITBUZZ

Being MSITians we definitely need a time and space for ourselves where we can share the pride, prejudices, up&downs, success and failures, joys, happiness related to daily/routine/rare/special events of MSIT.

At one point or the other everyone of us thought of expressing our opinions/views on various activities related to MSIT - which we believe could be beneficial to the whole of MSIT society and MSITians.

I believe we can do it now in a free BUT RESPONSIBLE fashion. Following the big show success of various issues being discussed on http://iiitbuzz.blogspot.com/ (IIIT Blog), we have created http://msitbuzz.blogspot.com.

More importantly I believe this blog can act as forum to express ourselves - what it takes to be an MSITian, how/why/what we are different from other, what are the special events that are happening this week, next week, our courses, achievements, projects etc.

Please start contributing to this blog to express ourselves, however, please note that it is YOUR blog, the whole world would watch, and it is important to express BUT IN A RESPONSIBLE WAY.

Please send an email to kishore.prahallad@gmail.com if you think you want to be one of the authors in this blog (start a new topic/post), else please feel free to comment on the posts.

Good Luck.

Best Regards
Kishore Prahallad
(kishore.prahallad@gmail.com)