ACM INDIA ANNUAL EVENT

The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) India Annual Event jointly organized by ACM and Indian Institute of Technology – Delhi (IIT-D) took place on 15th February, 2014 in the IIT - Delhi campus. Ms. Bhanu Bhardwaj, Assistant Professor, Computer Science & Engineering Department DGI, Greater Noida was delegated for the event.

The first speaker of the day Dr. Shafi Goldwasser, RSA Professor, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science in MIT and a co-leader of the Cryptography and Information Security Group discussed some creative developments in the theory of computing through the cryptographic lens, and the role cryptography can play in the next successful shift from local to global computation. Dr. Shafi elaborated that Cryptography has become the general study of correctness and privacy of computation in the presence of a computationally bounded adversary, and as such has changed how we think of proofs, reductions, randomness, secrets, and information.

The second distinguished speaker for the event was Dr. David Patterson, Professor of Computer Science, University of California, Berkeley. His best known projects are Reduced Instruction Set Computers (RISC), Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks (RAID), and Networks of Workstations (NOW), each of which helped lead to billion dollar industries. The specific focus area of his talk was about teaching Software Engineering. He maintained that the traditional approaches to software development are often neither supported by tools that students could afford to use, nor appropriate for projects whose scope matched a college course. He cleared several Myths about MOOCs and Software Engineering Education.

The second part of the day included a very informative session by Mr. Ramesh Gopinath, Director of IBM Research, India (IRL). In his talk he gave a technical overview of Watson and described some recent technical advances leading to the first commercial offering based on Watson Technologies called the IBM Watson Engagement Advisor. Watson Engagement Advisor answers questions to end customer queries. The session ended with the sharing of speakers’ experience using Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) to teach this material amidst loud applause.