DST AWSAR Award 2021 and VLSID 2022

The 35th International Conference on VLSI Design and the 31st International Conference on Embedded Systems were held 26 Feb to 2 March 2022. Both VLSI design and embedded systems are two of the areas in which my group carries out research. Encouraging students to participate in these conferences is one way of helping them align with their field more closely. Prachi Kashikar, the 1st PhD student in my group, received the VLSID 2022 Fellowship. This year, I also served as a TPC member in the Embedded Systems track.

Another PhD student, Pavitra Bhade, is one of the winners of the DST AWSAR Award 2021 for the Best Story in PhD category. The Department of Science and Technology (DST), Govt. of India sponsored AWSAR award aims to promote story telling approaches to describe research. AWSAR stands for Augmenting Writing Skills for Articulating Research. The goal is to make research work accessible to non-experts. Pavitra wrote a story on her research about detection of cache side channel attacks by using a children’s playground as an example.

Talk on Use of Technology in Education

I recently gave a talk on “Use of Technology in Education” as part of National Education Policy 2020 (NEP 2020) organized by the Indian Institute of Technology Goa (IIT Goa) where I am a faculty member. This talk discussed not only related sections in NEP (sections 23 and 24) but also focused on aspects related to GDP, investment in education and some past projects in making online/digital education accessible. The talk is available at this link.

NSM Nodal Center in HPC and AI

I am happy to share that I will be leading the NSM Nodal Center for Training in HPC and AI  at IIT Goa.
This is a great opportunity for training students, faculty, researchers, engineers etc. in HPC and AI under the National Supercomputing Mission of the Govt. of India. The Nodal Center was inaugurated on 12 October 2020 in an online ceremony.

As a first step, the four NSM Nodal Centers for Training in HPC and AI (IIT Goa, IIT Madras, IIT Kharagpur and IIT Palakkad) together with CDAC, have jointly launched a pan-India online course “HPC Shiksha: Basics of High Performance Computing” to run for three months beginning 9 November 2020. It is open to students as well as non-students.