Centre for Internet and Society

Secure IT 2012 — Securing Citizens through Technology

praskrishna — 2012-04-28T04:06:47Z

The event is co-organised by DST and NSDI, Govt. of India in partnership with Elets Technomedia Pvt. Ltd. on March 1, 2012 at Claridges in New Delhi.

Draft Agenda

9.00 am – 9.30 am	Registration & Tea
9.30 am – 11.00 am	Inaugural Session

Securing Citizens through Technology

The SecureIT 2012 Inaugural Session would present an overview of the security scenario in the country, and place the use of ICT towards ensuring national security centrestage. The inaugural would also highlight the use that ICT is being put for in effective disaster management, minimising material as well as human loss.

The session would aim at identifying a policy roadmap towards making effective use of ICT for the purposes of national security, well-being of citizens and businesses in times of disaster and an uncertain external environment and identify the major policy objectives for the sector as a whole.

Introductory Remarks: Dr Ravi Gupta, CEO Elets Technomedia and Editor-in-Chief, egov
Welcome Address: Dr M P Narayanan, President, Centre for Science, Development and Media Studies
Inaugural Address: Anil K Sinha, Vice Chairman, Bihar State Disaster Management Authority, Government of Bihar – Chief Guest, SecureIT 2012

Panel Discussion:

S Regunathan, Former Chief Secretary, Government of NCT of Delhi
R S Sharma, Director General, UIDAI
Shankar Aggarwal, Additional Secretary, Ministry of Defence, Government of India
Shambhu Singh, Joint Secretary (North East), Ministry of Home Affairs, Government of India
Ajay Sawhney, CEO, National e-Governance Division, Government of India
Major General (Dr) R Siva Kumar, Head, (NRDMS), Government of India

11. 00 am – 11.30 am	Networking Tea
11.30 am – 1.30 pm	Technical Session 1

Information Security – Securing Networks, Communications, Data and Applications

In the modern Information Age, knowledge is power like never before. A robust, secure communications network is not only desired, it is an absolute imperative in order to allow efficient functioning of the state. The communications networks have to be secured from state and non-state actors inimical to India. This session would highlight some major threats to the national communications infrastructure and the policies being adopted to counter these threats.

Chair: Ravi S Saxena, Additional Chief Secretary, DST, Government of Gujarat
Key Note Speaker: Dr Gulshan Rai, Director General, CERT-In

Distinguished Panellists:

S K Basu, Vice President, NIIT Technologies
Manas Sarkar, Head Pre-Sales (India & SAARC), Trend Micro
Ruchin Kumar, Principal Solution Architect, India and SAARC, Safenet India Pvt Ltd
Dr Kamlesh Bajaj, CEO, Data Security Council of India
Rajan Raj Pant, Controller, Ministry of Science and Technology, Government of Nepal
Prof. Anjali Kaushik, Management Development Institute, Gurgaon

1.30 pm – 2.30 pm	Lunch
2.30 pm – 5.00 pm	Technical Session 2

ICT in National Security and Policing

India faces a multiplicity of security challenges from within and without. Conventional responses to these challenges are no longer adequate and technology is being increasingly deployed to make the nation safer and more secure for residents, visitors and businesses. The legal framework has also been modified to incorporate modern technological advances.

The MHA has embarked upon a major project – Crime and Criminal Tracking System (CCTNS) that is expected to bring about a major overhaul of the policing system of the country. In this session, CCTNS and state adaptations of ICT in policing would be discussed along with an overview of technological advances in the field of security.

Chair: S Suresh Kumar, Joint Secretary (Centre-State), Ministry of Home Affairs, Government of India

Distinguished Panellists:

NSN Murty, General Manager, Smarter Planet Solutions - India/ South Asia, IBM
Col Vishu Sikka, (Retd) General Manager – Defence, Aerospace & Public Security, SAP India & Subcontinent
Joachim Murat, Director of Sagem Morpho Security Pvt Ltd.
Hemant Sharma, Vice- Chair, BSA India Committee
Raj Prem Khilnani, DGP (Homeguard and Civil Defence), Maharashtra
Rajvir P Sharma, Additional Director General of Police, Bangalore Metropolitan Task Force
Loknath Behra, IGP, National Investigation Agency
Purushottam Sharma, IGP, State Crime Records Bureau, Madhya Pradesh
Ranjan Dwivedi, IGP, UP Police
Sanjay Sahay, IGP, Karnataka State Police

5.00 pm – 5. 30 pm	Networking Tea
5.30 pm – 7.00 pm	Technical Session 3

Managing Information for Safety and Security

In the modern age, ICT is deployed in a variety of ways for enhancing citizen safety and security. ICT is being widely used for disaster management, urban planning, census operations etc.

In this session, discussions would highlight some path-breaking uses of ICT for enhancing citizen safety in a number of diverse settings.

Chair: N Ravishanker, Additional Secretary, Universal Service Obligation Fund, DIT, Govt of India

Distinguished Panellists:

Sandeep Sehgal, IBM, VP, Public Sector, India and South Asia
Sanjeev Mital, CEO, National Institute of Smart Governance (NISG), Government of India
Dr R C Sethi, Additional Registrar General of India
Maj Gen R C Padhi, Assistant Surveyor General, Survey of India
Sunil Abraham, Executive Director, Center For Internet Society
V S Prakash, Director, Karnataka State Natural Disaster Monitoring Centre, Karnataka
Rajiv P Saxena, Deputy Director General, National Informatics Centre, Government of India
Jay Kay Gupta, Fire Chief, Delhi Development Authority

7.00 pm onwards

Valedictory Session: Way Ahead High Tea

VIDEO

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/news/secure-it-2012

Content Developers/Trainers

praskrishna — 2012-02-29T13:42:51Z

The Centre for Internet and Society is hiring for the full-time position of a content developer/trainer to work on an upcoming project Building Knowledge and Capacity around Telecommunication Policies in India.

The objective is to create an on line repository of telecommunication-related information and learning materials targeted at a multi stakeholder audience; organise interactive public lectures and workshops around the country to disseminate awareness on telecom issues; as well as use traditional and new forms of media to impart information to academia, civil society, policy makers and the general public.

Candidates do not need to have a technical background or be experts in the field of telecommunication; however, some experience/interest in telecom related issues is needed.

Other requirements are:

Excellent analytical and writing skills
Visualization skills
Good communication, presentation and training skills
Basic computer skills

To apply, please send your CV and three examples of writing to yelena@cis-india.org

CIS is committed to equitable employment and is encouraging female job candidates. Please refer to the above e-mail address for further inquiries.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/news/content-developers-trainers

Francis Bags EPT Award for Open Access in Developing World

praskrishna — 2013-08-03T05:36:54Z

The Electronic Publishing Trust recently announced a new annual award to be made to individuals working in developed countries who have made significant contribution for the cause of open access and free exchange of research findings. There were 30 nominations from 17 countries around the world and Dr. Francis Jayakanth from the National Centre of Science Information, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore was selected for the inaugural EPT Award for Open Access in the Developing World by a committee that went through all the nominations.

The award function organised by the Electronic Publishing Trust for Development and the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS), Bangalore was held at the Sambasivan Auditorium, M S Swaminathan Research Foundation (MSSRF) in Chennai on 14 February 2012. Leading luminaries such as Prof. M.S. Swaminathan, Prof. Subbiah Arunachalam, Prof. G Baskaran and Prof. K Mangala Sunder participated in the award felicitation ceremony.

Giving the welcome speech, Prof. Arunachalam, distinguished fellow at CIS said that Dr. Jayakanth works for the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, has trained many students and helped a number of institutes to set up open access repositories. Prof. Arunachalam added that the event is being celebrated in India as the winner is from India and specified that it is being held at the MS Swaminathan Foundation as this was the institution that hosted the first workshop to promote open access. Prof. Swaminathan had a vital role in arranging funds for the workshop. About 50 people had learnt what open access was, how to set up open access repositories, how to use the EPrints software, etc. For this very reason it was decided to hold the event in Chennai and not Bangalore where Dr. Jayakanth is based.

Felicitating Dr. Jayakanth, Prof. Swaminathan who presented the award added that it is important to highlight the contributions of those who really convert the concept of social inclusion to reality. He said that today every politician talks about inclusive growth. What is this inclusive growth, how do you convert exclusion to inclusion? Exclusion creates large problems, social problems, economic problems, etc. On a concluding note, Prof. Swaminathan said that the Prime Minister, Dr. Manmohan Singh has declared 2012-13 as the year of science and he hopes that there will be a new science policy and technology policy and that he hopes that a very important component of that should be methods of ensuring open access including open access to knowledge and open access to literature.

In his award acceptance speech, Dr. Jayakanth said that the atmosphere was very overwhelming and never in his two-and-a-half decade old career he had the opportunity to speak amidst such luminaries and added that it was a privilege and prestige to have received the award from Prof. Swaminathan, the father of the Green Revolution in India. He also added that no event in India or elsewhere is complete without the active participation and mentioning of the name of Prof. Arunachalam, the greatest advocate of open access that India has seen so far, and that he wouldn’t have been here at the award ceremony but for the timely intervention of Prof. Arunachalam.

Dr. Jayakanth concluded by saying that he would like to thank Prof. NV Joshi, Prof. Derek Law, Prof. Alma Swan, Prof. Balaram, Prof. N Balakrishnan, Prof. Giridhar, and Prof. TB Rajashekar, and particularly the students of the information and knowledge management programme at the National Centre of Science Information, Indian Institute of Science, who were responsible for the growth of a repository granting more visibility to the 32,000 publications that are part of the repository.

Prof. Mangala Sunder of IIT Madras and Prof. G Baskaran of the Institute of Mathematical Sciences, Chennai, also participated in the event. Prof. Sunder said that it is for the kind of information that we talk about, which we want to make public for which champions like Dr. Jayakanth have been working on the sidelines but working so efficiently to get institution after institution to convert what is known as a rigid framework into a flexible more open policy of bringing their scientific content to their intellectual information content. He said that he works in the area of content development from the point of view of education and he understands the difficulty of bringing material to the public.

There are many issues, such as issues about copyright, issues about people owning the information, issues about people feeling very rigid on what they want to say in the public, etc. Dr. Jayakanth has gone through all these exercises for the last 30 years in slowly creating the “little after little” what are called the waterways to finally see that everyone benefits. The linking of science, knowledge and sustainable development to open access to information, open access to research and open access to content completes the whole cycle of knowledge.

Prof. Baskaran said that it is a very well deserved award and Dr. Jayakanth has definitely raised the bar for future awardees. Prof. Baskaran stressed upon the aspects of open access. He said that as a theoretical physicist he understands the need for open access very well. Physicists, when they have new research results place them in arXiv, the open access repository for preprints in physics. Some people wonder what if some physicists deposit all kinds of articles in the arXiv. Experience has shown that 99 per cent of the articles appear in good journals later. He added that once it is put in the arXiv, the whole world gets access and a bad paper will be noticed and commented upon by many. No one likes to be the author of such a paper! He urged that other sciences, especially the life sciences should have a repository similar to arXiv and requested Prof. Swaminathan to take the intiative at MSSRF.

Dr. Francis Jayakanth

Dr. Francis Jayakanth is a library-trained scientific assistant based at the National Centre for Science Information (NCSI), the information centre of the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) in Bangalore. He has played a significant role in the establishment of India’s first institutional repository (IR) (http://eprints.iisc.ernet.in). He now manages the IR and has provided technical support for establishing IRs in many other universities and institutes in India. He has been the key resource person at many events to train people in setting up IRs and open access journals. He has delivered presentations on IRs, open access journals, the OAI protocol, OAI compliance, and the benefits of open access to authors and institutions and the role of libraries. He has developed a free and open source software tool (CDSOAI), which is widely used. Dr. Jayakanth can indeed be considered an open access ‘renaissance man’, an advocate and technical expert in all aspect of open access development and an inspiration to all, both at the research and policy level.

See Francis's presentation on Who Benefits from Open Access to Scholarly Literature? [Powerpoint, 1523 KB]

See the video of the award function below:

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/francis-wins-ept-award

Digitisation is making e-learning simple

praskrishna — 2012-02-28T10:05:20Z

Though the computer literacy in India is low, some companies are effectively spreading education using digital contents riding on the Internet.

This article by Shayan Ghosh was published in the Deccan Herald on February 13, 2012. Sunil Abraham was quoted in this.

The business of education is all set for a transformation in the country as the government, recently, announced that it will purchase some 100,000 low-cost Aakash tablets from Datawind, the Canadian company that has developed this equipment.

These tablets would then be distributed to schools and colleges in India, where students would get them for free. This move of going the e-way and the limitations the low cost tablet has revealed has seen a lot of criticism all over, however, the e-learning industry in India is going to be one of the biggest game changers in recent times.

E-learning service provider Tata Interactive Systems (TIS) CEO Sanjaya Sharma recalls his experiences when he began his company in 1990. “There was no e-learning then. It was computer-based training along with multimedia training that existed,” says Sharma. However, times changed slowly as TIS began getting clients. One of its first clients was the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) with whom it did a project involving VGA monitors. This product was later sold to 32 other organisations.

Now, the company has many Fortune-500 customers to itself and is also conducting business with universities and publishers abroad. Sharma is very optimistic about the present Indian e-learning market, though he believes that it has just begun to take shape. “Adoption happened much earlier abroad, than in India,” Sharma added.
TIS is coming big on the e-learning in schools with their Tata ClassEdge, a solution for interactive teaching in schools.

Tata ClassEdge is an innovative and comprehensive educational solution from TIS, designed to help teachers deliver quality instruction, with an effective blend of classroom activities and interactive multimedia demonstrations.

For this purpose, the company would be providing its services to partially government-aided schools apart from private schools. Study estimates that there are around 80,000 government schools; 150,000 partially-funded schools and 105,000 government schools in the country. TIS is also going to reach out to government schools soon with a different pricing model within a couple of years.

Through ClassEdge, teachers will have access to lesson plans that they can use to make their classes engaging and memorable. The plans are customised for students and it provides tips to elicit student participation, including reinforcement activities for struggling learners and challenging assignments for high achievers.

Teachers can use animations to explain difficult topics. They can engage children through stories that teach. They could use interactive games to get students to interact with the medium and have fun while learning.

Sharma strongly believes that the education sector in India is going to take advantages of technology in the coming years and will improve in the process. “I definitely feel that technology should be available to every individual,” adds Sharma.
Meanwhile, another institute AVAGMAH (avagmah.com) is making good business with its online learning platform deemed for the higher education space. AVAGMAH offers UGC-recognised degrees for MBA (Global) in sales & marketing, HR management and banking & finance. The education platform is entirely online and the student must attend classes on the Internet.

“The faculty conducts a class and students sit at home, taking lessons. That was my aim and that’s what AVAGMAH offers,” says AVAGMAH Online School CEO Karthik K S. The platform for this online school was developed in 2007 and it had also won an award for innovation from Nasscom, the same year. However, the content generation took another two years and only in 2009, was AVAGMAH ready to deliver education online and commence its first batch. The institute now has more than 6,000 students to its name and the number keeps growing with each passing day.

The ease of access, they feel, is drawing people towards online education as they can log into their classes after their day’s work and have a quick session with the faculty. “Internet can reach places where prevalent education systems cannot. We have students logging in from places like Palanpur in Gujarat and also from places like Guwahati,” explained Karthik. He also says that the content can be delivered on low bandwidth Internet connections making it easier for narrowband users to access it. On the cost factor of such courses and how viable it would be for the not-so-rich sections of India, he pointed out that AVAGMAH offers two-year MBA courses for Rs 40,000 per year.

“Online education is going to drastically change the learning space in India as technology becomes more accessible,” added Karthik.

Karnataka, the state with the most developments happening in the IT space, is no doubt heralding the e-learning spree in India with various initiatives to bring this form of education to all. In the year 2009, NIIT had announced a partnership with the Government of Karnataka (Department of Social Welfare - DSW), the Karnataka Vocational Training & Skill Development Corporation Ltd (KVSTDC) and the Department of Employment and Training (DET) to provide e-learning to young under-graduates residing in DSW hostels.

The vision of this project is to enable the students in the government hostels to use their free time to enhance their skill sets by acquiring some of the soft skills and life skills that are required in most job areas, and in the process, providing the latest learning technologies at the student’s doorstep.

IT major Intel India and the Karnataka Government’s Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan, last year, launched ‘Computers on Wheels’, an e-learning pilot programme, in five districts of the state.

The pilot programme includes digital instruction materials from ‘Educomp’, an education solutions provider. The programme enables teachers to utilise a variety of learning strategies and tools to cater to the diverse learning styles and abilities of students, making education more engaging and inclusive for all. Under the ‘Computers on Wheels’ approach, netbooks are housed in a cart and can be moved between classrooms as needed.

Not only has the Internet found a newer way in traditional courses, but it has also made advances in supplementary education. Atano, a Mumbai-based company, has come up with a unique idea of providing e-books for vocational courses on its website. Imagine living cities like Meerut, Shimla, Jaipur, Guwahati, Indore, Cochin or even in the metros, one can download a supplementary e-Book at a click of a button. Supplementary education books can be downloaded on the individual’s Windows PC, Android platform, or even Mac (iPads).

Cost-effective option

Industry experts are of the opinion that this sector has a huge potential and more so, in a country where education finds it tough to reach remote places.

“The country needs e-learning as it is the best way to reach out to millions and moreover this sector is very promising,” says head of IT & ITeS Practice at KPMG, Pradeep Udhas.

He adds that not only in traditional courses, but also in vocational courses, e-learning will be the trend-setter.

Another initiative by Manipal Global Education Services, EduNxt enables interactive learning environment which includes small group mentoring, virtual classrooms, simulation, self-study content, recorded presentations and shared browsing.
Launched by Sikkim Manipal University-Distance Education in 2009, it helps all the Distance Education students through their online platform.

The university believes that it develops a sense of togetherness among the members and different stakeholders of the huge community within the platform.

The platform has functionality which provides a student to interact with 65 core faculty and 6,500 supporting faculty counselors in order to utilise the varied expertise and vast experience of this community.

“We may have progressed from just computer-based learning to technology-enabled solutions in the classroom, but the objective has remained intact, improving the learning experience by making it more engaging,” said Pearson Education Services COO Srikanth B Iyer.

Iyer adds that in their current avatar, e-learning solutions are not seen as replacements for teachers, but aids which will help teachers deliver lessons better, thereby increasing the quality of the learning experience.

However, Centre for Internet & Society Executive Director Sunil Abraham feels that learning should not be restricted to the Internet and interactive classroom sessions but should be made available on mobile phones through audio files as mobile penetration is much higher compared to Internet reach.

“Audio files can also be productive and a learning experience for people who can’t afford the Internet,” explained Abraham.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/news/digitisation-is-making-e-learning-simple

India debates limits to freedom of expression

praskrishna — 2012-02-28T09:50:37Z

From Google to Facebook, from world-famous author Salman Rushdie to a little-known political cartoonist, it has become increasingly easy in recent months to offend the Indian government, and to incur the wrath of the censor or even the threat of legal action.

This article by Simon Denyer was published in the Washington Post on February 13, 2012. Sunil Abraham has been quoted in this.

In the world’s largest democracy, many Indians say freedom of expression is under attack, and along with it the values of pluralism and tolerance that have bound this nation of 1.2 billion people together since independence from Britain more than 64 years ago.

India’s democracy is nothing if not raucous. The huge array of newspapers and 24-hour television news channels are often vociferous in their criticism of politicians. But the media’s determination to root out corruption in the past two years has prompted a backlash. Talk of more stringent regulation is mounting.

At the same time, artists say their creative freedom has been steadily eroded. Even Jay Leno managed to offend Indian Sikhs — and prompt an official government complaint — with a satirical reference to their holiest shrine, the Golden Temple, in a joke about Mitt Romney’s vacation homes.

At fault, many say, is a thin-skinned government that gives in to the demands of violent mobs, ostensibly to make political gains but in fact to suppress its critics.

“For a country that takes great pride in its democracy and history of free speech, the present situation is troubling,” said Nilanjana Roy, a columnist and literary critic. “Especially in the creative sphere, the last two decades have been progressively intolerant.”

Targeting authors, artists

Rushdie, whose novel “The Satanic Verses” was banned in India in 1988, was forced to cancel appearances at the Jaipur Literature Festival last month after threats of violence from Muslim groups and a warning about a possible assassination attempt — information he said was probably fabricated by authorities to keep him away.

Wary of alienating Muslim voters in ongoing state elections, not a single Indian politician spoke out in favor of Rushdie’s right to be heard.

Last month, the screening of a documentary on Kashmir was canceled at a college in the city of Pune after right-wing Hindus objected, and an artist was beaten in his gallery in Delhi for showing nude paintings of actresses and models that his attackers claimed were an insult to the country.

The release of the latest book by Bangladeshi author Taslima Nasreen was canceled in Kolkata after Muslims protested, and Aseem Trivedi, a 25-year-old political cartoonist, was charged with treason and insulting India’s national emblems in drawings inspired by activist Anna Hazare’s anti-corruption movement.

But perhaps the most shocking episode for advocates of freedom of expression has been the government’s attempt to muzzle Facebook and Google — and prosecute the companies’ executives — for content posted on their sites deemed to be offensive. “Like China, we can block all such Web sites,” warned the judge hearing the case in the Delhi High Court.

The government cites images insulting to one or another of India’s religions, content it says could provoke unrest. It is up to social media sites, the government says, to manually screen and censor all potentially offensive content or face prosecution.

“No freedom can be absolute,” said the chairman of the Press Council of India, Justice Markandey Katju. “The hold of religion is very strong in India, and you have to respect that. You can’t go insulting people.”

Katju’s concerns are perhaps understandable in a country whose birth was scarred by the mass murder of Hindus and Muslims at the time of independence in 1947. But the effect, critics say, is to give the mob the power of veto and take away a fundamental right in a free society: the right to offend others.

Sunil Abraham at the Center for Internet and Society says the government’s proposals on Web censorship would kill the vibrancy of the Internet in India. Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales warned that they would scare off investors and crush the country’s potential to become a true leader in the Internet industry.

The irony, according to critics, is that the concern over religiously offensive content was little more than an excuse: What appears to have really offended the ruling Congress party were defamatory images of their idolized leader, Sonia Gandhi.

“The myth that is spread is that the government is acting against hate speech and obscenity. But when the government acts to control information on the Internet, it is usually defamatory or potentially defamatory content against people and politicians,” Abraham said.

Almost a year ago, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said the media were undermining the nation’s self-confidence by harping on official corruption. Since then, talk of tighter media regulation has grown louder.

And despite the vibrancy of India’s mainstream English-language media, the country’s ranking on the press freedom index of the journalism advocacy group Reporters Without Borders has dropped, from 105th in 2009 to 131st last year.

An optimistic view

Arnab Goswami, the editor and anchor of the Times Now television channel, points to television’s dramatic success in exposing official corruption in the past two years to argue that there is plenty to be optimistic about.

Courts in India generally have a better record than do politicians of defending freedom of expression. And there are people in government, including Information and Broadcasting Minister Ambika Soni, determined to resist the temptation to take a harder line.

“The pressure was enormous, to control the media, to clamp down on the media,” she said. “But I did withstand the pressure.”

Soni said she sees self-regulation by the media rather than official regulation as the way forward. She maintains that, for example, the debate about Rushdie has not necessarily done India any harm.

“That’s the strength of Indian society,” she said. “You have discussed it, everyone has had their say on the matter, the government has had its share of criticism, yet we’ve moved on.”

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/news/india-debates-limits-to-freedom-of-expression

Developing location-based services

praskrishna — 2012-02-28T09:31:50Z

For mapping enthusiasts, geeks and neogeographers in Bangalore, here's something to look forward to. Cartonama, a workshop that offers intensive hands-on training on tools to build and manage location data for location-based services, will be held in the city on March 2 and 3.

The article was published in the Hindu on February 26, 2012

This workshop, being organised by city-based tech event management firm HasGeek, is open to developers, neogeographers and entrepreneurs working on location-based services who want to understand how to use advanced tools to manage and represent their geographic data.

The workshop will be conducted by Mikel Maron and Schuyler Erle, both from the OpenStreetMap project. The event is being held at the Centre for Internet and Society in Domlur.

For more on this, log on to workshop.cartonama.com or contact sajjad@hasgeek.com

Cloud 20/20: online technical paper contest

Unisys India announced the results of Cloud 20/20 Version 3.0, the third edition of one of India's largest technical paper contests, designed to encourage innovative ideas and recognise emerging technical talent from among the country's leading engineering colleges.

Following several rigorous rounds of evaluation, the judges selected Dharmesh Kakadia from International Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad, as the first prize winner for his entry on ‘Network Virtualisation and Cloud Computing'. The runner-ups were Sridhar S. from Anna University, Chennai, and Poornima J.R. from M.S. Ramaiah Institute of Technology.

A system to protect confidential data

Xerox and computer security firm McAfee have teamed up to design a security system to help companies protect against threats to confidential data, a release from McAfee stated.

This involves integrating embedded McAfee software into Xerox technology. The two companies plan to use a whitelisting method that allows only approved files to run, offering significantly more protection than traditional blacklisting tactics, where a user has to be aware of and proactively block viruses, spyware and other malicious software.

Additionally, the solution provides an audit trail to track and investigate the time and origin of security events, and take action on them, the release added. The companies claim that the decision to partner on this was a result of a survey commissioned by the two firms that found that 54 per cent employees in India do not follow their company's IT security policies, even fewer (33 per cent) are aware of these policies.

Automating healthcare and insurance

IT major Wipro Infotech announced that it has successfully implemented the digitisation of the Employees' State Insurance Corporation's (ESIC) Project, Panchdeep, the healthcare administration programme that automates healthcare services to over six crore beneficiaries across the country.

This is the largest e-governance programme in this sector, providing online facilities to employers and insured people for registration, payment of premium and disbursement of cash benefits.

It also automates medicare services to all insured people, and an estimated 75,000 people use this every day.

HP launches new press

Hewlett-Packard announced the launch of HP Indigo W7200 Digital Offset press for the Indian market. This has been installed at Bangalore-based printing press, the KolorKode digital press. With its robust productivity this new press offers the ability to address a wider range of long-run jobs. It will be able to deliver a broader range of jobs for a dynamic market place meeting the demands of monochrome to seven-color jobs, from spot to highlight color during a single run, without stopping or changing the settings, a press release from HP stated.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/news/developing-location-based-services

Grooming the geek

praskrishna — 2012-02-28T09:16:29Z

Generation 2.0, the iPad child, is enriched by technology, and many parents are embracing it wholeheartedly. But can technology transform the way a child’s abilities develop?

The article by Gopal Sathe was published in Livemint on 24 February 2012. Sunil Abraham is quoted in it.

Gauri Uttam, 11, loves reading books. Her room houses a huge number of books that her parents have collected for her over the years. But her favourite books are not in these piles. They are on her iPad. Ask her what her favourite book is, and pat comes the reply: The Pedlar Lady, downloaded on the family iPad 2.

The Pedlar Lady app, by Moving Tales Inc., is a beautifully animated story for children. Background images move, the text flows in and out, and the app reads the text aloud as well. “The book looks beautiful, and whenever you turn the page, it reads the words,” says Gauri. “You can carry it around anywhere, it’s not like sitting on the computer, but it’s much more fun than reading a book. There are pictures and if you get bored and want to draw something, you can, right there.”

Gauri’s father Sachin Uttam, 44, a director (consulting) with the Gurgaon-based technology start-up Enabling Dimensions, has also introduced her to software such as FaceTime on their iMac to teleconference with her cousins for homework. “Computers are a part of everything now,” Sachin says. “When children grow up, we try and teach them to sing, paint, write stories... In the same way, we need to teach them to be able to use computers. I’m a techie, so is my wife. We both have iPads and iPhones, and so it wasn’t surprising that Gauri started to use them too.”

Technology is revolutionizing the way children grow up. Parents put the Internet and technology to a variety of uses. It is not uncommon to see toddlers gurgling to a touch screen that tiny fingers don’t find daunting. In December, the Podar International School in Mumbai announced that from its next term, lessons for classes VI to XII would be on iPads.

The shake-up

For some parents, it is a way to help their children hone their creativity. Bangalore-based Viswanath Poosala, 41, head of Bell Labs Research India, has two children, a daughter (9) and a son (7) (names withheld on request), and he has been teaching them programming for the last year and a half. Poosala wanted to show his children how computers can be fun. “The key is to find ways to relate your children’s interests to computers. If you make a computer a tool that helps them do what they want, then they will learn enthusiastically,” he says.

Poosala’s son uses a tool called Scratch, a free MIT software for children, to make simple games that he can share with friends; his daughter uses Scratch to make animated, interactive versions of the stories she writes.

To teach his children programming, Poosala first introduced them to a free online game called Light-Bot. “In the game, you have to click on a set of commands, and once you are done, the robot will follow your choices to try and clear an obstacle course. It’s a fun game so children are keen to play it, and it shows them how a computer follows inputs.”

But in Light-Bot, commands are limited, and it is not possible to add custom elements. So Poosala downloaded Scratch. “It’s a visual programming language. You can add images and sounds, but it’s still completely visual, with no actual programming. You just click and choose from different icons,” he adds.

By engaging children with their own creations around their interests, they become more involved in what they are doing, and are keen to share their work with friends. They are more likely to finish projects and start new ones. Using such tools also helps them understand logic as a concept, which can then be applied to any field.

Sachin believes the iPad, especially, is a powerful reading resource that can make books far more attractive to children. He says, “Ever since Gauri discovered iBooks, she’s reading so much more than before. When she gets stuck on a difficult word, she just needs to tap it with her finger to get a definition.”

One such book is the Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland app. The book is presented with big, interactive illustrations on every page. Give Alice different bottles when she falls down the rabbit hole, and she will become bigger or smaller, depending on the bottle. Tilt your iPad on another screen, she will fall down and stand up.

New avenues

Enhanced books, such as Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and The Pedlar Lady, are more advanced, redefining our expectations of children’s books. Take, for instance, Khoya, an iPad app illustrated by Shilo Shiv Suleman and written by Avijit Michael. The app has been showcased at TEDGlobal 2011 in Scotland, the Wired conference in the UK in 2011, and launched at the INK conference in Jaipur in 2011. Khoya has artwork, animated pages, quests that have to be completed in the real world, that require children to help the two protagonists navigate various worlds.

Bangalore-based Suleman says, “People are so excited about how technology is functional and useable that they forget how technology is also magical. Sure, it’s useful to be able to fly to London in 10 hours, but the idea that we are actually floating in the clouds, flying around the world is forgotten.”

Khoya uses technology to get children to explore the natural world along with a screen. While the protagonists of the story undertake their quests, readers are given their own quests such as collecting flower seeds and making photo collections of these seeds. “It’s a real problem that children in the last 10 years have been glued to computers, but now with mobile technology we can get them outside their houses. Photo quests, augmented reality in the garden, are just two examples of how we’re trying to find the links between the earth, magic and technology,” Suleman says.

Technology can also help children find their passions, and guide them through life. Aveek, the son of Bangalore-based media expert Arun Katiyar (56), found his passion through technology. Lego blocks helped Aveek, now 23, develop an interest in mechanical engineering.

Katiyar says Aveek, now studying industrial design at the National University of Singapore, was a fan of Legos since he was 6. When Aveek turned 15, he was gifted Lego Technic, a programmable Lego set. Katiyar says, “The Technic was exceedingly advanced for its time. You take a programmable microchip, and connect it to a computer. You can then program commands in the remote to control the chip. Then you remove the chip, and put it in your Lego creation that is a lot more advanced than the coloured bricks most will be familiar with, as a Technic set includes moving parts, pistons, engines and much more.”

The Technic is not available any more, but Lego now sells the more advanced Mindstorm. Legos are particularly useful as learning tools because of how versatile they are. Children can fit the pieces together to make almost anything they can imagine. By fitting joints and gears, they can create a small machine, entirely by themselves.

Rajesh S. (full name not given on request), runs an environmental NGO in Bangalore, and has worked in the US with several leading IT firms. His two sons, Parthiv, 14, and Tarang, 11, have picked up their parents’ interest in technology and gone with it in different ways. Parthiv learnt about film-making thanks to a discarded video camera, Tarang experiments with circuits around the house, and knows his way around capacitors and resistors.

Rajesh says, “When my elder son was 8, I had an old video camera that no one was using any more. Instead of throwing it away, I gave it to my son. It was an expensive gift, but it didn’t matter even if he broke it.”

Parthiv became fascinated by the camera, and would find new ways to keep using it. Rajesh says Parthiv would write short poems and then make small videos for them. Since he didn’t have a track or a dolly, he mounted the camera on an old toy truck and made his younger brother pull it to take panned shots.

“As he experimented with it, we also encouraged him. He was quickly teaching himself how to make the best use of it. Using their computers, the boys learnt to edit their footage, and put it up themselves as well. Parthiv is interested in the media, and is determined to either direct, or write, or act, undoubtedly because he had access to the right technology in his childhood.”

Tarang used the Internet and a lot of trial and error to find his way around a circuit board—a skill many adults lack. Rajesh says, “I don’t know what got him started. He’s fascinated by circuits, always experimenting and we are happy to buy circuits and capacitors too.”

At the same time, as an environmentalist, Rajesh also wants the boys to experience the outdoors. “My role has actually not been to support them but to discourage them. I want them to spend more time outdoors, and find more interests. Play sports and explore the world as well as their hobbies,” he says.

The points of debate

Expert opinion on the use of technology is divided. Chennai-based child psychologist Lakshmi Rajaram says parents need to monitor how their children are using technology and moderate the amount of time they spend with it. “While it can look harmless, these Internet-connected devices can be a gateway to pornography, violence and all kinds of disturbing and harmful content,” she says.

Sunil Abraham, executive director of the Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore, also feels that it’s important that younger children at least be given limited access to technology. He says children have to learn fine motor and social skills; tablets and other technology hinder the development of these skills. “For young children, this is counter-productive—if your two-year-old can scroll and zoom on an iPad, that’s nothing to be proud of. You’re underestimating your child, who should be capable of much greater dexterity. New technology is too simple, and doesn’t give the child enough feedback to develop their skills.”

Ramya Somashekhar and her husband, both doctors, live in the UK, but grew up in India. They have a two-year-old son, whom they have kept away from new technology. Somashekhar says, “There’s an information overload in the world today. We want our son to grow up at his own pace, and let him stay a kid for as long as we can. Just because he thinks an iPad is pretty doesn’t mean we want our two-year-old playing with something that expensive. He thinks that a teddy bear and a singing toy truck are equally fascinating. A gadget doesn’t begin to compare to the real world, and we want to keep it that way, so he grows up the way we did.”

At Podar International School in Mumbai, though, students have started using iPads, and Vandana Lulla, director of the school, says only around 10% of the parents have not opted for it. While the school is not providing the iPads, they are offering a financing scheme for them.

She says, “Moving to iPads was a natural step because they are easier for students to use than laptops. We had observed how tech-savvy and comfortable they were, and had gone through studies that show the use of computers makes the learning of science more effective. We can also block access to games on the iPads, so the devices would allow students to work more effectively.”

Mumbai-based writer and freelance journalist Manisha Lakhe almost bought an iPad last year, but her then 13-year-old son Agni Murthy was able to talk her out of it. She says, "Agni told me to buy the Acer Iconia instead, because it was better. I was sure I needed a 3G tablet. He convinced me to get the Wi-Fi one, then sat with it, entered its programming and was able to change it so that it worked using my old 3G dongle, saving me a lot of money."

By looking up a lot of different methods, Agni was able to find the best way to change the installed operating system on the Iconia, and instead run a routed version which would support the function his mother needed, without buying the more expensive 3G model. He says, “I use my laptop to study, to work with my friends on chat, to do homework and Photoshop. I used to draw but now I do a lot of that on Photoshop. I look up a lot of tech stories on the Net, because that’s really interesting. I read about how to make the Iconia work on 3G so I could give my mother advice.”

This positive view is also supported by a study carried out by the US department of education. The 2010 study, Young Children, Apps and iPad, concluded that touch-screen technology allows younger children to play productively with a sophisticated media technology platform. The study found that “the use of touch-screen devices improved tacit and explicit learning, and was easy to pick up for children.”

It continues, “Children are fascinated and engaged by touch-screen devices, and the engagement goes up over time. Using such devices, children learn ‘motor skills, exploration, game concepts and generalization of skills’, where the learning from one app can transfer to another app.” The study also says, “Well-designed apps give children the opportunity to play/learn independently, and to participate in activities that would be messy in the real world, for example, finger painting.”

As Gauri says, “You can do everything with the iPad. You don’t need to carry anything else. I have books, cartoons, and games and we can take them in the car, or outside, or in any room, all the time.”

CHILD-FRIENDLY APPS

The App Store has a lot of child-friendly apps available—some are meant to entertain, while others have an educational component. We hand-picked five of the best apps that have launched this year, for different age groups. We have focused only on iOS apps that offer something over and above real-world analogues.

ALPHATOTS: $0.99(around Rs. 48)

Learning the alphabet is a slow process that involves a lot of repetition and trial and error. The AlphaTots app uses funny sounds and cute animations to make this more fun, and also demonstrates things that a

standard “A is for Apple” style book can’t. For example, F is for Flower is accompanied by a picture of a flower, and turning the page shows G is for Grow, and the flower gets bigger.

GRIMM’S RAPUNZEL POP-UP BOOK: $3.99
This version of Rapunzel’s story is simple, beautifully animated, and from time to time, the angle changes from a 2D view to a 3D angle, where parts of the book pop out of the page and can be played with.

SPARKY THE SHARK: $3.99

This funny e-book is meant

for children above six years of age, and tries to impart lessons of self-confidence, and the importance of being yourself through the adventures of ‘Sparky the Shark’. There’s clever animation work mixed with text and read-aloud sections as well.
FREDDI FISH AND THE STOLEN SHELL: $2.99
Somewhere between a game and an interactive book, ‘Freddi Fish and the Stolen Shell’ tasks children with solving a mystery. There are various touchable elements on each screen and by following the clues, it’s easy to go through the story. Unlike similar games, the app follows consistent logic, so it’s a fun way of teaching children critical thinking.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/news/grooming-the-geek

GeekUp with Erica Hagen

praskrishna — 2012-02-29T03:00:14Z

HasGeek is organizing a GeekUp with Erica Hagen of the GroundTruth Initiative on 1 March 2012 at 5 p.m. Erica will speak on the theme: "From Information to Empowerment: Unpacking the Equation".

From Information to Empowerment to Unpacking the Equation

In 2010, Erica Hagen and Mikel Maron started GroundTruth Initiative to work towards empowering communities through open data, open information and participatory processes. Erica's and Mikel's work at GroundTruth is informed by their earlier experience of working with the Map Kibera project where they helped the youth and the communities in Kibera to map their geographies and represent information about themselves to the world through citizen media. In the process, Erica and Mikel uncovered several complex dynamics about self-representation by communities, what open data really means to communities and how they apply it to their circumstances, the dynamics between participatory development and participatory technologies, and the process of using community media tools and online methods for talking about issues that matter to them.

In this lecture, Erica Hagen will talk about her work with communities in Kenya, Jerusalem, Nigeria and other parts of the world through GroundTruth Initiative. Specifically, Erica will unpack the relationship between empowerment, information, and storytelling, and what both these elements mean to communities in different parts of the world. How are communities applying the information and data that they collect about their governments and themselves? What are the challenges involved in the process of working with open data, participatory processes and technologies? How can communities apply new media and data gathering tools to achieve local goals? What does empowerment mean in the face of the delicate lines and precariousness that communities and the interveners/practitioners have to tread in the process of data gathering, representation, communication and outputs?

Interested persons need to confirm attendance by registering at http://geekup.in/2012/erica-hagen

Erica Hagen

Erica Hagen is a journalist and international development practitioner working for democracy of information and citizen participation in both online and traditional media. She is the co-founder of Map Kibera and GroundTruth Initiative. Erica has worked in four countries on development communication and evaluation, and in the United States on refugee and immigrant issues, for organizations such as United Nations Population Fund, Concern Worldwide, and Unicef. She holds a Masters Degree in International Affairs from Columbia University, New York.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/geek-up-with-erica

Climate Change and Controversy Mapping

praskrishna — 2012-02-27T04:10:30Z

A three-day workshop with Professor Bruno Latour, Dean for Research at Sciences Po, Paris. The workshop is being organised in collaboration with the Devechia Centre for Climate Change, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore from March 19 to March 21, 9.30 a.m. to 5.00 p.m.

The development of ecological crisis creates problems for political representation. Because of the scale of the phenomena to be considered, the esoteric character of the scientific knowledge necessary to apprehend them, the intensity of the conflicts of values that they generate, there is no assembly to handle those crises. The workshop will explore digital tools that might allow citizens to get a grasp of ecological crisis by drawing ''cartographies of scientific and technical controversies'' a necessary preliminary for political assemblies.

The workshop is opened to PhD students from all academic fields doing empirical work in various types of ecological crisis. The participants will experiment some of the digital tools and methods developed within the "mapping controversies" consortium (MACOSPOL, demoscience and other sources of "science studies"). It requires students to devote three full days to the study. A background in Science and Technology
Studies and some grasp of digital data analysis are preferable.

Eligibility criteria:

To be a doctoral student or at the post doctoral level
To have a general interest or research connexion with ecological/climate change issues
Familiarity with digital data analysis

Candidates must send their CV and a short synopsis of their doctoral or postdoctoral research before Sunday March 4, 2012, to:
jayes@caos.iisc.ernet.in & gilles.verniers@sciences-‐po.fr

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/events/climate-change-and-controversy-mapping

FUEL Kannada - Workshop on Kannada Computing Terminology

praskrishna — 2012-02-23T10:32:59Z

A two days workshop on the standardization of Kannada computing terminologies was organized on January 28th and 29th 2012 at the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS), Bangalore under the FUEL project. This FUEL Kannada workshop aimed at the community review and standardization of frequently encountered computing terminologies in Kannada. FUEL Kannada Evaluation meet aimed at solving the problem of inconsistency and lack of standardization in computer software translations in Kannada language. This workshop was hosted by CIS, sponsored by Red Hat and organized by Sanchaya (sanchaya.net).

Along with well know television actress Jayalaxmi Patil. members from Banavasi Balaga, Translators, Kanaja Content writer, Linguistics, Journalists participated in this workshop. Shankar Prasad welcomed every one and explained the importance and need of standardization of Kannada Computing Terminologies. KaGaPa's Secretary Narasimha Murthy shed light on the past work on computing terminologies.

This workshop discussed on 578 commonly appearing entries people use. FUEL Kannada Evaluation meet was a concrete move towards solving the problem and after the meet, FUEL Kannada came with the standard translation of entries in Kannada language for the first time that are frequently being used by a normal user.

Localization is the process of transforming a product into different languages and adapting it for a specific locale. As the localization process becomes more complex and involves more players and tools, problems related to consistency of translations and terminology are faced. Henceforth, in this context the need of such type of meet is significant and important. Except few languages, this type effort is generally the first effort for most of Indic languages for computing terminologies.

FUEL tries to provide a standardized and consistent computer interface for users. Before Kannada language, FUEL already completed evaluation phase for 9 other Indian languages.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/news/fuel-kannada-workshop-on-kannada-computing-terminology

Will open access replace costly commercial publishing models?

praskrishna — 2012-02-23T09:12:10Z

Cost of research journals going up while funds available are coming down, writes Vasudha Venugopal in an article published in the Hindu on February 19, 2012.

Technology has inherently changed the way science education is propagated. Digital libraries, wikis, webinars, videoconferences, open access and repositories — all seem to be excellent tools for sharing scientific knowledge.

Download the PDF

But with the escalating cost of research journals and the economic and logistical challenges that often accompany attending a conference, the open access model is increasingly being recognised as an alternative to expensive commercial publishing models.

Consider the situation at, say, a biological sciences research firm in Chennai. At least 16 per cent of its total budget is spent on the subscription of journals; more than 50 per cent of that going to the two largest publishing companies. Experts say the cost of journals is increasing at an average of eight per cent a year. Further, many academics do not consider work to have been adequately shared if it has been merely published in over-priced journals.

Boycott

Incidentally, last week, more than 5,700 researchers started boycotting Elsevier, a leading publisher of science journals, amid growing concerns at cost and accessibility. More than 3,000 academics have signed a petition that claims the publisher charges “exorbitantly high” prices for its journals and criticises its practice of selling journals in ‘bundles,' forcing libraries to buy a large set with many unwanted journals, or none at all.

"Since 1950, the volume of research results started getting too large for the scientific societies, leading to the entry of commercial publishers into the field. The cost per journal and the number of such journals are proliferating, while the funds available are coming down,” says Francis Jayakanth, who has been instrumental in creating an institutional repository, ePrints@IISc, which has more than 32,000 publications by researchers.

India has nearly 53 registered open access repositories that allow users to download and use documents free.

Open access advocates say Indian papers appear in both Indian and foreign journals, roughly in equal proportions, but most Indian journals have a very poor circulation, many of them below 1,500; and most Indian papers appear in low-impact foreign journals. “Most scientists in India are forced to work in a situation of information poverty. Others are unable to access what Indian researchers are doing, leading to low visibility and low use of their work. Thus, Indian work is hardly cited. Both these handicaps can be overcome to a considerable extent if open access is adopted widely, both within and outside the country,” says Subbiah Arunachalam, an open access advocate.

Experts say many U.S. universities, including Princeton, MIT and Harvard, have their own repositories. Institutions in India, too, need to set up open-access repositories to ensure their work is available to the public even if it ends up being published in an expensive journal. Even if these are made available in different repositories, one can still access them all if all the repositories are interoperable.

Trustworthy

The established method for an academic to circulate his work is to publish in a peer-reviewed journal of repute, and the reader, too, places some degree of trust in the quality of the work being presented. So will open access, with the huge volume of papers, change that? “Not at all, open access is not vanity publishing or self-publishing or about publications that scientists expect to be paid for. Since every paper is peer-reviewed, the quality is never compromised,” says Dr. Jayakanth.

Read the article in Hindu. Prof. Subbiah Arunachalam has been quoted in it.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/news/will-open-access-replace-costly-commercial-publishing-models

An Interview with Dr. Francis Jayakanth

praskrishna — 2012-11-24T06:09:54Z

India has been losing out its best talents to the West, however, this trend could be reversed if we create adequate number of world-class institutions and research facilities, and our scientific productivity and quality of research will improve significantly, says Dr. Francis Jayakanth in an email interview with the Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore.

First of all congratulations for winning the inaugural EPT Award for Open Access.
Thank you very much.
When did you first take an interest in Open Access and what are your research interests?
I have always been impressed with the electronic pre-print servers like the arXiv, Cogprints, etc. I wanted to do something similar for IISc research publications.

One of the important activities of the National Centre for Science (NCSI), Indian Institute of Science (IISc) has been the training programme. Till recently, NCSI was conducting an 18-month training course called Information and Knowledge Management. This was targeted primarily at students graduating from Indian library schools, with a view to providing them with classroom and practical training in the application of ICT. Essentially, the aim was to train the students in how to provide state-of-the-art, computer-based information services. I have been closely associated with this training programme by offering courses and overseeing projects.

As part of the training programme the students are expected do a project. Around the year 2001, one of our students, Mr. Madhuresh Singhal carried out a project work in implementing GNU Eprints.org software developed by the University of Southampton. Incidentally, ePrints is the first professional software platform for building high quality OAI-compliant repositories. The student project successfully demonstrated the self-archiving concept through institutional repositories. The project work was later implemented to set up the country’s first institutional repository, eprints@IISc . Ever since, I have been an OA practitioner and an OA advocate.

I’m not a hard-core researcher. My work interests lies in using free and open source software for providing web-based information services.
Why Open Access is important to science and particularly India?
When researchers publish their works in journals and conference proceedings, they would want their works to be read, cited, and built upon by as wide an audience as possible. Much of the scientific publications are being published by commercial publishers. Subscription costs of such publications are very high, constantly increasing, and beyond the means of most of the libraries. The high subscription costs create an access barrier to the scientific literature because of which the publications do not get the kind of visibility that the researchers would like to. The lack of adequate visibility will reduce the potential impact of the publications. This in turn could affect the advancement of knowledge. It is therefore imperative that the access barrier to scientific literature created because of high subscription costs should be overcome and this could be achieved through OA publishing.

The problems with respect to research literature that India and other developing countries have always faced are two-fold:
- Not being able to access high quality scientific literature because of the high subscriptions costs, and
- Research reported in the national journals does not reach the global audience because most of the journals published from the country are not indexed by Web of Science (WoS) and/or Scopus databases, which are leading citation indexing databases.
If all the journals that are being published in the country could migrate to open access platform then the visibility of research works reported in the journals published from the country will automatically improve with time. This has been the experience of several of the OA journals published by MedKnow and others.
In terms of the number of papers published in refereed journals, the number of citations to these papers, citations per paper, and the number of international awards and recognitions won, India’s record is poor. What needs to be done to improve this?
For a long time now, our country has been losing out the best of the talents to mostly western and other countries. If this trend could be countered by the creation of adequate number of world-class institutions and research facilities, our country's scientific productivity and also quality of research done in the country will improve significantly. This may also trigger reverse brain-drain.
Indian scientists lack access and visibility. They find it tough to access what other scientists have done, due to the high costs of access and libraries in India can’t afford to subscribe to key journals needed by users. Also other researchers are not able to access what Indian researchers are doing leading to low visibility. How can we overcome these deficits? Will adoption of Open Access within and outside India overcome the aforesaid handicaps?
Access to scientific literature in the country has improved significantly during the last decade or so. This is largely because of the several library consortia that have emerged in the country during that period. However, the existing consortia and the ones that are likely to emerge in the coming years, is not the solution for the access barrier to scientific literature that exists today. There has to be a world-wide adaptation of OA to overcome the access barrier.
Do you support the movement towards making scientific publications as freely accessible as possible and create an institutional repository? What steps are being taken by the Indian Institute of Science to maintain an open access archive?
Yes. Open Access Journals and Open Access Archives or Institutional Repositories (IRs) are the two ways to facilitate OA to scholarly literature. As per the DOAJ statistics, today, there are close to 7500 peer reviewed OA journals and as per the Directory of Open Access Repositories (DOAR) there are more than 2770 institutional repositories across the world.

In a recent study, Bo-Christer Bjork estimated that the overall percentage of scientific literature currently available OA is about 20 per cent. This includes both papers published in OA journals and those deposited in institutional repositories and directly on the Web. So, still a long way to go in achieving 100 per cent OA to scholarly literature! If all the research institutions set up their IRs and ensure that copies of post-prints are placed in the IRs then 100 per cent OA to scholarly literature could be achieved, at least, from now onwards.

ePrints@IISc, the OA institutional repository of IISc was established by NCSI in 2002. The repository holds more than 32,400 publications of IISc making the century-old institute’s research far more globally visible than before. NCSI has also provided technical help and support to several other institutes and universities in setting up their repositories and OA journals.
What are the key challenges of the scholarly publications in India?
Poor visibility and readership of many of the journals published from the country affects the citations of the articles published in such journals. This in turn affects the impact factors (IF) of the journals. No author would like to publish in very low IF journals.
What message would you give to funding agencies, the government and policy makers particularly for implementing a nation-wide mandate for Open Access?
Most of the research projects in the country are being funded by the government agencies. It is therefore imperative that we should have a nation-wide OA mandate for research publications that emerge from research projects funded from tax payers’ money. Such a mandate will not only help in enhancing the visibility of research done in the country; it may also help in avoiding duplication of research projects carried out in the country.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/interview-with-francis-jayakanth

Research papers will be available in public domain

praskrishna — 2012-02-17T05:38:36Z

IIT-Madras intends to make circle of knowledge complete, writes Vasudha Venugopal in this article published in the Hindu on 15 February 2012. Prof. Subbiah Arunachalam is quoted in the article.

2012-13 was declared the year of science by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh last year, and there is a lot of effort being made all over the country to not only intensify the quantity and quality of research but also ensure greater access for all. For instance, IIT-Madras plans to make available its research papers in all disciplines online, in the public domain. The institute already provides e-learning through online web and video courses in engineering, science and humanities streams through NPTEL.

The attempt now is to convince faculty members to upload their research papers into the institution's repository, says Mangala Sunder Krishnan, Web Coordinator (NPTEL). The move will not only benefit students and faculty members but will also help the circle of knowledge to be complete, he says.

What IIT- Madras plans to do is follow an Open Access policy that would make the access of journals and scientific research public and many other educational organisations plan to follow suite. “Most research publications stay locked up in commercial journals and are inaccessible to many. Open Access is the best way to ensure that research produced in the developing world gets wider visibility,” says Francis Jayakanth, a library-trained scientific assistant based at the National Centre for Science Information, the information centre of the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore. Mr. Jayakanth has been instrumental in creating an institutional repository ePrints@IISc that has over 32,000 publications by researchers.

Subbiah Arunachalam, distinguished fellow at the Centre for Internet and Society explains: “A research produced by the Tuberculosis Research Centre in Chennai which would be of great relevance to researchers, say in a university in Maharashtra, may not be even noticed by the scientists there. Both groups receive funds from the same source - Government of India - and yet what one does is not easily accessible to the other. “Open Access would bridge that gap and make information available to everyone,” he says.

Open Access repositories would help authors place their papers in an interoperable institutional open access archive and anyone with an Internet connection can access it. Researchers say that in most reputed journals, it takes almost six months to get a paper published, and most insist that the paper is removed from the internal repository of the author's institution once it is published. “But 70 per cent of the publishers are now fine with the authors taking the pre-print of their paper uploaded in the repository. And since in open access, every thing is peer reviewed, the quality is never compromised,” says Mr. Jayakanth.

While institutions such as IIT- Madras subscribe to over 2,000 journals, many colleges under Anna University and University of Madras have access to just about 1,500 journals. “There is almost Rs.10 -12 lakh that the institution spends on journal subscriptions so unless there is funding, many self-financed colleges prefer not to subscribe to journals and go for a few mandatory ones prescribed by AICTE. Students and researchers have no way to acquaint themselves with recent updates,” says D. Krishnan, professor, Anna University.

Even if you go through consortiums, you have to spend Rs.20 lakh which many smaller R&D organisations cannot afford to, adds P. Ramamoorthy, librarian at Sameer- Centre for Electromagnetics, a government-funded research agency. “The restrictions imposed by many commercial publishers do not allow one to legally share the published output of his result with his colleague. Open access will relive authors of such hassles,” he says.

The original article was published in the Hindu

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/news/research-papers-in-public-domain

OurSay: how India’s technology is cutting into corruption

praskrishna — 2012-02-17T02:40:43Z

In the world’s largest democracy, corruption has long been part of the system of governance. However, transformative new technologies are playing an exciting and powerful role in citizen engagement, good governance and in the mobilisation of the masses for social action.

The blog post by by Gautam Raju, co-founder and creative director, OurSay Australia was published in Crikey on 17 February 2012. Nishant Shah has been quoted in it.

Since the beginnings of the Indian independence movement, technology has been a central element to citizen engagement. According to Nishant Shah, from the Centre of Internet and Society, print and cinema reflected the views of citizens and informed them of the visions and changes that the country was going through. Today, India has one of the largest young and connected populations in the world.

Fifty per cent of the population is under the age of 25 and there are about 880 million mobile phone subscribers. New technologies are shifting the way that citizens interact with government and mobilise around issues they care about.

Based in a cramped office in New Delhi, the group Gram Vaani community media are developing tools to make governments more accountable. This group of young people with impressive resumes and big dreams form part of the new generation of Indian social entrepreneurs calling for change.

One of their most revolutionary products is a citizen news telephone hotline. The initiative is having a huge impact with recorded reports of government officials being fined for corruption, school teachers being paid overdue salaries and medical resources being sent to remote areas to fight malaria outbreaks. It allows callers to report incidents or problems from their regions, which are then transcribed and made available through a website for the media, government and general public.

This technology is particularly effective in remote areas, where Gram Vaani partners with local NGOs who empower local communities to use the tool. The service, which is expanding across the Indian state of Jharkhand, clocked 40,000 calls during the first month. Roshan Nair, from Gram Vaani, said: “NGOs have taken up the entire responsibility of informing local residents about our hotline, verifying information, and training new users. We have supported them, but they continue to do good work at great personal risk.” The technology is also currently deployed in Afghanistan with plans to expand to Pakistan and Iraq.

During my most recent visit in January, 74-year-old anti-corruption campaigner Anna Hazare and the India Against Corruption (IAC) movement dominated the media. The movement has been fighting for the introduction of the Lokpal Bill, which would create an independent ombudsman with the power to investigate corruption allegations from citizens. The movement launched a successful social media campaign, which built an image of Hazare as the 21st century Gandhi.

Social networking websites such as Facebook and Twitter were used as organising tools for protests and when Hazare was arrested, his team released YouTube videos of him in jail to rally supporters. Their campaign was incredibly successful, mobilising thousands to support passing of the legislation.

According to a 2011 report released by Facebook, Anna Hazare and the Lokpal Bill were the most mentioned topics in Indian status updates, a sign that Indians are increasingly using the internet to share and debate political events.

Online movements such as the IAC are spreading through Indian urban areas with online campaigns on issues of violence, the environment and the protection of women are gaining momentum and political leverage. Increasing tension from the government around internet censorship and with more organisations and citizens harnessing the power of the internet and mobile phones for social action creates a very interesting space to watch in 2012.

Another powerful governance project Ipaidabribe.com is the world’s largest crowd-sourced database on corruption, with more than 18,000 acts of corruption registered. Developed by NGO Janaagraha, the website aims to tackle corruption by allowing citizens to log corrupt acts that are then used to lobby for better governance systems, law enforcement and regulation. A reporting tool on the website allows the public to view detailed analytics on where bribes are made, to which government department and their total costs to the public.

The Transport Department of Karnataka was frequently reported for bribes on the website, which led to the Public Transport Commissioner inviting Janaagraha to identify procedures that would help foster transparency and accountability in their bureaucratic processes. The Karnataka state government has since agreed to put posters promoting the website in all government offices. The technology is currently deployed in Kenya with Janaagraha stating that they are in talks with 15 countries.

India is booming; changing at a rate the country has never seen before. Despite the increasing use of technology by organisations and social movements, India still has a huge challenge in bridging the digital divide. Despite the powerful examples provided, social action and citizen engagement movements largely remain concentrated in urban, metropolitan settings, and often only engage the middle class. According to Mr Shah, from the Centre of Internet and Society, “there are innovations which are allowing people with cell phones in rural and remote India to be better connected, but there is no substantial data that actually proves that it fosters citizen engagement”.

As organisations such as Gram Vaani and Janaagraha begin to build more tools to foster citizen engagement and hold governments accountable, it is going to be incredibly fascinating to not only observe their future impact, but also see how technologies will be developed and spread to rural areas.

Gautam Raju travelled to India in January as part of an OurSay research trip.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/news/oursay-how-india2019s-technology-is-cutting-into-corruption

Digital Natives Video Contest

praskrishna — 2015-05-08T12:35:27Z

The Everyday Digital Native Video Contest has its top five winners through public voting.

A Day in the Life of a Digital Native: Story scripted, shot and edited by Leandra (Cole) Flor. The video is an extension of Cole's photo essay "Mirror Exercises" conceptualized for 'Digital AlterNatives with a Cause' Book 1 To Be. Download the book.

Top 5 winners of the Digital Native video contest selected through public votes. From left to right: Marie Jude Bendiola, T.J. KM, Thomas Burks, John Musila and MJ.

The Jury Prize for Two Best Videos goes to John Musila (Kenya) and Marie Jude Bendiola (Singapore)! Congratulations to all winners. The Top 5 winners win the grand prize of EUR 500 each!

Our Top 10 contestants: Click on their profile to watch their videos

	Marie Jude Bendiola I come from a third world country where technology seemed to be hard to reach back in the 90s; especially by the not-so-privileged. As we progressed, technology has not only become ubiquitous (in malls, various institutions and technological hubs) but also, it has come to be used by the common man. My video will answer how technology bridges the gap between dreams and reality. It will be a fusion of documentary and re-enactment of real life events and dramas. Read More
	Cijo Abraham Mani The power of digital media will be presented to audience with the help of showing tweet-a-thon panel discussions, blood aid tweets getting spread, etc. Read More
	TJ K.M. My video explores the spiritual aspect of digital technology and how rather than getting in the way of our spiritual expression, it is actually bringing us face to face with it, if only we choose to look. The video will be a mixture of live action and stop motion animation/puppetry where digital devices take on a transcendent character similar to nature spirits in various cultures. I plan to investigate the tendency to exclude digital devices and technology from being categorized alongside nature as if it is somehow exempt from or superior to this category. Using symbolism and motifs from various cultures such as the Native American Hopi, Balinese Hinduism and Japanese Shintoism, my video will create a world where the technology we use daily is viewed not just as a means for socio-cultural exchange and communication but is available for the nurturing of our souls if we so choose. Read More
	Thomas Burks We have a small production company in Birmingham, Alabama. I was hired on a year ago to do film and commercials for them as they expand into advertising and video coverage of events. We only have about 3 employees including myself, working out of our homes. We recently acquired a space to open a studio and retail location downtown where we live. We use Facebook, blogs, and viral marketing all the time to get our name out there. Our account executive is constantly monitoring our Facebook for client orders and bookings. We are beginning to use twitter to provide information more fluidly to people. We believe this might be a year of growth for our small company, as we are becoming able to provide much higher quality content. We're fully digital; constantly updating our websites and blogs, and I believe we would be able to tell a great digital story. We submit numerous small films and skits; we cover awesome concerts, and rely so heavily on the digital world to show our content. That will be the gist of our video. Read More
	John Musila Map Kibera Trust is an organization based in Kenya’s Kibera slums. Using digital gadgets and technology, they have transformed the community by placing it on the map as it was only seen as forest when viewed on a map. They also film stories around the community and share them with the world on their YouTube channel and other social networks like Facebook and Twitter. Through this they have been able to highlight and raise awareness about the challenges the community faces. Our video would show Kibera’s role in bringing about change. Read More
	Andrés Felipe Arias Palma I think many people are digital natives unknowingly. Being a digital native is a relationship with activism and society, not as they initially thought. It was a condition of being born in specific times and external factors. In the video, I will interview people about who and what is a digital native? How to use the Internet? What are the advantages and disadvantages for society where everything is run with the power of the Internet? Read More
	Martin Potter Over a period of nearly four years, moving across small towns in Australia and South East Asia, I have seen the most extraordinary innovations at a local community level. My video will focus on these local stories with global impact. I am pursuing a PhD in participatory media and this will lend a uniquely academic perspective on the concept of collaboration, community life and innovation. Read More
	E. James Rajasekaran I live in the temple town of Madurai in the south Indian state of Tamil Nadu. I am a social worker and the plight of people living in slims is something that my NGO is closely associated with. My video will bring out the efforts of the people who live in the slums of Madurai. Read More
	Anand Jha Bangalore is home to a lot of technology start-ups. A lot of geeks, who find it limiting to work for corporations, are driving a very open source-oriented, frugally-built and extremely demanding culture. While their products are standing at the bleeding edge of technology, their personal lives too are constantly driven on the edge, every launch being a make or break day for them. The project would aim at capturing their stories, their frustration and motivation, looking at the possibilities of Indian software scene moving beyond the services and back-end office culture into a more risk prone but more passionate business of technology. Read More
	MJ As a digital native living in a developing country, I have carried out a series of both online and offline projects, which have always striven to benefit Zimbabweans in a number of ways since 2000. These projects have greatly increased my interactions with computers. I might say, I got married to a computer in 2000 when I bought my first PC; in a way, my relationship with my computer is intimate. Even though this computer I bought is an old 386 machine made obsolete by the faster Pentium III models, this did not change my love for the computer. My video will focus on a dream-like moment of my digital life. Read more

Jury Members

Shashwati Talukdar Shashwati Talukdar grew up in India where her engagement with theatre and sculpture led to filmmaking, and a Masters degree from the AJ Kidwai Mass Communication Research Center in Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi. She developed an interest in American Avant-Garde film and eventually got an MFA in Film and Media Arts from Temple University, Philadelphia (1999). Her work covers a wide range of forms, including documentary, narrative and experimental. Her work has shown at venues including the Margaret Mead Festival, Berlin, Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia, Kiasma Museum of Art and the Whitney Biennial. She has been supported by entities including the Asian Cine Fund in Busan, the Jerome Foundation, New York State Council on the Arts among others.
Leon Tan Leon Tan, PhD, is a media-art historian, cultural theorist and psychoanalyst based in Gothenburg, Sweden. He has written on art, media, globalization and copyright in journals such as CTheory and Ephemera, and curated media-art projects and art symposia in international sites such as KHOJ International Artists’ Association (New Delhi, 2011), ISEA (Singapore, 2008) and Digital Arts Week (Zurich, 2007). He is currently researching media-art practices in India, and networked museums as an expanded field of cultural memory making.
Jeroen van Loon Jeroen, digital media artist, investigates the (non-) impact of digital technology on our lives. For two months he went analogue, refrained from connecting to the World Wide Web, and communicated through his Analogue Blog. He is currently working on Life Needs Internet in which he travels around the world and collects people's personal handwritten internet stories.
Becky Band Jain Becky Band Jain is a non-profit communications specialist and blogs on everything from technology to psychology and culture. She spent the last five years living in India and she’s now based in New York. She’s a dedicated yoga and meditation practitioner and is passionate about ICTD and new media.
Namita A. Malhotra Namita A. Malhotra is a legal researcher and media practitioner and a core member of Alternative Law Forum in Bangalore, India. Her areas of interest are image, technology, media and law, and her work takes the form of interdisciplinary research, video and film making and exploring possibilities of recombining material, practice and discipline. She is also a founder member of Pad.ma (Public Access Digital Media Archive) which is a densely annotated online video archive.

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For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/digital-natives/video-contest/digital-natives-contest