Month: July 2013

Welcome! and Welcome Back!

The start of an academic year is a good time- things seem fresh, even if we have been here before, and its a time for new beginnings. The rains have really washed things clean, and the whole environment looks and feels special. So before anything, welcome to all the new students, and welcome back to all the returning students! The campus has not been the same without you… Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.

And what better way to start than with the announcement of the Chancellor’s Awards. From this year onwards, the University has instituted five awards for younger faculty, for teaching and research. Nominations will be invited later this year, and the awards will be announced at the convocation in October by the Chancellor, Prof. Hanumantha Rao. This is one small way in which to recognize excellence, and all of us will have a say, both the students as well as other colleagues.

There is a group of happy campers who have been setting up some new resources for the campus. These are in development, so no criticism please, at least not just yet, but here is a list.

UntitledThere are way too many gaps, but we also need volunteers to put up the information. Write in and offer to help if you can.

  • The University needs a place to engage in discussion, and soon we will have a Connect UoH site, where all can post comments, raise issues, get information, and so on…
  • A job portal, both on G-HAN, as well as more specific to the University.

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And, starting along with the semester, the conference season gets going as well! Perspectives in Nonlinear Dynamics, is a meeting that we are organizing along with the TIFR, Hyderabad, from 15 to 18 July. This edition of PNLD is the fourth in a series, and the aim of the meeting (that is being held in the Science Complex) is to focus on the open issues in nonlinear science and to identify the directions in which the field is developing. The themes that are being explored at the conference include Chaos, Nonlinear Phenomena in Engineering Sciences and Applications, Nonlinear Phenomena in Biological and Medical Sciences,Synchronization, Bifurcations, Time-delay systems, Extreme events, and so on. All are welcome!

G-HAN, जी हाँ !

The city of Hyderabad is home to many academic institutions- and an amazingly diverse set at that. No fewer than three Central Universities- apart from the UoH, there are MANUU and EFLU (the only other city with more is Delhi that has DU, JNU, JMI and IGNOU), and several state universities- OU, Telugu University, technical universities BITS Pilani, JNTU, IIT and IIIT, several CSIR laboratories, several defence laboratories, NALSAR, the Indian School of Business, the Administrative Staff College of India… The list is long and very very varied.

Navigating through the academic landscape can be hard. Admittedly most of us don’t need to do it often, but if one did want to know where one could study a specific topic or degree, there is no easy way to get the information. Some time ago, when then Human Resources Minister of State, Dr. D Purandeswari visited our campus she asked many heads of institutions to come together to discuss, among other things, how we could network. It was quite an eye-opener, both  as to what expertise there was in the city, and how little mutual information was shared.

And how little resources could be shared. For a brief while, there was some talk of the “meta university” concept, some sort of virtual coming together of academic institutions in cyberspace. But like all virtual enterprises, that too evaporated- one of the biggest difficulties in making things like this a reality seems to be economics- it is just impossible to do this on a nonexistent budget.

Nevertheless, we thought that it would be possible to go part of the way, and this is GHAN, the Greater Hyderabad Academic Network. This is a website where we have brought together information on all the academic institutions that are located in the city of Hyderabad. This is interpreted somewhat generously to include as many as we can, even if distances between the outermost entities are nearly 100 km.

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To begin with, G-HAN is a collection of introductory information pertaining to all organizations devoted to various aspects of higher education and research.  Given the fact that these are scattered in the Greater Hyderabad area, forming several clusters, this site is an attempt to give the visitor a quick introduction to,

  1. where an institution is located
  2. what it is about, and
  3. what expertise is represented there…

As of now, there are about 100 institutions listed on this site, but this is just the beginning since we have started with the governmental (both central and state) and semi-governmental sectors. There is a FaceBook page for GHAN as well. We hope to be inclusive and therefore we will be adding privately funded institutes and laboratories. If you have suggestions of what more should be there, please write in to the GHAN Team at ghan @uohyd.ac.in.

One small step, but hopefully a useful one,  जी हाँ !

PS: Read the Indian Express story about GHAN-