Month: February 2014

Round 3 of the NAACcreditation

indexThe results from the NAAC reaccreditation are now out, and our University has been awarded the overall score of 3.72 out of 4. This is lower than what we had in the first round of reaccreditation when we were given 3.89 out of 4. It is disappointing that we have slipped by 0.17, a percentage drop in quality of about 5%, however that may be estimated… From the documents that can be seen on their website, it is clear that with the passage of time the NAAC has gotten somewhat stricter, but that in of itself is little solace, given the effort that went into the preparation for the visit of the peer review team in January.

SMBe that as it may, all of us owe a word of appreciation to the Coordinator of the effort, Professor Sachi Mohanty of the Department of English. He was a veritable one-man army, mobilizing the efforts of so many staff in preparing reports, collecting information, supervising cleaning, painting, and doing the million things that we all saw him do.

As a colleague wrote to him after the NAAC peer team visit, “I want to take the opportunity to congratulate you and your team for an excellent academic presentation and for the efficient coordination and organization of the NAAC visit. We may know the grade/marks later, but whatever these may be, you and your team made the UoH community proud of its achievements.

I would also like to acknowledge and salute your personal commitment, dedication and devotion to the University; it is rare to find this today. You not only put together and presented an academic assessment through the voluminous report documenting the achievements of the various Departments and Centres and Schools but also highlighted the small and big endeavors made by the teaching, non teaching and student community. As a member of the campus residential community I want to particularly thank you for efforts you made to improve our environment and ambience and make the campus a clean and aesthetic place to live in. In ensuring this, you went beyond the call of duty.“

we-try-harder-tvlowcost-australia There are some advantages to not being No. 1 – one tries harder to achieve excellence… There will be time enough to discuss what all needs improving at the University- starting with the infrastructure, both physical and academic. But we should find both the time and the will to bring about some real changes, to earn the higher grades that we all know that we are capable of. Till then, we should keep trying.

See an interview on the local tv station: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=57gT5J8wrxE#aid=P-sgiBrV7IE

CKN: The Campus Knowledge Network

Yesterday’s Distinguished Lecture by Ashok Venkitaraman was exciting in more ways than one. First thing- it was a superb lecture. Great material, excellent presentation, very thought provoking and truly inspiring. And the best part was that you can see it again, here. And again. And tell your friends they can see it via the National Knowledge Network (NKN) all over the campus, and all across the nation.

mapThe NKN is a state-of-the-art multi-gigabit pan-India network for providing a unified high speed network backbone for all knowledge related institutions in the country. The purpose of such a knowledge network goes to the very core of the country’s quest for building quality institutions with requisite research facilities and creating a pool of highly trained professionals. The NKN will enable scientists, researchers and students from different backgrounds and diverse geographies to work closely for advancing human development in critical and emerging areas.

This is just the beginning, I hope. We should have all our Distinguished Lectures made available to all Universities on the NKN, and as you can see from the map on the right, that network is pretty extensive. In some ways this would be better than just putting them on UoHTube, but since it is in addition to that, it only widens our range.

inaugural_lecure_sk_udgata_140214

Our Campus Knowledge Network needs strengthening, though. Too often our ivory tower is actually more like a set of ivory minarets, each housing a School, Department or Centre, isolated even from each other. To that end, starting this Valentine’s Day, the University begins its Inaugural Lecture Series, an ongoing set of colloquia that will be delivered by newly appointed Professors. These lectures are to be very general and accessible to colleagues from all disciplines, and are open to students and faculty from all across the University. The first of these will be given by Professor Siba Udgata of the School of Computer and Information Sciences: February 14, 2014 at 3:00 pm in the Raman Auditorium.

Siba works on Wireless Sensor Networks, crucial to many aspects of the ubiquitous computing environment that we inhabit. A great opportunity for us all to learn about the work that he and his group are doing in the area of green computing among other things.

We do need to cross the many divides that separate the two or more cultures that inhabit our academic landscape, and it requires not just the effort of the lecturer to reach out to a diverse audience, but also the effort of the audience to listen and learn. I hope that our community on the campus can learn to engage with ourselves and the variety of scholarly work that is going on here at home, namely our very own campus knowledge network!