Connecting Archives - And then...

Taking Wing

10561790_10152201109211053_3239163086169552431_n There is a brilliant art show in town at the Salar Jung Museum, a group show by the outgoing MFA students of our University. Paintings, sculpture, prints, installations- its all there in great variety and the exploration of different techniques and themes is amazing!

As the pictures in this post attest, there are artists finding their sophisticated expressions through a variety of media, and scattered across the gallery one can see installations made of matchsticks, lace, umbrellas, scupltures constructed out of wood, scrap… literally anything that could be used. The range is, to put it mildly, spectacular.

How strong the breeze, How precious the flight– the title of the show is taken from the feminist poet Andrea Gibson’s The Moon is a Kite. The fragment brings to mind a wonderful image, of the fledgling artists finding their wings and taking strength from the training here- the breeze- to launch themselves into the wide open world- the flight. And as the dreams in one of the installations, the dreamcatcher on the right, swirl around in the gallery, the choice of title seems very appropriate…

But more, there is actually a double bonus at the Salar Jung- the adjacent gallery is home to another UoH linked show, by our honorary alumnus K. G. Subramanyam, the legendary artist who so graciously accepted an honorary doctorate from our University last year. Titled “New Works”, the scale and scope of the paintings on display belie the artist’s 90 years- Mani-da, as he is more popularly known has admirable discipline, and the phenomenal ability to work in concentration. The few images of the paintings on display give an idea of what feasts await the visitor.

We are very fortunate to have such great persons associated with the University, and are very happy that the students’ show was inaugurated by him. One could not have asked for a stronger breeze to lift them up and propel them into the uncertainties of the everyday world and the vicissitudes of life beyond studenthood.

The show is on until the 16th of August for all to view and enjoy. By going out and showing our work in a public space, the University affirms, yet again, that we are not just of the city, we are a University for the city of Hyderabad…

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.

The 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.

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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!

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.

All courses that are offered at the University will find their way to the Courses Page: http://courses.uohyd.ac.in

There 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.

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,

where an institution is located
what it is about, and
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-

Bridging the Gap(ps)

I have remarked earlier that our campus seems to be quite adept in not transmitting as much information as might be possible quite easily: the informal Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy that seems to operate on so many fronts. And being connected, something that’s inevitable in these times, is more via the giant Facebook in the sky than on closer, campus based entities.

I don’t know how many have been looking at the UoH Herald, the online newsletter being run by the PRO’s office with some help from the S N School’s Department of Communication. Their byline: UoH HERALD is an attempt to save paper but connect with the world on the happenings on the campus. That said, they are doing a great job, and for the most part offer a very comprehensive news service for many things that happen on campus.

As many of you have (woefully!) remarked, we really do need a better website– the one we have at present hardly does us justice. Apart from being difficult to navigate, it is also a wonderful place to hide any information one needs to! Some effort is being made to change that, and hopefully the next academic year will see us with a new website. Meanwhile, there are some plans afoot (and near at hand) to change the way in which we connect within the campus in the coming months, and while I will post about things as they happen, I thought I would alert the campus community to the first of the bridging initiatives that we are trying.

UoH Google Apps. With the help of Google we have created a service for the whole campus community that give each member of the campus personalized email accounts. You can choose to be (details on how to get the account is given below) Your.Name@uohyd.ac.in or even Your.Initials@uohyd.ac.in. This has the same features and custom settings as the ubiquitous Gmail with 25 GB space and the usual set of frills…

Google Apps comes with a Calendar function which enables a master online calendar for UoH. Every public event can be posted, sharing information and enabling all to participate. (SMS alerts also possible!) Profiles of people, Departments and Centres, Seminars, events all possible at profiles.uohyd.ac.in/. This service is free and is open for each member of the UoH Community to edit and design. I hope that all Departments, Schools- faculty and students will make good use of it. Essentially unlimited space will be available for storing materials like lecture talks, audio, video, podcasts, and so on.

All this starts with getting your mail id: write to gapps@uohyd.ac.in to request one, along with a scanned copy of your currently valid UoH Identity Card, and a choice of username (give two options in case one is taken already…).

What else can we do to connect? Send in your suggestions to me at my new account: rr@uohyd.ac.in.