Information for applicants who have University exams on May 25th, 2009.
Date for Written Test and Interview for shortlisted candidates: May 25th, 2009.
Reporting Time: 9:00 am.
Reporting Venue: F. C. Kohli Auditorium, CSE Department (Kanwal Rekhi Building).
Schedule:
9am - 9:30am: Registration, address by Convener, Admissions Committee.
9:30am - 11am: Written Test (On Mathematical Aptitude, General Aptitude, Programming Aptitude and Computer Science GATE Syllabus)
11am - 1pm: Presentations by RA supervisors about the various RA positions
1pm- 1:15pm: Filling out RA job choices in order of preference
1:15pm: Interview shortlist will be announced.
1:15pm - 2pm: Lunch Break.
2pm onwards: Interviews for candidates on the interview shortlist
There are the various types of RA jobs available this year in IIT Bombay for CSE M.Techs. There are two major types of jobs: Sysadmin/Programming RAs (RA) and Project RAs (PA). Some jobs may be a mix of these two types of jobs.
In case of Sysadmin/Programming type RAs, you will be the systems administrator for some computer lab in the Institute, or you may be doing programming work for the various centres we have in the Institute. Your supervisor will be the person in charge of the respective centres or labs. In this case you can choose to do your Masters project with any one of the faculty members of the CSE department, as per the allocation process for the other Masters students.
In case of PAs, your supervisor will be a CSE Department faculty member, and you will work on a research and development project that the faculty member is involved in. This will be a project typically sponsored by the government or an industrial entity. You are expected to do your seminar and Masters project in the same area as your PA project, and under the guidance of your PA supervisor. Your PA supervisor may also advise you about which courses to take, etc during your M.Tech. Note that even PAs are often required to carry out general sysadmin/programming duties as required by the faculty supervisor.
If you have further questions you can see this informal FAQ on the 3-year M.Tech. Programme.
The job descriptions for the various types of jobs available this year are given below. Please read the descriptions carefully. You will hear more about this on the day of the interview. On the day of the written test and interview, after the presentations by the RA supervisors, you will be asked to list the jobs you are willing to do, in order of preference.
1. ASC (Application Software Cell) / CDEEP (Centre for Distance Engineering Education Programme)
ASC: Designing, developing, deploying and maintaining Web-based software applications for use by students, faculty and staff of IIT. Today, much of IIT's administrative function runs on software developed by ASC, and IIT Bombay is a leader in the country in development and use of web-based software for grading, registration, fee payment, etc. We use cutting edge technologies and tools, and develop some on our own as well. You will be a part of a very enthusiastic team of employees and RAs, who in addition to their study and work, also party with equal enthusiasm.
a. Programming and development related work: To work in the areas of system administration, compression technologies, integration of audio and video technologies, in linux and windows.
b. Curriculum related work: To help develop methodologies for effective coordination through Moodle the interaction between external students and our TAs and instructors of CSE courses. To help restructure Moodle use for distance participants so as to reduce duplication, improve interaction without intrusion. To help come up with methodologies to improve the quality of our video courses, with a special focus on CSE courses.
It is possible to mix and match the above two requirements depending on the aptitude of the RAs.
2. Systems Administration (Computer Science Dept. Computer Centre, Mechanical Engineering Department)
CSE: Setting up servers and various services like email, proxy, ldap, file server, webserver, news server, webmail, mailman, wiki, printers, backups. Maintenance and upgrading of these servers and services. Setting up and maintenance of Software Lab machines (about 250 machines). Attending to hardware and software requirements of all CSE lab courses, workshops, CEP courses, On line tests for courses, placement office etc. Configuring and maintaining network to the Dept. Trouble shooting of problems in network, servers and services.
ME: Manage the computers and network of Computational Lab of Mechanical Engineering (Windows and Linux Machines). Also Web page development of the lab and setting up multi node cluster platform.
Network Administration (CC) : Computing Center (CC) maintains the IITB Intranet. You will be part of the team who looks after the network, monitors them, develops and deploys various software to protect the network etc.
3. GCC Resource Centre (Prof. Uday Khedker, Prof. A. Sanyal)
Work involves: Understanding essential abstractions in GCC, Designing experiments and assignments for understanding GCC, Developing course material and documentation at appropriate level of abstraction, Research and development, Enhancing GCC by including new research ideas, Measuring the effectiveness of new research ideas, Improving the architecture of GCC, Routine system administration responsibilities, Overall coordination of activities required for holding workshops and tutorials.
4. Automatic Problem Solving/Statistical Machine Translation (Prof. Om Damani)
1. Automatic Problem Solving
Given a
standard class 10 math problem in plain English, can a computer solve
it. This project is quite exploratory in nature and will require
experimenting with several new technologies and catching up with the
state of the art in Artificial Intelligence.
2. Statistical
Machine Translation
Given sufficient annotated data, computer
scientist believe that they can solve any Natural Language Processing
problem without any linguistic knowledge whatsoever. You will get a
chance to apply this belief to Machine Translation, a problem which
is hard even for humans. Check out translate.google.com
and you should plan to better it.
For both problems, no specific or
linguistic background is needed but you should be interested in
languages, programming, math, and probability.
5. Formal methods for test generation (Intel-sponsored)/ Hierarchical verification for large designs (BARC-sponsored) (Prof. Supratik Chakraborty)
The first is a project sponsored by Intel on the development of a symbolic simulation based methodology for approximate test generation. The only requirement I have of the candidate at this point is to have a flair for programming and to learn mathematically oriented background.
The second is a project sponsored by BRNS (Bureau of Research in Nuclear Sciences) on the development of a tool for verification of hierarchically specified hardware designs. The requirement I have for this project is that the candidate should have a liking for programming/building tools and must be enthusiastic about learning new topics.
6. Natural Language Processing: Text Mining, Machine Translation, Cross Lingual Information Retrieval and Wordnets (Prof. Pushpak Bhattacharya)
a. TCS sponsored Laboratory for Intelligent Systems (LIS): An activity on text mining (focus: sentiment detection and text entailment) is to start in collaboration with the ML and TM group at TCS. The candidate should have good programming skills and grasp of statistical and probabilistic techniques. Exposure to NLP and/or Machine Learning wil be an advantage.
b. Any of the projects on Machine Translation, Cross Lingual IR and Wordnets: The work will involve creating tools, resources and interfaces for the mentioned tasks. Good grasp of data structures and algorithms, and good programming skills are needed. Exposure to NLP and Machine learning will be an advantage.
7. Geospatial Information Science and engineering (Prof. Sarda)
Project title : Geospatial Information Science and engineering (proposed)
Description: The advanced research lab will focus on establish R&D thrust in the following primary areas:
· Spatio-temporal data modelling and analysis
· SoA based architectures for Geographic Information
· Geo-visualization and analytics
· Software Engineering for geospatial systems
In addition, the Lab will focus on creating a platform and repository for hosting technologies, applications and prototypes. The Lab will establish research collaborations within India and overseas leading centres and user organizations. These collaborations will help in reaching state-of-art status, identify problem areas, understand standards, products and technologies, and set up educational and training activities to undertake capacity building in the country.
Pre-requisite: interest and background in databases, software development
8. Systems and Networking Group (SyNerG) (Profs. Bhaskar, Puru Kulkarni, Kameswari Chebrolu)
As an RA in the group, you can expect to work on interesting system building projects involving current wireless technologies such as 802.11 (WiFi) 802.15.4 (ZigBee's lower stack), 802.16 (WiMAX). We are currently in the process of building a campus-wide wireless testbed for exploring various research ideas. Our research has a strong component of investigating technical issues specific to India and other developing regions; these technical issues involve cost and power optimization among other traditional criteria.
Someone with some experience with hardware would be good: simple circuits, microcontrollers, PCB design, etc. But this is not absolutely necessary. We can also take students with generally good software kills.
Follow the links below for more information on the projects.
9. CFDVS (Profs. G. Sivakumar/ Kavi Arya)
System and network administration in CFDVS, participation in at least one R&D project in CFDVS (which could lead to MTP), maintaining and enhancing CFDVS web page, talk and paper repository, participation and help in organizing technical workshops etc. (roughly once in 6 months), and blending well with the informal yet academic environment in CFDVS.
10.Mapping and Exploiting ICT Innovations (Prof. Krithi Ramamritham)
11.Software and hardware for Embedded Applications (Prof. Kavi Arya)