I also wants to know whether we are in position to initiate mega project on freeware. I wish to know reaction of community whether we are ready for this type of work ( I mean Indians are ready to contribute for public). We are starting one such project CRDD for developing computational resources for drug discovery. May I know view of other members on this project.

Regards

Raghava

Indian scientists want to compete with the world and develop much more for that. However, there seem to be less number of plans for research on Indian life, Indian soil, Indian seas, Indian pollution, Indian food, Indian habits, Indian heritage and Indian people—made of such a huge mass of people on earth. I list few examples…

(Let us include only those topics where science can contribute)

O Mumbai faces flood almost every rainy season—WHY SO? People complain that Municipal Corporation should do something, but also, there is no apparent reason known from scientific point of view. If we know the reason then we can stop the damage or make it less effective.

O There is a large number of crimes every year but not much science is used to solve any case. Police rarely approaches scientists and the scientists are not much aware of the need of police. However, I heard of police tracking mobile phones or recording the chatting (only in cities) but much more can be done.

O A large population faces pain in back regularly including many ladies but no study on WHY such a large number? What can be done, etc.

O Also, a large number of population do fasting on particular occasions and no study exists on such fasting—how long fast is ok for body or what should be taken during fast, or how body functions during fasting etc. etc. I heard of some Jains doing it for weeks. They should know what happens to them.

O Why is there no study on Ayurveda to verify some results and make them public?

Let us think of how much and how many people are aware of day to day science?

O Their habits of watching TV for long hours and taking any food on the way, and who knows the side effects? Their irregularities in life, etc. etc. may affect their health.

O How much spice is ok for the body and how Indian food should be taken in every season in India for a good health?

O How trees are good for the environment? How about some plants in home?

O Common public is not aware about Indian science and its progress except that their children may enter into an IIT or not.

I have just done a 1 year course in clinical research and I am looking for a job in this field. I have posted my resume to job portals like www.yellojobs.com and naukri.com. But I am not getting any interview call. Please help.

If you’d like to see new local hubs for Indian cities or regions, there’s now a way to vote for this.

• Log in, head to your profile page and click ‘edit your profile’.
• At the top, click ‘change your location’.
• Enter the city or town in which you work. This will set your location.
• Nature Network will then suggest three potential ‘hubs’—regions (not necessarily cities) that may become full-fledged hubs like Boston and London once enough people from that area sign up. Click the one that you belong to.

If you don’t see an option you like, feel free to get in touch with me. We can add to or tweak the proposed hubs according to the wishes of users.

The Workshop faculty is Prof. Sargur Srihari, SUNY Distinguished Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the University at Buffalo, State University of New York, USA and Visiting Faculty at ISiM. Professor Srihari, author of more than 300 research papers including 6 US patents, is the founding director of CEDAR (Centre of Excellence for Document Analysis and Recognition) and a well known expert in pattern recognition and Machine Learning.

Focus of the Workshop:

Balancing theory and practice, this Workshop, will focus on the following applications:

· Information Retrieval,
· Language Processing,
· Document Analysis
· Speech Recognition

Objectives of the workshop:

· Introduce participants to concepts of ML including concepts of clustering, Gaussian mixtures and dimensionality reduction
· Enable the use of the state of the art methods and tools in ML techniques
· Provide an overview of the major areas of applications of ML
· An in depth understanding of ML applications in the four focus areas – Information Retrieval; Language Processing; Document Analysis and Speech Recognition
· Provide hands on training on the key techniques

Course Outline

Module 1. Introduction: What is ML; Discriminative vs Generative ; Regression Example
Module 2: Probability Theory ; Decision Theory ; Information Theory ; Probability Distributions ; Linear Regression Models ; Linear Basis Functions ; Bias-Variance Trade-off ; Bayesian Linear Regression
Module 3. Neural Networks and Kernel Machines: Biological Motivation; Perceptrons ; Multilayer Networks and Backpropagation ; Representational Power; Applications ; Support Vector Machines
Module 4. Graphical Models and EM: Bayesian Networks; Conditional Independence; Markov Random Fields ; Inference in Graphical Models ; K-means Clustering ; Mixtures of Gaussians
Module 5. Sampling Methods: Basic Sampling Methods; Monte Carlo Methods, Gibbs Sampling
Module 6: Sequential Data : Markov Models ; Hidden Markov Models ; Extensions to HMMs ; Linear Dynamical Systems ; Conditional Random Fields
Module 7. ML Applications with focus on Information Retrieval, Document Analysis and Recognition, Natural Language Processing, Data Mining

Participant Profile

This Workshop is designed for academicians and professionals in Computer Science and Engineering, Statistics and Social Sciences. The workshop is mainly targeted for:

· Academicians and industry practitioners of ML
· Professionals working in the areas of Information Retrieval, Language Processing, Document Analysis and Speech Recognition
· Researchers working in the application areas but new to ML
· Students pursuing projects in ML

Workshop Highlights and Benefits to Participants

· Get a panoramic view of ML
· Understand the basics of ML
· Learn the latest tools and techniques used in ML
· Get hands on experience on developing basic biometric, character and image recognition modules
· Gain knowledge of implementing advanced classifiers and boosting
· Get exposure to new arenas of research and projects

For more details Please contact Angrosh at 9886970411 or mail to office@isim.ac.in

There is a lot of competition everywhere. Every nation is encouraging people for the ‘development’. Our society is also orienting towards ‘development’. We researchers believe that we contribute to the betterment of lives. All is finally leading to where? Will we be happier and healthier than ever if we will be ‘developed’? Or we also need something else to add in the definition of DEVELOPMENT?

Of course, materialistic development is important but not at the cost of something important like health and hapiness of the people. At the end of the day, we want healthy, happy and peaceful lives in the world. How fast are we achieving this?

When we think of development, we should perhaps also ponder over these side-effects of the development, like, possibly we may solve old problems and may invite new troubles (perhaps some BIG troubles too). For examples, unhealthy lives or a lot of pollution and change of weather or less social and lonely people or extinction of some animals/trees/birds/even humans . Development causes tight competition everywhere, sometimes global competition too, which may also invite problems like mental diseases and blood pressure or unsatisfied society to name few.

I mean to say, how many parameters should we include to define the REAL DEVELOPMENT OF A COUNTRY (made of happy and healthy people)?

The workshop includes a tutorial and presentations of selected works in the field of systems biology. Papers of high quality are selected from three rounds of reviewing from elite panelists.

More details can be had by visiting the following page:
http://www.infocybereng.org/imeti2008/

If you wish to participate or send the abstracts/papers for the worskhop, please contact me at prash@ruc.dk

Sincerely
Prash on behalf of organizers of the workshop
Systems Biology in present day bioinformatics

Prashanth Suravajhala
PhD Fellow
http://ruc.dk/_prash/

“Every man alone is sincere. At the entrance of a second person, hypocrisy
begins.” ~ Ralph Waldo

Call for papers: Systems Biology in present day Bioinformatics

It’s Indian Republic Day ! Celebrate the free spirit of India.

An average fresh postdoctoral fellow in US got five times salary than senior scientist in India. My salary in USA is more than 12 times than my salary in India (during my short visits to USA). Now some people will say why money is important for a scientis. It is beacuse they have family, they also live in society, they also need all facilities, above of all they work hard. This is one of the reason our scientist visit foriegn countries. Its difficult to attract tallent with present salary system. Due to salary system science profession is not popular in India, kids wants to become manager, civil servent, engineer or doctor but not scientist. It is because, we do not see any crorepati scientist, where it is common in other profession. Most of us we expect that other will sacrifies for country why we should sacrifice at end of day nobody sacrifice. It is not India but it is all over world the research output is propotion to budget spend on research. This is the reason USA is able to attract more talent than other countries. I believe per dollor research output is very high in India. The question is whether situation in India is improving our not. It is improving because we have lot of grants nowadys for scientific research. Today, we may afford to costly equipment in India as Govt. is giving good funds. Only problem is salary, though getting grant in India is easy than getting grant in USA but it is not linked with salary. It means your salary will be same whether you got grant or not, perform or not, which is a major problem. I can easily get grant of few crores but I can not pay more than fifteen thousand to my Postdoc. Our institute produce more than 20 PhD every year most of them are working abroad other side we are not able to fill our scientific positions. Some time we feel that we are simply training them to work abroad. We can not retain our PhD as we can not offer attractive salary. We may also produce good research if we got money and freedom to spend money the way we wish to spend. In that case we may pay high salary to our work force (PDF or other staff) in order to attract best tallent in the world. In my view money is major factor behind science other factors are associated with it. It is not that all our scientific work force is happy abroad but they are their because they are getting more salary.

I would like to thank the nature india team for doing a gr8 job, although i am not sure when the site will be launched.

I would like to know the latest research goin in the field of Diagnostics in India.
How is technology going in terms of medical devices or instruments that are used in the field of life science research eg HPLC, Luminesence, FPLC, mass spectrometry. Are ther no companies that manufacture these instruments in India so that we can get a lot of instruments at cheap cost.

Regards,
Vaibhav

Do India have to sign Fissile Material Cut off Treaty, which would prohibit further production of weapons-grade uranium and plutonium.

‘As part of the US-India nuclear deal, India has refused to place under international safeguards its stock of spent fuel from indigenous power reactors, separated plutonium, reprocessing plants, fast breeder reactor program, and several CANDU-type reactors needed to provide the initial fuel for the breeder reactors,’’ said the 164-page report. The report says that Pakistan (60) has more nuclear warheads than India (50).

From: http://www.ndtv.com/convergence/ndtv/story.aspx?id=NEWEN20070030973&ch=10/28/2007%201:35:00%20PM

So what do you think?

Indo-US nuclear deal is good or bad for India?

Shri Sunil Mukhi has identified few reasons that I am summarizing below:

Our education system does not promote creative thinking.

Junior scientists are not encouraged and guided by seniors.

Our scientists aim only to make their mark at national level and avoid facing international competition.

We pull each other down.

We are afraid that we may make mistakes and ruin our career.

Financial aid is restricted to few fields.

Your comments…..