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  • February 2009
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  • November 2008

Open Predictive Analytics

Piyush Verma	Open Predictive Analytics
Institute/Affiliation	KDE/ Mpower Mobile Inc.
Abstract	The talk orients about a framework that provides the power of predictive statistical analytics to the applications handling time-indexed content. This aims at bridging the Industrial need of BI [ Business Intelligence ] with the existing data oriented sources. The components of the talk shall be: 1. The concept & need of BI. 2. Scientific Techniques to be used. 2. The Planned architecture. 3. Areas where this could be used, which are many.

Community metrics - Measuring free software activity

Rahul Sundaram	Community metrics - Measuring free software activity
Institute/Affiliation	Red Hat
Abstract	Measuring community growth in a free and open source software project is a interesting challenge. How many users do you have? How active are your contributors are some of the key questions every successful project should be asking itself. There are some creative ways to measure this and there is a lot of value in doing so. This talk will present some ideas based on what has been done in high profile projects and what we can do to improve it.

The answer to Google Earth, Universe and Everything Else

Shashank Singh	The answer to Google Earth Universe and Everything Else
Institute/Affiliation	Geodesic Limited
Abstract	Marble is a leading Open Source Virtual Globe application , which from it's very inception has been aiming to be a unified platform for bringing Open-Geo Content providers like Open Street Map , Wikipedia Geo Project to Desktop Users in a easy way. The Intention of this talk is to introduce listeners to world of Open Content , Marble and their relevance today . The talk would also try to explore diffrences between Open Content and Freely available content with respect to Geo-Data . Examples like Panormaio , Wikipedia Geo Tagged project, Twitter -GeoData, open Street Map would be expolred in relavant detail. "Google Earth is copyrighted software owned by Google"

Wikieducator – towards freely accessible educational content

Dr. Savithri Singh	Wikieducator: towards freely accessible educational content
Institute/Affiliation	Principal, Acharya Narendra Dev College, Delhi University
Abstract	The Wikieducator was launched in 2006, specifically for on-line creation of educational resources collaboratively. The Wikieducator is financially supported by Commonwealth of Learning, Vancouver, Canada. Since the Wikieducator targets teachers and educators for content creation, the community feels the need to promote learning of wiki skills as well as spreading the understanding of Open Educational Resources. The COL funds Learning for Content (L4C) Workshops in the Commonwealth countries that also helps build the WikiEducator community. All materials submitted to WikiEducator are licensed under the Creative Commons CC-BY-SA 2.5 copyright license which permits copying, editing and free reuse of the materials, with attribution. An India Chapter of Wikieducator was launched on 15 November 2008 in order to promote the development India-specific Open Educational Resources in the country. There is need for development of contexual, language and culture specific materials in India and provide free access to learning materials.

Educational Resource Planning (ERP)

Sanjeev Singh	Educational Resource Planning (ERP): Transforming Higher Education through FOSS
Institute/Affiliation	University of Delhi, South Campus
Abstract	In the last few years, ICT approach has gathered increasing interests, both in formal and non-formal higher education system of India. As some of ICT solutions in different application domains have achieved huge success in their respective area of concern. Academic interests in this collaborative, community driven development has also grown considerably, arising from various backgrounds. In India, the higher education system is governed mainly by two regulatory bodies viz. UGC (University Grants Commission) for University system and AICTE (All India Council for Technical Education) for higher technical education. It is worth noticing that formal higher education, under University system is almost 100% funded by UGC or state government; while the government supports only 20% of the technical education and rest 80% of higher technical education is run by the private institutions. These institutions of diverse academic infrastructure normally procure the technology to make their infrastructure richer rather than adopting it as per their curriculum requirements. This paper intends to show the potential of ICT solutions backed by open source to make significant contribution in the academic institutions of plural academic and financial structure. One of the first major steps for higher education that plan to act in this context is to accept that open source approach has its own communication culture. It is also illustrated on the basis of a case study in which a open source supported ICT framework was implemented to build a new and much improved learning environment. The author hope that the open source supported ICT approach will encourage more and more institutions to officially adopt this much affordable solution to strengthen academic communities and achieve higher academic benchmarks.

Opensource Tools for Managing a Data Centre

Gagandeep Singh Sapra	Opensource Tools for Managing a Data Centre
Institute/Affiliation	System 3 Net Technologies Pvt. Ltd.
Abstract	I run India's only carrier neutral non ISP Owned Data Center based out of New Delhi. When we started out back in 1996, money was hard to come by (well it usually is for an entrepreneur), and tools such as HP Openview were unthinkable. Over the last 12 years, we have written scripts and adopted the finest NMS platforms, all running Opensource to manage our Data Centers and Servers globally, from our NOC Here in New Delhi.

Scaling Django databases

Supreet Sethi	Scaling Django databases
Institute/Affiliation
Abstract	Django takes you longway towards your application without knowing details of database you are using. This helps ease the pains of using databases. But after making such application, scaling is one question which remains un-answered. How to scale django database to n-level is theme of the talk. - Query optimizations - Indexing - Replication

Free Internet access on paid Wifi networks

Goldwyn Rodrigues	Free Internet access on paid Wifi networks
Institute/Affiliation	SuSE, Novell
Abstract	There are a lot of wireless paid networks available across the world, in hotels, airports, fast-food joints etc. The client can however associate with an AP without authorization, but Internet access is limited - all traffic is blocked and HTTP(S) is re-routed to a authenticating webserver. Most implementations have serious flaw, and Internet can be accessed without paying, using a simple ssh tunnel.

Gach: doing the grunt work

Rakesh Pandit	Gach: doing the grunt work
Institute/Affiliation	Fedora Project, Redhat
Abstract	Fedora is known for setting high standards in RPM packaging. With a repository that is growing each day, and our emphasis on working upstream we have a collection of packages that makes us proud, our derived distributors happy and our competitors envious. However to maintain high standards we need to make sure that package review requests get the necessary time and attention to meet the large queue of new submissions. Gach is an effort to take away the grunt work from the review process and make it easier for both the reviewer and the submitter to get an initial idea about the quality of their packages by taking a Spec/SRPM pair and running it through Gach and getting a report. It will be possible to do periodic audits of the entire tree and it will be also be possible to go beyond detecting build failures and uncover a whole bunch of other violations as well. This might be lucrative to third parties, having a stake in the quality of the distribution (eg., derived distributors like CentOS, academic or enterprise users, etc.), to carry out regular quality analysis on our repositories. Currently it is difficult, albeit possible, to do this using a mix of RPMLint, Mock and some ad-hoc scripts. Since Gach ties together these utilities, and adds a few customized Fedora specific checks written by the Fedora developers themselves, one can rest assured that the generated reports are in accordance with the latest guidelines approved by the Fedora Packaging Committee. Regarding the design it takes a Spec or source RPM or even RPM through its feeder and does a review and posts its report via its reporter interface. Feeder will have different interfaces to get input from Bugzilla or any generic URI. Similarly, reports can be provided as Bugzilla comments or as a local file. Our process also includes(very much obviously) running rpmlint on input files. We plan to push all guidelines checks to upstream rpmlint. But there are some hybrid checks which are fedora specific require input from logs generated via builders or multiple file inspection and are very much out of scope of rpmlint will need to be kept in Gach. (Check table) is were inspecting each checks one by one and decide on which are programmable and which are not, takes place. Plan is to speed up automating guidelines once structural architecture get working with very basic capabilities and later on concentrate on automating guidelines. We plan to keep checks categorized to distributions and keeping all FHS, Single Specification etc guidelines separate so that in future this feature can be ported to other rpm based distributions e.g smolt has been ported to all major distributions. My talk will explain the usability, and wonderful design of this infrastructure feature which we are proposing for fedora 11. And how it integrates with already existing fedora services, making them more efficient together. Few useful links: * Home Page https://fedorahosted.org/gach/wiki * Browse Source Code https://fedorahosted.org/gach/browser * Mailing List https://fedorahosted.org/mailman/listinfo/gach * Structural Design https://fedorahosted.org/gach/wiki/arch_image

Developing Open Educational Resources: WikiEducator-Gargi 2009 - A Step Forward

Dr. Gita Mathur and Dr. Promila Kumar	Developing Open Educational Resources: WikiEducator-Gargi 2009 - A Step Forward
Institute/Affiliation	Gargi College (University of Delhi)
Abstract	WikiEducator, a website for educators and teachers, launched by the Commonwealth of Learning in 2006, has grown into a dynamic and exciting worldwide community of educators who believe passionately that learning materials should be free and open to all. This effort builds on experiences of the free software movement and licensing options like Creative Commons and GFDL designed to protect the freedom of content resources. Gargi College, University of Delhi, organized a WikiEducator-Gargi Workshop on Open Educational Resources recently for arts, science and commerce faculties of the college. This jumpstarted thirty one educationists as WikiEducators commited to contributing educational content, and led to establishment of a WikiEducator-Gargi College Multi-Disciplinary Academic Advancement Hub. All contributions by Gargi academia are being linked to this hub, which in turn is linked to WikiEducator-India. Emphasis in the workshop was on the use of free and open source software. This resulted in formation of Gargi College Linux User's Group of Gargi faculty. In this paper we will talk about the objectives, challenges, community participation and technical hurdles in this project. We will also discuss need of support from the free software user's community for the long-term success of this open knowledge initiative.
About the Speakers	Dr. Gita Mathur Reader (Associate Professor) in Botany http://www.wikieducator.org/User:Gita_Mathur Dr. Promila Kumar Reader (Associate Professor) in Mathematics http://www.wikieducator.org/User:Promilakumar

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