READING INSPIRATION DAY 2021: REPORT

 READING INSPIRATION DAY 2021

We salute APJ Abdul Kalam and celebrate his monumental achievements as a Scientist, Scholar and the President of India. We fondly remember his passion for teaching education and for reading. Dr. Kalam truly ignited young minds with the power to think and innovate. Dr. Kalam is not with us today but his thoughts, ideals and vision for India live on forever.

As part of the virtual celebrations, the library conducted the following two events in collaboration with the NDLI Club:

1. Online Quiz on the Life and Times of Dr. A.P. J. Abdul Kalam

2. Online Book Review Competition

3. Book Exhibition for the faculty members of SFIT

                                                    Poster for the Quiz Contest

24 students participated in the Online Quiz conducted as part of the Reading Inspiration Day.

Online Book Review Contest

Book Exhibition: 160 books were kept in the exhibition.

22 books were selected by faculty members (Ms. Josna Jose and Ms. Varsha Thandasarry) of the Electrical Engineering Department for their Departmental Library from the Book Exhibition.

As part of the virtual events, the library launched the following:

Wakelet on Dr. A.P. J. Abdul Kalam - https://wakelet.com/wake/3t6vUJO2hXrmqHe4MRfsF

Padlet: https://padlet.com/sfitlibraryreference/zs4m6k35fys49ulw

Booklets on Cyber Safety & Security for students

 Be Safe in Cyber World: Do's and Dont's for Teachers

 Be Safe in Cyber World: Do's and Dont's for Students

For More resources, please visit the following URL:

https://ciet.nic.in/pages.php?id=booklet-on-cyber-safetysecurity&ln=en&ln=en

Quiz on Cyber Safety & Security

October is celebrated as National Cyber Security Awareness Month (NCSAM) globally. In order to bring attention to Cyber Security and as a concentrated effort to stay safe and secure online, NCSAM is celebrated all over the world. It is an initiative to put conscious efforts towards ensuring better cybersecurity hygiene and incorporate stronger security measures.

With this objective, DSCI drove a month-long awareness campaign under the guidance of the National Cyber Security Secretariat. The campaign disseminated various content artifacts and reached out to 3.25 million citizens throughout the country.

Many interesting quizzes have been launched on the myGov portal to test the knowledge and readiness level of citizens around Cyber Security. The overall objective of the Quiz was to create Cyber Security awareness among citizens, to achieve a better security posture for the country, and to empower online users to remain Safe Online. 

Participate and earn reward certificates: https://quiz.mygov.in/quiz/securing-digital-space/

Source: https://www.mygov.in/

This HR leader has an engineering degree

hey say there’s gold but I’m

looking for thrills

You can get your hands on

whatever we find

Because I’m only coming

along for the ride

Protima Achaya loves music, but her all-time favourite remains Pink Floyd’s album The Dark Side of the Moon.

Born in Mysuru to an army officer, Protima had been to six schools by the time she was in class 12. She did not have any place to sink her roots into. But this life made her comfortable with change.

Protima was good at studies. She had different ‘what I want to be when I grow up’ answers at different points of time – playback singer, hospitality, businesswoman, chief of staff at Tata Group. Protima finally landed up in the engineering college now known as NIT Surathkal for a BE in electronics and communication.

Being one of the few girls in the college, life was not easy. It was Protima’s first experience in navigating her way in a male dominated world. And she literally rocked. She joined the college band, and became the first girl in the history of the college to perform on stage.

Post college, she worked in an electronics consulting company, and then in the defence research establishment, LRDE, in its digital signal processing lab.

Protima then took a seven-year break from paid work to look after her kid.

Her second innings at paid work was different. She was briefly in an AutoCAD startup, and then she took up a completely unexpected role – as festival coordinator for the Udaipur film festival. She went on to work with the team that created the country’s first ever reality show, Meri Awaz Suno.

In 2000, she had to move to Bengaluru, where she joined Sasken. Here, she burned the midnight oil to learn the ropes of HR. She credits Sasken’s leadership for giving her the opportunity to prove herself. “They appreciated my point of view, which was not grounded in HR theory but more from real-life experiences. So success is not always tied to a degree. I do not hold an HR degree, but that was the start of my HR career, and I have been in it for 21 years,” she says.

After 10 years with Sasken, Protima moved to Cisco, and then to NetApp. She now leads HR and talent acquisition for Apac and India at NetApp. “HR today has to be a lot more agile in responding to the needs and expectations of employees,” she says. 

Source: https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/business/india-business/this-hr-leader-has-an-engineering-degree/articleshowprint/86982239.cms

 

Raj Reddy: India’s only Turing Award winner, AI pioneer

TNN | Oct 13, 2021, 07.25 AM IST

Raj Reddy, professor of computer science and robotics at Carnegie Mellon University, is the first person of Asian origin to receive the Turing Award, often called the Nobel Prize in computer science. He’s still the only Indian to win the award.

Reddy, who comes from a farming family in Chittoor in Andhra Pradesh, is an artificial intelligence (AI) pioneer. He’s been researching AI since the 1960s, when few in the world knew much about it. Reddy says AI has transformed the world in the last 10 years in a way that previously seemed would take at least 50 years.

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“I joined the field when the subject was starting off. I was at the right place at the right time. Now we have computers that are a trillion times more powerful, memories that are a trillion times larger. Back then, the first computer had just 4 KB of memory and if you could not fit your programme, you had to recompute. So yes, things have changed exponentially and more so since 2007, when the first smartphone came in, enabling extensive communication,” he says.

Reddy, who is best known for his pioneering work in the field of speech technology, encourages aspiring engineering students to take up computer science as their preferred subject, but cautions them to not limit themselves to the subject. He himself was a civil engineer, before he did a PhD in AI in Stanford University.

“Most of the education in the US has that broad liberal arts focus, where you end up spending just two out of the four years of engineering studying the core subjects. The rest is studying languages, history, philosophy, and, during our times, we would bemoan all the IIT students at Carnegie who had not read or seen a Shakespeare play,” he chuckles.

Reddy says the Indian engineering curriculum should similarly be shrunk to two years, and students should be asked to take up 20 different courses from 20 subjects for the other two. And students, he says, should demonstrate excellence even in these other subjects, and not study them just to get a passing grade.

AI, Reddy says, has made the most striking impact on speech recognition and natural language processing, facilitating automatic translation of different languages. “You speak in Telugu and I speak in Gujarati and both understand each other because the phone is translating it and feeding me the Telugu translation instantly. While that is still some time away, the concept has already been demonstrated by Google and Microsoft for many languages,” he says.

Reddy says speaking to computers and the computer having the ability to understand and process it was something that could not be done even 10 years ago. “It is now possible through deep learning. While it is possible in English, think of a situation when an Indian can speak to the computer in his mother tongue and it can talk back to him. Then, all of a sudden, you are empowering many semi-literate people by expanding their knowledge base,” he says.

Source: https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/business/india-business/raj-reddy-indias-only-turing-award-winner-ai-pioneer/articleshowprint/86982304.cms

Reading Inspiration Day 2021: e Quiz 1

 

St. Francis Institute of Technology Library & NDLI Club, Borivali, Mumbai organizes Quiz on “READING INSPIRATION DAY OR VAACHAN PRERANA DIWAS 2021”, to commemorate the Birth Anniversary of Dr. A.P.J. Abdul Kalam on 15th October.

e Quiz Link: https://forms.gle/xdy4J9DWD4ngWqbS8

Reading Inspiration Day 2021: Online Book Review Contest

 

Dear SFITians

A Warm Greeting from….

St. Francis Institute of Technology

On the occasion of 'Vaachan Prerana Divas' (15th October), Birth Anniversary of our Former President Dr. A.P.J. Abdul Kalam 

 “NDLI Club” Invites you to participate in an Online Book Review Competition

🗓️ Date: 22nd October 2021 

⏱️ Time: 5:00 pm to 6:00pm

📌Registration is Free

 Registration Link: https://forms.gle/7vdwiRxujn7zEtKT7

 

Last Date for Registration: Friday, 15th October, 2021

Note: 

Registration is mandatory

 Rules and Guidelines: 

Students are required to review book other than textbooks and religious books.

One entry per student

Only SFIT students, faculty and non-teaching staff are allowed to take part in the contest.

The book review must be uploaded in pdf on the Google form itself.

Time allotted is strictly five minutes for presentation..

Medium of presentation English / Hindi /Marathi.

Join the meeting 10 minutes before the given time.

Decision of the Judges will be final and binding.

E-certificate will be provided to all the participants through the NDLI account present for the event.

All the other details will be given on the WhatsApp group from time to time.

 Join the whatsApp group for further information

WhatsApp group Link:

https://chat.whatsapp.com/DxXLUiJ34swKLa17aRrvXz

📌e-certificates will be generated through the NDLI account for all the participants  present for the event.

WISH YOU ALL THE BEST

Best Regards,

Dr. Sincy George

Principal

St. Francis Institute of Technology,

Borivali, Mumbai.

For any query contact:

Viral Soni

8898106479

Paul Fernandes

76660 90565

Chinmayee Bhange

9820336910