LIRC@SFIT

The government is considering conducting a single entrance examination for admission to all engineering colleges, including private institutions, across the country. The proposed joint entrance examination (JEE) for engineering colleges, which is said to be human resource development (HRD) minister Prakash Javadekar brainchild, could kick in from 2018. The test, pending clearance, will be on the lines of the  national eligibility-cum-entrance exam (NEET ) for entry into medical colleges, sources in the HRD ministry said. It is aimed at bringing transparency to the admission procedure, including checking the practice in some private institutions of extracting a heavy capitation fee from students. “The aim is to make the process more transparent, standardised, and free of corruption and commercialisation,” a government official said. India has more than 3,300 approved engineering colleges affiliated to universities, with an annual approved intake of above 1.6 million st...

The new frontiers of virtual reality Virtual reality can change the way individuals and groups interact, and for those interested in experiencing and sharing its powerful benefits Virtual reality opens the avenues to experience places and time periods otherwise inaccessible to an individual. Virtual reality (VR) has entered its golden age and now has the potential to help people experience episodes and incidences, across time periods, from a uniquely first-person perspective. While VR continues to make its mark on entertainment, it has immense potential to allow people to experience something ground-breaking. It equips people to experience being in two realities at once, making ‘duality of presence’—being present in two ‘worlds’ at once—a possibility. This extrapolation of VR into reality has an extraordinary potential to create greater empathy, understanding, compassion, and connection to the ‘real world’. Virtual reality has the capability to make one ...

Source: Daily News & Analysis dated December 19, 2016

Microsoft releases MS MARCO dataset to train AI systems by MIKE WHEATLEY UPDATED 22:39 EST . 19 December 2016 Microsoft Corp. has made yet another big bet in its quest to help lead the development of artificial intelligence with the release of a new dataset containing 100,000 questions and answers. Called MS MARCO , or Microsoft Machine Reading Comprehension, the dataset is being made available for researchers wishing to train their AI systems. The company says the anonymized data is based on real-world queries typed into its Bing search engine, and that the aim is to make AIs better able to understand questions in a conversational context than they are now. Microsoft explains that while virtual assistants like Cortana and Siri are already quite adept at reciting facts and figures like the population of certain cities or previous World Series winners, they’re n...

Carnegie Mellon and Hear2Read Make Free Software Available A visually impaired boy in India uses open-source software developed by CMU and the Hear2Read project that converts electronic text written in Indian languages into messages he can hear. BY Byron Spice - Thu, 2016-08-04 09:30    Millions of visually impaired people in India may benefit from free, open-source software for Android devices that converts electronic text written in Indian languages into messages they can hear. The text-to-speech (TTS) software, developed by Carnegie Mellon University in collaboration with the Hear2Read project, can now be downloaded free of charge from Google Play . Tamil is the first language offered, with subsequent releases of seven major languages — Hindi, Bengali, Gujarati, Marathi, Kannada, Punjabi and Telugu — expected over the remainder of the year. Four out of five people i...

According to data tabled in the Lok Sabha by the Human Resources Development Minister on December 5, 2016, 18 per cent positions of teachers in government-run primary schools and 15 per cent in secondary schools are vacant nationwide. Educationist Dev Lahiri talks about whats plaguing the system. What’s the biggest problem our education system is facing? Our teachers. It’s the last choice for most, for various reasons. They just want to get the job done with and make money from tuitions. Most teachers have very little connect with students and don’t know, for instance, how to keep them engaged on days they are ‘switched off’ and don’t want to know Maths or Science. Good teachers link curriculum to life in a very imaginative way. How do we get the right kind of people on board? We need to put out the message strongly that teachers are the backbone of society. Thanks to the Nehruvian ethos, right after independence the emphasis was on engineering and medicine, then as corporate...

1.What is e-PGPathshala? e-PGPathshala is a one portal under which High quality, curriculum-based,interactive content in different subjects across all disciplines of social sciences, arts, fine arts & humanities, natural & mathematical sciences, linguistics and languages is being developed.An MHRD, under its National Mission on Education through ICT (NME-ICT), has assigned work to the UGC for development of e-content in 77 subjects at postgraduate level. The content and its quality is the key component of education system. 2.Terminology in e-PGp and MOOCs 3.What is difference between e-PG Pathshala and SWAYAM? e-PG Pathshala provides e-content for post-graduate courses in various subjects in four quadrant. It can be accessed as Open Educational Resource where no teacher support/hand-holding for students is available. SWAYAM is a web platform on which MOOCs shall be hosted. These MOOCs shall have teacher-student groups where MOOC coordinator/tutor/tea...