TUTORIALS: 21st December 2002.

Goutam Chakraborty of Japan, Sudensha Sarkar of IIT Kharagput and A K Bisoi of Utkal University, Bhubaneswar, the Tutorial Chairs, had initially accepted 12 tutorials. However, 5 of the would be tutorial teachers dropped out due to various personal reasons.

On 21st december, in six institutions, seven tutorials were held. The details about the abstract of the topics and about the tutorial teachers occurs in the final call for particpation , and about attendance, response of the students and other remarks of the tutorial teachers occur in tutorials02 . All the institutions were intimated about the tutorials, and the institutions were told that they could attend any tutorial they like includinng those in other venues. De facto however the major participants in individual tutorials were from the respective institutions.

Around 500 students and some faculty attended these tutorials with details as in tutorials02 as noted above. The feed back from the tutorial teachers was that the response of those who attended was quite good. Most of the tutorial teachers came for the Conference, and the local fall out in this regard (one of the objectives of OITS) was satisfying.

The tutorial teachers were given local hospitality for the period of the Conference. Their registration was de facto voluntary. It is really to be appreciated that they took such pains to make the tutorials a success.

MAIN PROGRAM: 22nd December to 24th December

The success of the main program was mainly due to the untiring efforts of Sagar Naik of Canada and Sridhar Iyer of IIT Mumbai, the Program Chairs of cit2002. These sessions were held from 22nd to 24th in hotel Marrion. Every day the attendance was consistently good.

There were three key note addresses. The inaugural key note address on 22nd was by late Prof A K Pujari who gave a general review of IT scenario, particularly with reference to Orissa. The second key note talk by A Jhunjhunwala of IIT Chenai on 23rd morning was a scientific lucid account of how we can connect villages in India through internet. The closing key note address was by Deepak Phatak of IIT Mumbai. He also gave the awards for the best papers in the Conference. The key note speakers and the invited speakers had kindly accepted local hospitality for the Conference, and registration for them was de facto not accepted.

There were five invited talks. The first one by Ashok Panda of supreme court who talked on 22nd about right to privacy and IT. On 23rd there were two invited talks; one by A Karandikar of IIT Mumbai who talked on MPLS in IP network, and the second one was by U C Mohanty of IIT Delhi who talked about simulation of supercyclones. On 24th also there were two invited talks by K Thulasiraman of Oklahome, USA about communication networks, and by Sanghamitra Mohanty of Utkal Un. who talked about digitalisation of Indian languages.

There were six parallel sessioons (two in each of them) for the presentation of papers on different fields of Information Technology, along with a session for poster presentation. Altogether 101 papers were submitted, of which 24 were accepted as full papers and 19 as short papers for presentation. Most of these papers were presented at the conference. The last date for submission of papers had been 25th July, 2002.

On 24th, in the last session of the last day of the Conference the attendance was about 80%, which is quite a good attendance in any serious Conference. The satisfying feature was that the attendance was more for the Conference, and sight seeing became secondary. A special Interactive Session in the Conference on 22nd afternoon conducted by R N Mohapatra of USA evoked a lot of interest of young scientists and generated their interaction with the senior scientists. On 23rd afternoon a Poster Session was there which was participated by many, including some by students.

The arrangements for all the delegates, and implementation of the programs were made by Sudarshan Padhy, Organising Chair and Debasish Jena, Finance Chair to the satisfaction of all the delegates. Some affordable accommodations were made near the railway station, not far from the hotel. Presence of many young scientists with a serious academic purpose made the Conference successful, and was an inspiring event for thirty odd students who attended the same.

There were three awards given at the Conference. The first two, the Avaya Labs, USA best paper award, and the Satyam Computer Services best paper Awards, each of Rs.5,000/-, were given to the two best papers reported at the Conference. Besides this, S.P. Misra of OITS donated a sum of Rs.45,000/- to OITS for Narayan Misra IT award, which carried an award of Rs.4000/ to the best paper from contributions from Orissa. Purnendu Sinha of Concordia University, Canada, and Basabi Chakraborty from Aizu Un. of Japan won the two best paper awards, and Rakesh Agarwal of Infosys, won the Narayan Misra IT award.

CD:

We have also made a copy of all the tutorials and talks (keynote and invited) as available into a CD. This shall be complementary to the Proceedings. The CD will be made available free to any OITS member, or any one else asking for it. The CD also includes additional materials regarding earlier lectures by Prof L N Bhuyan on Advanced Computer Architecture delivered at Utkal University as well as lectures on Network Security and Protocols by Prof Sanyal of TIFR, Mumbai delivered at KIIT.