Ground Rules for Sending Scientific Papers for Publication

A veteran and distinguished Computer Science researcher with decades of experience in academia and industry in India, UK & USA shared with me the ground rules he follows while sending scientific papers for publication. Further, he kindly permitted me to share that below for the benefit of interested readers.

Let me tell you the ground rules under which I send papers for publication.

a. I choose a journal or conference which I think is most appropriate for the subject matter (e.g. because of related publications that have appeared there and/or I trust the editor/program chairperson to be fair).

b. When I receive the referees reports (usually 6-12 months later for a typical journal, 3 months for a conference), I take a deep breath and read them.

c. Usually, they start encouragingly and end by saying things I don't want to hear. I put them aside for a day or two and then re-read them.

d. I make a summary of the changes they have asked for and which the editor agrees with in a general way.

e. I revise the paper to meet the objections and resubmit it to the editor, making a list of the changes asked for and made. If I don't agree with any objection I explain why I have not made corresponding change.

The rule I follow is simple: if I want a paper published in a journal, I must satisfy the editor that my article follows most of the recommendations of the referees. I must do this whether I like it or not. It does not make sense to pick a fight with a referee or to tell the editor he or she does not know their job.

If the paper is accepted and appears I invariably see that the new form of the paper is definitely better than the original submitted version. That is true for every paper I have ever submitted and however strongly I first objected to the referees' comments.

Many (perhaps most) papers are rejected after refereeing: good journals and conferences may accept only one of 5-10 submissions. So everyone experiences the rejection of a paper. Of course it is dispiriting and one begins to question everything from the sanity of the reviewers and the editor to their objectiveness and knowledge. There may occasionally be an unfair rejection but in the overwhelming number of cases a rejection is justified because:

a. The paper is just not good enough;

b. The paper has been submitted to the wrong journal or conference;

c. There are errors or weaknesses that lead the reviewers to question the author's knowledge of the area; it does not matter what you think the paper is about, it's what someone reading it concludes;

d. The same results have been reported earlier. Saying that this is the first time something has been done in India is not a valid argument for it to be worth consideration. Science is universal and it does not matter where the work was done or what language it was reported in.

I discovered that the results from one paper I published in the UK in 1986 were rediscovered by  a researcher in Argentina and by a PhD student in the UK, neither of whom had read my paper. They both graciously accepted that their work, while done independently, was done later. It's the job of the referees to be aware of all work related to a submitted paper but they are human and will sometimes not be aware of everything that is done.

There's not much one can do when a paper is rejected except to grin and bear it. You can revise it and try resubmitting it to another journal or conference. That works sometimes but the paper may well end up with some of the same referees!

There may be things in the paper that can be used elsewhere if they are made part of a bigger piece of work with something genuinely new. Or there may not.

By the way, the paper I refer to above was rejected by one journal before it was resubmitted to and accepted by another (it has since had over 800 citations).

An "educated guess" analysis of Large no. of Seats in Andhra Pradesh (India) Engg. Colleges Going Empty

Last updated on December 5th 2012

Please note that the data for this analysis has been taken from media (news) articles. There is a possibility of some inaccuracies but even if there are inaccuracies I think the data may not be far off from the real situation on the ground. Further this analysis is in the realm of an "educated guess". It could be proved wrong or in need of alteration in the face of more data, especially from reliable sources.

This "educated guess" analysis is presented roughly in the form of a time-line.

• Union finance minister announces several incentives to provide education loans via nationalized banks in 2004-05, Source: Banks feel the heat of Bad Study loans. From 2005 education loans sector has grown significantly in nationalized banks. As of March 2012, the four South Indian states of Andhra Pradesh (AP), Tamil Nadu (TN), Karnataka and Kerala account for more than 50% of the these education loans provided in the country by nationalized banks, Source: Southern states lead in providing education loans. As per the same source, total education loan disbursed in the country by nationalized banks (public sector banks) as of March 2012 is Rs. 49,069 crore (at Rs. 55 for 1 US $ it is $8.9 billion).

• As money becomes available to students from nationalized banks, new engineering colleges in states like Andhra Pradesh (AP) and Tamil Nadu (TN) started cropping up at a furious rate. AP's engineering colleges grew from 238 colleges in 2004-05 to 717 colleges now (2012-13) i.e. three fold growth in a span of eight years, Source: No new engineering colleges in Andhra Pradesh from next year. As per the same source, the number of engineering seats in AP grew from 82,225 in 2004-05 to 3,44,986 now (2012-13) i.e. over four fold growth in a span of eight years. Most of the new engineering colleges in AP seem to be private (as against central government or state government owned/managed) and possibly created more with a motive of education for profit rather than education as a public service.

• The quality of education offered in the newly created engineering colleges seems to have been not so great. So graduates from these colleges were finding it difficult to land good paying jobs.

• In Andhra Pradesh, a scheme to provide fee reimbursement to marginalized sections of society (Backward Class communities and later extended to Economically Backward Classes) was introduced by the state government in 2008, Source: YSR's fee reimbursement scheme hangs in limbo in Andhra Pradesh. It included engineering, MBA and MCA degree courses/programs. Engineering colleges in rural AP seemed to have benefited from this scheme as they could induct students from these marginalized sections of society and claim fee reimbursement from the government. This seems to have contributed to furious growth of engineering colleges in AP. In 2012-13, the AP state government seems to be struggling to handle the financial burden of this fee reimbursement scheme and seems to have not reimbursed fees to some colleges thereby putting such colleges under financial strain. [This issue was pointed out by a friend.]

• The global financial crisis of 2008, in its aftermath, reduced the number of jobs available for fresh graduates (of all types of educational institutions not just engineering colleges), Source: Banks feel the heat of Bad Study loans. This would have made the situation particularly bad for graduates from those of the newly created engineering colleges which were not imparting good quality education.

• Indian banks started reporting problems of bad study loans! Some graduates (including management college graduates/post-graduates) were getting stuck with a study loan to repay but not getting a decent job with which to pay back the loan, Source: Banks feel the heat of Bad Study loans.

• By 2012-13 academic year, students and parents probably got wise to the situation and became very choosy about which engineering college to join. So now around 50 % of the 3,44,986 seats in AP engineering colleges have gone empty, Source: No new engineering colleges in Andhra Pradesh from next year! Perhaps students and parents have seen some bad study loan cases and are a lot more careful about taking a study loan. Perhaps banks too have become reluctant to lend to students joining some engineering colleges. So engineering colleges which have not earned a good reputation are perhaps being 'weeded out' by students, parents and the banks (the market).

• Rural and semi-urban engineering colleges in AP are facing the heat of students and parents avoiding them and so lobbied the AP state government to introduce a cap in intake of number of students per college (420 or 540) to ensure that city based colleges (which probably have earned a good reputation for the education they impart) do not take up most of the students thereby threatening closure of rural and semi-urban colleges in AP, Source: Rural colleges welcome cap on engineering seats, urban colleges question the move.

• The key regulatory authority to maintain standards of education in these new (and mostly private, it seems) engineering colleges, namely AICTE, a country-wide authority (as against an AP state only authority), seems to have been completely ineffective in its role of maintaining standards of education.

A similar scenario may be getting played out in other states of the country especially other south Indian states of Tamil Nadu, Karnataka and Kerala.

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Andhra Pradesh (India) Engineering Colleges - Half Empty!

There seems to be a serious crisis in engineering colleges in Andhra Pradesh (AP), India according to this recent media article, "No new engineering colleges in Andhra Pradesh from next year".

Some specifics:

In 2004-05, AP engg. college students intake was 82,225 in 238 colleges.
Now, AP engg. college students intake has been 3,44,986 in 717 colleges. [Another news media report given later on in this post, mentions AP no. of engg. seats as around 3,50,000. So I think this news media article's word 'intake' may be incorrect.]

In 2010-11, 30 % AP engg. college seats were vacant.
In 2012-13, 40 to 50 % AP engg. college seats are vacant.

Here's a recent media article which speaks about colleges closing down degree programs (referred to as 'course' in the article), "JNTUH flooded with requests for closure of nearly 350 courses".

Some specifics:

"Out of the 17,317 seats only 4,983 students opted for the B.Tech (IT) course leaving 12,334 seats vacant."

"... 21,776 seats out of the 67,518 seats going vacant in MBA and 15,224 seats out of the 23,532 remaining vacant in the MCA stream"

"The MCA courses suffered the worst with not a single student joining in 159 colleges while MBA was better with zero admissions in 29 colleges."

A slightly dated media report, 10th June 2012, "Slowdown hinders campus placements" states that companies have postponed campus placements indefinitely citing “tough global economic conditions”.

Some specifics:

Every year the number of engineering college graduates produced are:
Andhra Pradesh - 2,00,000
Tamil Nadu - 1,80,000
Karnataka - 80,000
Maharashtra - 80,000

Country wide, 12,00,000 B.Tech. seats are available, of which AP has 3,50,000.

Here's another news article, which seems to be very recent, though the article does not show a date, http://www.academics-india.com/Andhra%20update.htm (the content on this page may be transient as it is labeled an update), giving some additional input on the AP engg. college situation.

Some specifics:
AP government has introduced a cap in intake of number of students per college (420 or 540) to ensure that city based colleges do not take up most of the students thereby threatening closure of rural and semi-urban colleges!

Many AP private engg. colleges are facing closure due to few students joining them and so they are working out deals to shift students between them!

In Tamil Nadu (TN), 50 new engg. colleges get added every year. Available seats were around 1,20,000 in 2011-12 and went up to around 1,49,000 in 2012-13. In 2012-13, around 1,04,000 seats were allotted and around 45,000 seats fell vacant.

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Dictatorial Powers of VC in Indian Central Universities

Here's an interesting article by faculty from the University of Delhi (http://www.du.ac.in/index.php?id=4, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Delhi) about the role of Vice Chancellors (VC) in Indian universities today, http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/lead/wanted-intellectual-leaders-not-ceos/article4151232.ece. It contends that the typical Indian VC is one of or seen as "1) the CEO of an academic corporation; 2) an academic or bureaucrat with political connections; 3) a person selected by accident, error or compromise; and 4) an intellectual leader" and that the reality is that "these options are arranged in order of their importance in Indian higher education today".

It goes on to cover dictatorial powers of VCs of central universities, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_University,_India, and how exercise of such power by VCs who are impatient to bring about reform, results in a war like situation in the universities.

I presume the situation will be quite similar in state universities in India, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_university_%28India%29, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_state_universities_in_India. The other type of universities are private universities and deemed universities which may be receiving limited amount of funding from the state or central government or no funding at all. I presume that the VCs of such universities may typically not have dictatorial powers as the board of management/trustees/visitors of the universities may have direct control over the VC (limited autonomy).

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How Online Education challenge is shaking up US academia

Last updated on November 28th 2012

I think there is tremendous pressure on top US university managements on this online education stuff. University of Virginia (UVA) top administrator, President Teresa Sullivan, was fired and then re-hired amidst a lot of UVA community protests and tremendous media coverage in June 2012. It seems her lack of big initiative for online education was one of the main reasons behind her being fired.

NYTimes article, 'Anatomy of a campus coup', http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/16/magazine/teresa-sullivan-uva-ouster.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0, is an absolutely fascinating article on Teresa Sullivan's ouster and then reinstatement. The article touches upon many things including:

1. Funds crunch for UVA as state government reduced funding. Alumni network helped by contributing to endowment. UVA has a $ 2.5 Billion budget [At Rs. 55 for 1 US $ that comes to Rs. 13,750 Crores].
2. UVA Board seats are allotted by State government/Governor.
3. UVA Board head, Helen Dragas, a real estate developer, was strongly influenced by Harvard Professor, Clayton M. Christensen's book, "The Innovative University", http://www.theinnovativeuniversity.com/. [From http://www.theinnovativeuniversity.com/proj/the-promise-of-online-learning/: “The Innovative University” shows how online technology makes a college or university vastly more attractive to a wide subset of students. It gives many people a second chance at learning – i.e. those who cannot afford a traditional college education, those who do not have the flexibility to take part in a full plate of coursework, and late bloomers or dropouts who have fallen behind and now have the chance to catch up.]
4. Dragas said, “Higher education is one of the last sectors of the economy to undergo this kind of systemic restructuring". [I presume she meant systemic restructuring being forced by embrace of disruptive new technologies like online education]
5. UVA Board fires President Teresa Sullivan (though it is couched in different language). Helen Dragas who headed the UVA board justified decision of ouster specifically mentioning that UVA was falling behind in development of online courses, "a potentially transformative innovation". [The email dated June 10th 2012 from Helen Dragas and another person announcing President Sullivan's stepping down: http://news.virginia.edu/node/18788?id=18788]
6. Message from Teresa Sullivan to the Board of Visitors on stepping down dated June 18th 2012: http://www.virginia.edu/president/speeches/12/message120618.html. A telling extract from the above message about her views of online education: "There is room for carefully implemented online learning in selected fields, but online instruction is no panacea. It is surprisingly expensive, has limited revenue potential, and unless carefully managed, can undermine the quality of instruction."
7. Message from Teresa Sullivan after being reinstated due to outcry in campus and media leading to state Governor stepping into the matter, dated June 26th 2012: http://www.virginia.edu/president/speeches/12/message120626.html
8. After her reinstatement Teresa Sullivan announced a partnership with Coursera but used cautious words about its future.

This set of article and messages involving the President of one of the top public universities in the USA and one which is within the first 25 top national universities of the USA, http://www.virginia.edu/Facts/Glance_Rankings.html, clearly shows that online education is a very hyped-up buzzword. Teresa Sullivan's views on online education seem to be solidly sensible especially for a public school with fund constraints (as against an MIT or Harvard with massive endowment I believe). But her Board wanted more from her! I think it truly has been a great victory for academic sensibility that she was reinstated due to public outcry.

A couple of relevant videos which shows the humans behind the drama as well as the human aspects of it:

• U.Va. Board of Visitors reinstates Teresa Sullivan as President, June 26th 2012, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r1wuDVuA824, 26 min, 11 sec.
• President Sullivan Addresses Supporters on the Lawn (after the above reinstatement meeting), http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zTVIUSolPk8, 15 min, 58 sec.

A video which shows her supporters at the time she stepped down as President:

• Teresa Sullivan Addresses Rally Crowd after stepping down as President on June 18th 2012, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m2Ny-50XPVc, 2 min, 33 sec. 

I must also mention that I believe online education is rapidly coming of age. I mean, it may be a matter of just a few years before it reaches stability in terms of large percentage of enrolled students completing courses, getting credit/certification and even degrees, market giving feedback on knowledge level of such students and how employable they are, and revenue stream for online education providers.

Some further thoughts on this matter.

I had a mail exchange on this matter with a friend that made me drill a little deeper into the matter. Thought I can share that on this post.

In the Board of Visitors meeting on June 26th 2012 (video link given earlier) a senior person of the board specifically apologizes for due process not having been followed in the decision to ask Sullivan to resign. He also states something to the effect that if due process had been followed for her removal then such issues would not have cropped up in the first place

Here's the UVA Board of Visitors (BOV) web page and here's the UVA BOV manual. From the UVA BOV manual, Page 49-50, "The board shall be charged with the care and preservation of all property belonging to the University. They shall appoint a president, with such duties as may be prescribed by the board, and who shall have supreme administrative direction under the authority of the board over all the schools, colleges and branches of the University wherever located, and they shall appoint as many professors as they deem proper, and, with the assent of two-thirds of the whole number of visitors, may remove such president or any professor."

So where the rector, Helen Dragas, committed a "due process" mistake was to not convene a meeting of the board, raise the issue of asking the President to resign due to clearly specified reasons, put it to vote and get two-thirds of BOV support for it. Not all BOV members supported Dragas as could be seen from the BOV meeting video mentioned earlier, and it seems that such a motion would have had vigorous debate with the possibility of Sullivan being given a fair chance to present her side to the Board of Visitors. Instead it was, as the NYT article put it, a "campus coup" by the rector in getting the President to resign.

Regarding Dragas and others' concern about UVA falling behind other top USA universities in the area of online education, it seems that clear directives were not given to the President about online education efforts by the Board of Visitors. Teresa Sullivan's messages clearly show her side of the story (far more eloquently than the NYT article). No wonder she was able to get so much support from the UVA community and the media which led to her reinstatement.

Indian Situation

In India autonomy of academia is a very important matter which limits government and funding agencies power to manipulate academic processes (including selection of teaching staff) of large public universities (small private universities are a different matter).

It is quite decent in terms of official procedure, I think. A Vice-Chancellor (VC) is the top executive officer of a university and gets appointed for a term (typically 3 to 5 years). For large public universities the government is typically involved in selection & appointment of the VC. The paper, "Appointment of Vice-Chancellors: Rules, Procedures and Intentions", http://www.aserf.org.in/presentations/vcpaper.pdf, gives an interesting bird's eye view picture.

Removal of a VC of a big university is a major issue affecting the public of the area in which the university is based. So, it seems to me, due process is important. If a VC is dismissed the VC may be able to approach the High Court to question his/her dismissal and even get it reversed if due process has not been followed.

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A Princeton Sociology Professor's Online Teaching Experience

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/20/education/colleges-turn-to-crowd-sourcing-courses.html?_r=0 has the fascinating experience of a Princeton Sociology professor with online teaching. He had taught the "Introduction to Sociology" course 30 times before and recently moved it to a free online course. I find it so nice to see humanities courses go online.

The article covers many interesting points:

• The professor wondering where to focus his gaze while teaching?
• The prof. thinking about how to handle a worldwide student audience without a real idea of what their backgrounds are?
• How crowd-sourcing technology helped the prof. focus on important feedback from the thousands of feedback messages and how he responded to them in his later lectures.
• The key problem of grading so many students being tackled by students themselves using grading criteria designed by the professor.
• The huge feedback gives the professor more feedback on his sociological ideas than he has had in his entire teaching career so far!
• Mid-term and final exams were hand graded. There was plagiarism detected in the mid-term. The prof. detailed rules to avoid plagiarism before final exam and that seemed to have worked.
• Less than 5% of enrolled students completed the course. 40,000 odd students enrolled, 2,200 did the mid-term exam, 1,283 did the final exam.
• But Princeton does not give certificate of completion and that may have not given some students enough reason to take the exam.

Napster, mp3 music industry disruption and MOOC

[6th Jan. 2021 update: Web Archive - Wayback Machine - link: https://web.archive.org/web/20121113052806/http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2012/11/napster-udacity-and-the-academy/ as following link is now broken] http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2012/11/napster-udacity-and-the-academy/ is a fascinating analysis of higher education challenges and opportunities. 

I would like to preface my comments below by saying that some of what I have written below as possibilities for the future may already be happening in the USA but, as far as I know, have not yet happened on a significant scale in India.

I found the mp3+Napster disruption of music industry example and similar possibility being considered in higher education fascinating. The mp3 compression format, Napster and fantastic devices like the iPod allowed music of so many genres to be enjoyed by so many people worldwide, even if the quality of the playback was not as good as uncompressed CDs. It was a revolution in bringing music to the masses worldwide.

In my humble analysis of Indian Computer Science and Information Technology academia I have found that teaching quality has become less important as the academic career growth path is more on the research side, http://arxiv.org/pdf/1202.1715. With Internet based learning/MOOCs the emphasis on good teaching is bound to increase. The competition in higher education will be just a mouse-click away!

Prof. Sebastain Thrun talked about how teaching in elite colleges involves having 'weeder' classes and how his online class forced him to change his style to accommodate less brighter or less knowledgeable students too. Very importantly, the Internet teaching medium gave him the opportunity to do so. Prof. Thrun's talk can be viewed here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SkneoNrfadk. In case you don't have the time to view the video, you might want to read a blog post of mine on it, http://eklavyasai.blogspot.in/2012/07/prof-sebastain-thruns-experience-of.html.

Internet based learning certainly seems to have the potential to bring a knowledge delivery revolution just like the mp3+ipod music delivery revolution. It will be an awesome utopian-dream-come-true scenario if knowledge delivery to the masses worldwide in the not-so-distant future becomes like how music is delivered today to the masses worldwide.

Certification of whether knowledge has been acquired adequately can be delinked from teaching/learning (different from smaller tests/quizzes which are conducted during the teaching of a course). That may really free up the student. S/he can choose the Internet teacher(s) for her/his courses and prove to herself/himself and others that they have picked up the knowledge by clearing examination(s) of her/his choice and acquire the appropriate certificates.

Employers will be able to give market feedback on the knowledge level of graduates with different certifications. That should filter out certifications/examinations that do not test students appropriately.

First Question in 2nd US Presidential debate: Student asks about employment after graduation!

Yesterday I saw the 2nd US Presidential debate held on October 16th, 2012, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QEpCrcMF5Ps. Its transcript is available here: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/16/us/politics/transcript-of-the-second-presidential-debate-in-hempstead-ny.html?pagewanted=all.

The first question was by a young undergraduate student, "Mr. President, Governor Romney, as a 20-year-old college student, all I hear from professors, neighbors and others is that when I graduate, I will have little chance to get employment. Can — what can you say to reassure me, but more importantly my parents, that I will be able to sufficiently support myself after I graduate?" (Source: above transcript link from nytimes.com)

The transcript link also has the moderator saying that the questions were *not* known (prior to the debate) to the candidates and the commission (presidential debate commission, I guess) but known to the moderator and her team.

I think it is a celebration of US democracy that a young undergraduate student is able to pose such a real-life-concern question directly to the sitting President and his challenger. Hats off to US democracy!

The answers from the candidates were, well, politically correct :). But I am not sure whether they really were good answers. In my humble opinion, the challenges of today's tough economic times not only for the developed countries of the world but perhaps the whole world, must make educators/academics seriously examine whether the education they impart to students makes them job worthy. I think job-oriented education is the pressing need of the hour, worldwide.

A graduate who has been taught knowledge which cannot fetch him/her a job in today's economy undergoes huge suffering. The student's seriousness when he asks the question and how he clarifies that it is more important that his parents be reassured than him on whether he will be able to sufficiently support himself after graduation, says it all, IMHO.

Truth Telling - A Tough Job

Trying to be a truth-teller in today's world is a tough job. It is an unpopular affair.

I recently saw a few videos and read articles about how the great physicist Feynman faced the same challenges when he investigated the Challenger disaster. It was an eye-opener to me that even such a world-famous physicist had to face significant resistance from powerful administrators. If you have not seen it I recommend you see this 4 min 42 sec. video, Richard Feynman - Space Shuttle Challenger Investigation, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UCLgRyKvfp0. The official view now seems that Feynman did catch the real problem: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Feynman#Challenger_disaster.

The wiki page above states, 'He concluded that the space shuttle reliability estimate by NASA management was fantastically unrealistic, and he was particularly angered that NASA used these figures to recruit Christa McAuliffe into the Teacher-in-Space program. He warned in his appendix to the commission's report (which was included only after he threatened not to sign the report), "For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled."'

My respect for the great physicist Richard Feynman went up enormously after I recently came to know of the above human goodness side and the sheer *guts* to speak out the truth in the face of powerful opposition side of him.

So, I guess, it is always a challenge to be a truth-teller - material truth-teller - and far more challenging perhaps to be a spiritual truth-teller (e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mansur_Al-Hallaj). The saying goes: Sathyam Bhruyath Priyam Bhruyath Na Bhruyath Sathyam Apriyam. [English translation: Speak the truth; speak the pleasant truth; don't speak the unpleasant truth.]

Perhaps the safe path is to just put out one's views on the Internet and provide opinions only if people ask - a low-key activism and not a pushy activism.

Safe Path for Budding Academics in India

I think the world economic climate is pretty grim now. US academia seems to have suffered significant budget cuts in the recent past. Perhaps this is due to the condition of the US economy. The current debt of the US is reported to be around 15 to 16 trillion dollars and growing.

Will Indian academia be spared the problems that are currently afflicting US academia? I think a challenging economic climate in India may impact Indian academia too. How should budding academics in India chart out a safe course for themselves in this uncertain world economic climate?

The safe path for budding academics in India seems to be to clear UGC-NET for LS (Lecturer-ship), get appointment as an Assistant Prof. and then pursue a PhD. Time for PhD work can be difficult to make as teaching load may be 3 to 4 courses per semester. But job security is assured (after one becomes permanent) and the PhD can be done slowly, even over, say, a 10 year time period.

The big risk comes when one does PhD without an Assistant Prof. teaching position. Even if one is on a research fellowship I am given to understand that most of such fellowships at this junior level are time-bound (4 or 5 years). One day the fellowship will end and that's when the lack of permanent on-scale teaching position (Assistant Prof.) can hit very, very hard. By which time the young man/woman may be close to 30 years old! Even if he/she does win the PhD degree but does not have a job, they may find themselves in a severe life-crisis. Of course, this path provides far more time for PhD research work and so one can really delve into research fully and do possibly excellent research work.

The brilliant PhD holders will not be having any problems landing a job either in academia or in industry research. It is the less than brilliant that may struggle depending on the PhD job situation.

I think the problem may be quite challenging in the US now even for fields like CS. Starry-eyed youngsters may be under the impression that a US PhD program is the dream to be achieved and presume that there will be gold at the end of the US PhD rainbow in terms of an assured tenure-track faculty position. I am not entirely certain that that is the case now. There seems to be significant risk of even CS PhDs having to work for many years as adjunct (temporary) Professors/temporary researchers in the US which has (relatively) poor salary and perhaps no benefits. Perhaps industry research positions in the US are plentiful for CS PhDs now - I do not know for sure.

I was given to understand by an eminent Indian industry research correspondent that the Indian IT industry and Indian academic demand for CS PhDs is very good as of now. So, it seems that PhD scholars in the CS area in India need not be so worried about job prospects provided they do quality research work during their PhD program.

My intent in posting on this topic is just to ensure that the right job opportunities picture is presented to would-be (and current) PhD scholars. It certainly is not to be a scare-monger. If viewers of this post have input that presents a different picture (more positive hopefully) from what is presented I would be glad to receive it and be corrected.

Free Coaching for CSIR-UGC-NET Exam in AP University

I was very heartened to see this news report, "ANU tops in UGC-JRF-NET" in The Hindu a few days ago, http://www.thehindu.com/todays-paper/tp-national/article3920637.ece.

It mentions that Acharya Nagarjuna University (ANU) of Guntur district, Andhra Pradesh has topped the UGC-JRF-NET results in the country with 142 applicants clearing the Lecturer-ship level of the exam. It also mentions that 4 applicants cleared the JRF (research fellowship) level. As I understand it, those who cleared JRF level are eligible for Rs. 16,000 p.m. CSIR or UGC research fellowship for 2 years initially followed by a few additional years (max. 3) at Rs. 18,000 subject to some conditions; and are also eligible for Lecturer-ship. JRF is the higher bar; LS (Lecturer-ship) is below it.

"Acharya Nagarjuna University is situated between the cities of Vijayawada and Guntur in Andhra Pradesh on Calcutta and Chennai National Highway (NH-5).", http://www.nagarjunauniversity.ac.in/location.asp. That seems to imply that it is a tier-2 city or semi-urban university. In my humble opinion, that makes the achievement even more laudable.

The interesting point for me is that the article mentions that ANU has, with the assistance of UGC, provided free coaching classes for the NET exam since 2005. That may have been an important contributory factor for the wonderful results. Perhaps other semi-urban/rural universities could emulate ANU in this regard.

It would be interesting to know the break up of NET results streams wise. http://csirhrdg.res.in/netresultjune2012.pdf gives the results but without any break up stream wise  - I mean CS&IT, Physics, Maths, etc. http://csirhrdg.res.in/ gives general info. about the CSIR-UGC NET exam but I could not find links to streams wise break up. An interesting link is the information bulletin for the coming Dec. 2012 Joint CSIR-UGC NET exam: http://csirhrdg.res.in/ibnetdec12.pdf

I did some quick summing-up of the numbers to get a feel of how many cleared it. To facilitate the summing up I copied the data into an Excel sheet.

Note: A result row has a maximum 10 pairs of roll no.-rank entries/columns.

Quote from result pdf document "1. Junior Research Fellowship(JRF-NET):The candidates whose roll numbers are listed below have qualified in the test for JRF-NET. These candidates are also eligible for Lectureship-NET subject to eligibility criteria of UGC/Universities/ Institutes."

The number count:
(I) JRF(NET)CSIR:-
[(37 + 49 + 33)  rows * 10 rank-columns]  + 1 rank-columns  = 1191

(II) JRF(NET)UGC:-
[(11 + 49 + 49 + 21)  rows * 10 rank-columns]  + 0 rank-columns = 1300

Quote from result pdf document "2.Lectureship(NET):- The following candidates have qualified the eligibility test for Lectureship-NET. The candidates qualifying for Lectureship-NET will be eligible for recruitment as lecturer as well as for JRF-ship in a Scheme/Project, if otherwise suitable as per the eligibility criteria of that Scheme/Project. However, they will not be eligible for Regular JRF-NET Fellowship. They will be eligible to pursue Ph.D program with or without any fellowship other than JRF-NET."

The number count:

[(21 + 49 + 49 + 49 + 49 + 49 + 49 + 12)  rows * 10 rank-columns]  + 4 rank-columns  = 3274

To summarize: 2491 candidates passed JRF and 3274 candidates passed LS (Lecturer-ship).

So ANU's count of 4 JRF seems to indicate that it is not really in the top bracket. Therefore the article's statement that ANU "topped the country in UGC-JRF-NET" results seems to be quite a stretch :). Nonetheless 142 applicants qualifying for lecturership seems to be quite an achievement and ANU may have topped the results country-wide from this numbers-count point of view.

Another point, important from CS/IT perspective, is that I was told that, at least for CS&IT stream (Computer Science & Information Technology), this NET exam pattern has been changed to more of an objective test type recently (perhaps from last December) and so is somewhat less difficult to clear as compared to previous years.

Suggestion of Separate Tracks for Teaching and Research by US Academics

Last updated on: 2nd October 2012

Is it time to have two separate tracks for teaching and research in academia (higher education)?

It seems that some faculty in the USA are talking about separation of teaching and research:

1) A tech. view from Georgia Tech., one of the top US research universities in science and technology here: http://www.gatech.edu/vision/big-ideas/separate-faculty-tracks-for-teaching-research.

2) A humanities view from a Columbia University Professor Emeritus, Herbert Gans here: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/herbert-gans/separate-research-and-tea_b_844575.html.

I could be wrong but I think that really seems to be the future for higher education in these times of economic uncertainty worldwide. The online education movement may push strongly for this separation.

In the case of CS and IT graduate/post-graduate degrees (e.g. B.Tech., M.Tech.) where, I presume, there is supposed to be substantial focus on teaching software design and development, excellence in teaching these topics should naturally go hand-in-hand with software contributions - if the teacher of these topics does not practice software engineering/development himself/herself how can he/she be an excellent teacher of software engineering? And what better measure of a teacher's excellence in the practice of software development/engineering than his/her software contribution record?

In my references above to software engineering I mean the actual practice of software design and development which includes, as a small part, study of various software development processes. Sometimes the software engineering subject is considered to be limited to study of software development processes which I think is a big mistake. Such limited view of the subject should be called software engineering process(es) and not software engineering.

Open Access Journal Scams

This article from "The Hindu" claims that there are scams involving Open Access Journals. I do not know how accurate its information is: http://www.thehindu.com/sci-tech/technology/on-the-net-a-scam-of-a-most-scholarly-kind/article3939161.ece?homepage=true

The above article concludes, "With no organisation or system in place to check the entry of counterfeits, the onus is on researchers to decide the reliability of what they read, and where to publish their work."

The article indicates that quite a few researchers/authors based in India seem to have published in these alleged "scam" journals. Perhaps their research work loses some/most value as it has got published with journals which are being labeled as scam journals! I think researchers need to be pretty careful about not getting caught up in such scams.

Here are some links regarding such alleged scam journals.
1) http://scholarlyoa.com/individual-journals/ (referred by The Hindu article) authored by Associate Prof. Beall, academic librarian, http://scholarlyoa.com/about/, has a list which seems to have over 50 individual allegedly "questionable" journals. http://scholarlyoa.com/publishers/ has a list of allegedly "questionable" open access publishers. The list seems to have over 150 names!

Here's Beall's Criteria for Determining Predatory Open-Access Publishers, http://scholarlyoa.com/2012/08/04/criteria-for-determining-predatory-open-access-publishers/.

2) http://sust.academia.edu/bikas/Blog/94637/Fake-and-Low-Quality-Computer-Science-Journals

3) http://blog.pokristensson.com/2010/11/04/academic-spam-and-open-access-publishing/comment-page-1/

The Hindu article states that names of academics/researchers are advertised as members of the editorial board without the knowledge of these academics/researchers! That is Identity Theft, pure and simple! This is horrifying.

I think this is where the brand name of the publisher is so vital. For computing areas, top brand names like ACM and IEEE must be having top peer reviewer panel quality, decades of experience in publishing and a sophisticated publishing organization in general. Besides being top quality publishers they certainly seem to be safe publishers as well. Initiatives like ACM Author-izer, http://www.acm.org/publications/acm-author-izer-service, seem to resolve concerns of those authors who want their articles in these publications to be accessible at no charge.

Grad-Student. What does it really mean?

When I served in Indian academia as an honorary staff, honorary faculty and visiting faculty, I had initially got confused with the term grad-student that I saw on some foreign web sites/literature as I thought it may mean a student doing his graduate studies. As far as I know, the term is not commonly used in India. Later I understood that it meant somebody who is doing a PhD or other post graduate studies. (In India, research scholar is the term I have commonly come across to refer to a student doing a PhD). Somebody who is studying to be a graduate is referred to as an under-graduate student.

Today, as I came across the grad-student term in an article, I decided to browse around for it and confirm my understanding of it. That led me to two very interesting web pages.

First I will share, what seems to be, very wise advice from a science department of Yale: Some Modest Advice for Graduate Students by Stephen C. Stearns, Ph.D. It does not shy away from saying the unpleasant truths and seems to have solid tips to succeed in earning a science Ph.D. and become a scientist. While I am a technologist and not a scientist, I get the impression that it is top quality advice from an experienced scientist and academic.

The second part is a very harsh view of grad-student life. But I think there seems to be some truth to it and so is worth reading after reading the above, to get a balanced perspective. The urban dictionary view of the grad-student.

This video is another harsh view, this time from a cartoonist's perspective: The Simpsons - Comments about PhDs and Grad Students. Once again I think it is worth viewing for the balanced perspective.

Tough Times for US Academia; Lessons for India?

I read some articles and saw a youtube video that has startled me. While I knew that US academia had its challenges I had no idea it was so bad.

Read on only if you have the stomach for some pretty depressing stuff about US academia. But please note that the articles referenced below may be biased, so please take them with a few pinches of salt.

The closing of American academia, http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2012/08/2012820102749246453.html

The article above claims that 2/3rds of US university faculty are part-time and on contract which is not guaranteed for renewal each semester (adjunct faculty)! That seems to indicate that most of such contract faculty receive no benefits or health care.

The author writes, "In May 2012, I received my PhD, but I still do not know what to do with it.". She wonders about her job opportunities as an anthropologist in US academia and whether her education is a way into poverty instead of being a way out of it!

---

A brutal video on Humanities academia in the US, So You Want to Get a PhD in the Humanities: Nine Years Later, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6KkluiR5Rns (4 min, 21 sec).

---

The Ph.D. Now Comes With Food Stamps, http://chronicle.com/article/From-Graduate-School-to/131795/, is an eye-popping account of how some Ph.D. qualified persons in the US are on welfare!

The article mentions a lady with a PhD in medieval history who is an adjunct professor and who is a 43 year old single mother relying on food stamps and Medicaid. She says, "I find it horrifying that someone who stands in front of college classes and teaches is on welfare,".

The article mentions a 51-year old father of two who teaches two courses each semester in the English department in a US university. He is a graduate but not yet a Ph.D who has taught for 14 years in three colleges. "He says he has taught more than two dozen courses in communications, performing arts, and the humanities and he has watched academic positions in these fields nearly disappear with budget cuts."

He is grateful for the dole as without it, his family would be homeless and destitute! The article mentions that he feels he perhaps made a mistake by learning a practical skill that was elitist instead of learning a skill that the economy supports.

---

I think the education system in the US is going through a heart-rending period of change which may make it more job-oriented and cost-effective for students. Perhaps countries like India should carefully study what is happening in the US and learn appropriate lessons from it to avoid similar pain in future.

Prof. Sebastain Thrun's experience of teaching 160,000 students AI for free!

[Extracted from June 2012 mails, so a little dated.]

In Jan. this year, Prof. Sebastain Thrun, Stanford professor (may have left Stanford by now, I think) gave a talk on his "profound" experiences with a wildly popular internet medium teaching course on AI that he taught late last year, and how he feels that it will revolutionize education. There seems to be some amount of marketing hype in the talk. Free Internet medium teaching for higher education in the form of video lectures has been around for long now (MIT OCW, Indian IITs NPTEL etc.). But perhaps the way the internet was used for this course was far more effective. It somehow managed to engage stupendous amount of students worldwide by bringing in some amount of interactivity (online quiz), forcing the students to think, and having a regular assignment/exam pattern that made students work hard if they wanted to continue with the course.

I am a great fan of on-demand learning as that is what I have followed quite successfully in my software industry career. However my knowledge is not certified. It did not matter for me while I was in the software industry as the industry has the means of assessing knowledge and capability of persons. But for Indian academia and Indian government type of organizations my international industry experience is almost non-existent! For aspiring students of today, no matter what age or what country, certified free higher education from top notch Professors like Prof. Thrun would be like manna from heaven, especially given the debt trap that many students fall into while pursuing higher education not only in developed countries but even in developing countries like India.

Prof. Thrun and other initiatives like MITx seem to be making on-demand higher education with certification of some kind a reality TODAY or in the very near future (MITx perhaps is behind Prof. Thrun's Udacity as of now). Here's the youtube video link of Prof. Thrun's Jan. 2012 DLD talk. While all of us may not agree with all of Prof. Thrun's views I feel we may benefit by knowing about his experience of moving from a Stanford classroom of 200 students to the Internet medium classroom of 160,000 students. I am awaiting permission before I put the partial transcript of the talk on this blog post. Meanwhile I am putting down some comments from me below. The comments will make sense only on reading it after viewing the video/along with viewing of the video.

-----start comments ----

Prof. Thrun got inspired by listening to a TED talk by Mr. Salman Khan of Khan Academy. At that time Prof. Thrun was a tenured Professor at Stanford University.
...
Prof. Thrun mentions that students would get a certificate at the end.
[Ravi: I think what separates Prof. Thrun's AI class from MIT OCW and IIT&IISc NPTEL is the exams and certification. Further the exams were the same that the Stanford classroom students would take! That would have made it as close to a Stanford course as possible. Perhaps that's what drew the 160,000 students. I mean, which student interested in learning software would want to miss up on attending a Stanford course for free from the convenience of an Internet connection anywhere in the world and the chance of receiving a certificate on successful completion.]
...
Thrun shares his amazement when 160,000 students sign up!
[Ravi: The POWER of the Internet is mind-boggling! I think it can be such a fantastic force for good if wielded properly.]
...
They use just a camera, a pen and a napkin for course recording!
[Ravi: As simple as that, huh! I think one just needs the will and the knowledge for Internet based offerings. The budget is not really an issue.]
...
He talks of far more engagement with students in this medium.
[Ravi: From my industry and academic teaching experience I know that interactive sessions for teaching software technology go a long way in better learning of students. So I agree with Prof. Thrun's technique here to be more effective in teaching a wide group of students. Perhaps if one is having an elite (knowledge-elite) group of listeners the one-way lecture style is better.]
...
Paying, in-class students prefer to watch him on video!
[Ravi: That is a very telling experience. Students who have paid money prefer to use his free internet teaching ways than his classroom!]
...
He shares the Afghanistan student experience.
[Ravi: Higher education for all no matter which country you come from, which economic class you come from, which religion you profess - and for free. Wow!!! I think that's the way it should be. Education should ideally be "universally" accessible. And the vastly accessible and cheap medium of the Internet world wide is a fantastic carrier. It can even penetrate a war zone!]
....
He shares the experience of a student who is a lady with a teething infant and facing significant life-problems.
[Ravi: This melts one's heart. I mean, the lady has all the odds stacked against her. But she wants to fight her way to get out of her problems. And free higher education is giving her a chance to come out of it. Even if the AI course did not land her a secure job, if it gave her a sense of accomplishment I think Prof. Thrun and team would have done a fantastic good Samaritan job here.]
...
He talks of Stanford having weeder classes but that this medium can do it differently.
[Ravi: I think we have an elite vs. commoner education system issue here. The elite education setup weeds out the guys who can't come up to the expected elite levels. Perhaps that's necessary in an elitist setup like a Stanford, an MIT or India's IITs and IISc. But "universal" education has to cater to both the elite and the commoner. A "universal" education model cannot have weeder classes as then it will fail to be "universal" and become an "elite" education model.]
...
He mentioned that students felt more connected with him even though it was an internet video medium course!
[Ravi: This feedback was quite a surprise to me initially. But as I think about it, having seen a lot of youtube and other videos over the past few years, I find that I too develop quite some intimacy with the characters in the video. I have replayed some videos which really impressed me (like this one) and so have noted so many aspects of the main speaker/characters in the video like their facial gestures, their voice inflections, their accents, their 'mistakes' etc. In a regular classroom I am a back-bencher by choice and so would never have observed the lecturer/instructor that carefully.

Of course, the human contact aspect especially the vital eye contact aspect between the instructor and the student is not available in this Internet classroom. Further, the student cannot raise his/her hand and ask a question directly to the instructor during the course of a class, at least. Asking the question in some forum may result in a 'wrong' response - the forum is not as 'authoritative' a knowledge source as Prof. Thrun.]
...
He states that Profs teach the same way as it was done a 1000 years ago.
[Ravi: I think that's quite unfair. I have used PowerPoint slides and demonstrations of programs projected on screen in my over 9 years of teaching in a deemed university in a rural area of India.]
...
He says universities are rather slow in innovation and that people should reconsider this new medium.
[Ravi: Perhaps there is some truth in this part. Having taught both in the Indian software industry and in Indian academia I must say that I feel Indian software industry teaching techniques and practices (pedagogy) for software technology topics are far superior to Indian academia. But then Indian software industry did not have to worry about funds for teaching equipment. Indian academia has to deal with massive funding issues and all streams like Literature, Commerce, Pure sciences etc. have to be treated largely on par with sunrise fields like Computer Science or Information Technology. Indian software industry teaching/training departments don't have to worry about such problems.]
...
He talks about launching Udacity on that day.
[Ravi: He was charged in this talk, no doubt. I guess it is such guys who start off revolutionary movements. But will it stand the test of time? I wonder how Udacity's other courses fared in the first half of this year. They did not seem to make the waves that Prof. Thrun's AI course did. I think then he had the Stanford brand name. Now the name is Udacity. That's very, very different for students worldwide, I guess.]
...
He talks of a course which will teach a student with zero programming background to build a Google in seven weeks!
[Ravi: Building a search engine in seven weeks with zero programming background - That itself is a real tall claim. But, Okay, I am willing to take that. Maybe they are fantastic teachers and are going to teach just the bare minimum needed to know in programming to do a small search engine.
But building a Google in seven weeks with zero programming background - this will convey a completely wrong impression to many naive students that in seven weeks they can have their own search engine which can kind-of compete with Google. I feel, this statement is way, way over the top.]
...
[Ravi: I agree with Prof. Thrun that "programming is really important around the world right now in this time and age."]
...
He ends the talk asking support for Udacity.
[Ravi: Overall, I think this is a wonderful development. I hope Udacity is able to succeed in its endeavour to provide free higher education in the software field. Its success, even if partial, may result in big guns like MIT and India's IITs to try to modify their free higher education offerings to this perhaps more effective and popular model.]

--- end comments ---

Some remarks I made in June to an academic
[slightly edited as it is not appropriate for me to share that academic's private views - I have stated and modified only my response to be readable standalone].

Students need to put in sustained effort. Perhaps by giving the "same" exams that were given to the Stanford classroom students, Prof. Thrun ensured that students put in sustained effort. One of my past students, who now works in the computer department of a super speciality hospital, took the course. He was pretty squeezed for time and found doing the assignments/exams to be quite demanding. Like the 'daughter' who dropped out of the course due to the level of Statistics (Probability, I guess) knowledge needed, my ex student had to struggle a bit on it. But as he has a Maths background he could refresh his knowledge and pick up whatever additional knowledge that was required to be able to handle the Statistics part of the AI course.

So the impression I have is that students did have to put in sustained effort even in this Internet classroom AI course.
...
I agree that there seems to be a lot of hype ("star turn") to this AI class - especially the 160,000 number and world wide spread of students. So maybe there are quite a few drawbacks with their first such effort. But I believe for this particular course, perhaps due to the marketing hype, the support forums played the role that TAs perhaps play in regular classroom courses.

Were the internet forum support groups as good as TAs? Did they even misguide which would be a terrible thing for a student? Don't know for sure. But it seems it was not as if the students did not get any support at all besides the instructors' lectures.
...
I would say face-to-face teaching is preferable instead of essential. For those guys who are not in a position to avail of such a facility, these kind of courses will be very attractive.

I think it is a fairly simple issue of supply and demand, and ever rising costs of brick-and-mortar education. Perhaps we will have both models, brick-and-mortar and Internet-based co-existing, with students making a choice based on how much money they have, the quality of education they are willing to settle with, geographical and linguistic issues etc.

Maybe it will be like Proprietary and priced software, and free and open source software. Both models co-exist today.

Some input (edited) from a friend whose kin took Prof. Thrun's AI (Free on internet) course

Agree -- from personal experience (that students had to put in sustained effort for the course). Also, there was a fair amount of gap between the lecture & the assignments/test; much akin to the class room mode. So, yes. The class was definitely not spoon-feeding. I can vouch for the fact that the class needed a fair amount of thinking & hard work -- IMO, the class is worth the effort.
...
The support fora (for student queries) were not really general fora. They are like discussion boards for the class (need to be registered for the course), much akin to the current day scenario in the US universities. Lot of times, every live class has an online discussion board where students ask questions regarding the class, lectures, assignments & tests. TAs/professors handle some questions on the fora, and some others that need more involved discussion in the class.

While the online classes from Udacity did not really address the latter part completely, the professors held virtual 'office hours' where they fielded some of the harder questions from the forums. Not exactly like in the universities, but they did make a fair attempt to bridge most gaps.
...
As I had predicted in an earlier email, Udacity now offers accreditation for a fee.

Even at a public school like --- where I work, the annual fee for foreign students is about 56,000 USD. This model of free online courses with (hopefully) a small fee is perfect for us. Who knows, in these tough economic times, perhaps some tech savvy parents might encourage their (hopefully dedicated) kids to take a stab at online education & accreditation for a much, much, much smaller fee that 56,000 USD! (even for citizens from within the state, the fee is about 30,000 USD). Perhaps the cost of community college at the quality of Stanford/Harvard/MIT. Thats a bold dream -- one that seems perfectly poised to come true very soon.
...
An aside: I suppose you are aware that not all the 160,000 students completed the (AI) course; just about 23,000 did, IIRC. But still, even that is overwhelming -- when compared to the largest classes I have heard of -- about 200 students tops.
...
I suppose you are aware that MITx is now called edX -- a joint venture with Harvard!! [Ravi: I did not know it then as I had switched off these topics for a few months. Thanks to the friend I visited the site and saw the edX announcement video.]

NYT article on Massively Open Online Courses

Read a very interesting article from the New York Times News Service, printed, a few days back, in The Hindu on Massively Open Online Courses. Some points from it, including some quoted phrase(s), are given below.

1. It gives a current-state picture of Coursera as growing in university partners as well as courses offered with over 100 MOOC courses to be offered this fall.
2. It states that MOOCs were unknown till last year, but now are "likely to be a game-changer, opening higher education to hundreds of millions of people."
3. Revenue stream does not seem to be an immediate concern.
4. A Prof. was thrilled with thousands of downloads of his videos.
5. Online cheating and quality of peer-to-peer grading are concerns. Paid examinations conducted by global education companies may help.
6. Concern that MOOCs may be a danger to universities - however, one Prof. thinks that MOOCs will provide diplomas (informal type of certifications) with in-class universities provide degrees.

Some additional thoughts of mine

Profs. happiness with large downloads of their teaching videos is a fascinating human aspect of online learning. I mean, the Profs. are the main guys. They need to be interested. The thrill of teaching orders of magnitude more students seems to be almost an irresistible draw. The 'altruistic' teacher sharing his knowledge with the world-community - fascinating human aspect of online learning for me.

There are some serious concerns. A high-dropout rate has been reported by some sources - but even if 10% of 160,000 passed out, it is still a great number!

Rampant cheating is reported by one source. I am not surprised by that. However I feel that once exam services like what Udacity is reported to have tied up with Pearson Education comes into play, then it may work out. Those students who cheat with assignments during the course will know that their ignorance will make them trip up on the paid exam - so they will make the effort to learn.

Eventually they will have to find a revenue stream. But I think the Internet has lots of time-proven business models where the customer gets his service for free but his usage of the service is converted to some gain. E.g. gmail usage resulting in advertising money for Google. The impression that I am getting is that venture capital is pushing this model first into respectable delivery. Once that is done, they will find a way to make money from it. Due to the scale, like for iPhone/iPod Touch apps, the price can be really affordable. I mean, I have bought iPod Touch apps. for 1$, 2$, 10$ equivalent - unthinkable for PC business model. Once the online education guys want to monetize they may make huge money from millions of Indians, Chinese etc. besides Western market students who may be very willing to shell out, say, 20$ equivalent per course/subject. 

I think there is tremendous potential for new education providers who provide a college experience but use mainly MOOC teaching and combine it with good examination services like what Pearson is supposed to have got into. Such education providers will save costs of most faculty - they may need some administrative kind of faculty - and pass on the saved cost to students. These education providers may get accredited by international academic accreditation agencies and also tie-up with professional certification organizations like the IEEE CSDP. That would make for a pretty strong software development professional education provider.

Of course, elite education may still mainly be done in residential education environments. Face to face interaction with inspired & knowledgeable faculty along with shoulder to shoulder interaction with sharp peers is usually vital for excellent learning. But for those who are not that elite or have money problems or geographical location problems, I feel MOOCs based education providers may be a very attractive education solution which could also become quite scalable.

It is less than a year since I read about Stanford's AI class offering. In such a short period of time so much change in higher education circles in the US is amazing. I would not have believed it if somebody had told me that all this is going to happen in so short a time, a year ago.

Of course, it is still a 'Wild West' area. But, IMHO, surely something substantial will emerge once things settle down - the exact "settled down" form or forms it will take are not clear now but that is not so big an issue. The main thing is the movement. I remember the free email wave when I came to know of it - hotmail was the first IFIRC - but I got onto the yahoo bandwagon. It was unbelievable then. After gmail it has become almost a part of modern life, a given.

Is MOOC going to become a given like free email?

Wall Street Journal article on "Higher Education's Online Revolution"

A few weeks ago, I read this Wall Street Journal article, "Higher Education's Online Revolution"  by Mr. John E. Chubb, Distinguished Visiting Fellow at Stanford University's Hoover institution and member of its K-12 education task force, and Mr. Terry M. Moe, Professor of political science at Stanford and a senior Fellow at Hoover. BTW both Mr. Chubb and Mr. Moe have a PhD in Political Science (wonder why Wall Street Journal does not prefix Dr. against their name?).

I feel this is a vital article on online education (dated May 30th 2012) as it appears in a leading and very respected media outlet and is written by people with very strong education/academic credentials and associated with one of the well known technology and education innovation universities in the world, Stanford University. I have given some comments of mine as points below. They may make better sense when read in conjunction with the Wall Street Journal article. A few phrases and sentences from the article are quoted below.

1. Initially when I viewed the edX announcement video my feeling was are they overdoing it? Yes, it was Presidents of MIT and Harvard, and top-notch Profs from MIT and Harvard on the panel with, IFIRC, Anant Agarwal referring to the printing-press (and others not rebutting it). But still, "biggest change in education since the printing press"? That's saying one heck of a lot. I mean I recall OCW made quite a splash a decade ago in the newspapers (I was in industry then but still came to know of it as it got so much publicity). But it did not really 'revolutionize' higher education. But as I thought about it and factored in what I have read (and shared some over email) about Stanford's AI class I felt that new factors like high-cost of higher education, student-debt-trap, powerful collaboration tools (students among themselves, students with Prof./teacher and/or Teaching Assistants etc.), *massive* affordable Internet penetration worldwide now as against a decade ago (in Puttaparthi, AP, India - a remote/rural town - where I live, a decade ago we did not not even have broadband access to Internet!), video medium teaching techniques having evolved (Sal Khan Style Videos - ksv's are what edX's Anant Agarwal said edX was using as a model for some aspects of these teaching techniques as Khan Academy of Sal Khan has become the poster-child of this new avatar of online education), grading and assessment (OCW may not have had that) and, last but certainly not the least, certification. MIT & Harvard are talking of great educational research possibilities from the data they will be collecting on the courses they run. So, maybe this time around, this new avatar of online education may really be a 'revolutionary' game-changer of education. I learned a new term, 'flipped classroom' from the edX site - I had read about this approach but did not know the jargon of 'flipped classroom'. I think education seems to be in for quite some 'flipping' in the coming years.


2. How will they make money to sustain themselves if they give everything away for free? That's the big question on everybody's minds, I think.


3. "One Nobel laureate can literally teach a million students, and for a very reasonable tuition price." That's some line.


4. I guess that's what IT did to lot of industries (substitution of technology for labor). I have seen it happen in India and the world, while in industry for nearly two decades, from a pretty 'insider' kind of view, and, later in India, while out of industry but as a user of services in a rural Indian town (banking, railway reservation, post etc.) for nearly a decade.


5. Having been involved in academic classroom/lab. teaching for nearly a decade and fair amount of software industry classroom/lab. teaching/training before that, I find these points (about advantages of online education technology) to be very impressive advantages over traditional classroom teaching model.


6. I think this ("elite-caliber education to the masses") is the real winner point due to which institutions like MIT, Harvard, Stanford with backing from grant-giving foundations and perhaps political support from the US government may be pushing online education even if this is going to bring lot of disruption in the education system. Orders of magnitude more students benefit - so the pain of disruption/change is worth going through, perhaps. Another point is that in the competitive, meritocratic, capitalistic USA if MIT, Harvard, Stanford, Princeton etc. don't then Udacity (for-profit company providing only online education and funded by venture capital) will. And Udacity may then get so ahead of the race that it may become the Google of higher education! Perhaps therefore MIT, Harvard, Stanford etc. don't have a choice if they want to retain their leadership in higher education. This is one of the fantastic benefits of the competitive market-driven model as against a bureaucratic government-regulated model like Indian academia which may choose or even be forced (due to community/political pressure) to just kill any disruptive change as it will be treated as a 'disturbance to existing system'.


7. Interesting about skeptics worrying about "college experience" being destroyed by online learning and how the authors disagree with the skeptics. 'Flipped classroom' seems to be what they are talking about.


8. "College X" mixing online courses with local Professor taught courses is a cool idea!


9. That's a significant business number (doubling their share)! Hmmm. Seems to be making a strong case for for-profit education models "embracing technology" aggressively and profiting from it. I plan to read about the University of Phoenix foray into this area.


10. Apple or Microsoft can do 'wonders' with such content if made available to them!!! The world has seen and experienced what they can do! Of course, the big concern will be whether they will lock away this content into some 'walled garden' that only they can profit from and, worse, only they can deliver.


11. So humbly and clearly said ("The MITs and Harvards still don't really know what they are doing"). That's what even the edX announcement video conveys. One of the news reports talks of Anant Agarwal mentioning this area as a 'Wild West' area. I really appreciate this candour.


12. I think the last paragraph of the article, quoted below, is worthy of real hard consideration by education policy makers, education administrators and educators. Perhaps they tell us of what is in store in this area in the coming years, worldwide - that's what the Internet is - a global phenomenon, and coming years not coming decades. "But like countless industries before it, higher education will be transformed by technology—and for the better. Elite players and upstarts, not-for-profits and for-profits, will compete for students, government funds and investment in pursuit of the future blend of service that works for their respective institutions and for the students each aims to serve."

Google's Hybrid Research + Development Model

Last Updated on July 23rd 2012

Here is a very interesting recent paper from ACM flagship, CACM, July 2012 on "Google’s Hybrid Approach to Research". The page also has an embedded video of around 5 minutes where the authors give their views - worth watching, IMHO.

Some important points of the paper from my perspective:

1. "Research results come not only from universities, but also from companies, both large and small. The way research results are disseminated is also evolving and the peer-reviewed paper is under threat as the dominant dissemination method. Open source releases, standards specifications, data releases, and novel commercial systems that set new standards upon which others then build are increasingly important."


2. Google does research + development together with R&D (or R&E) teams usually writing production or near-production code from day one! [Ravi: That's awesome!]


3. "Typically, a single team iteratively explores fundamental research ideas, develops and maintains the software, and helps operate the resulting Google services— all driven by real-world experience and concrete data."


4. Google's CS Research follows "Hybrid Research Model" where research teams are encouraged to have the right balance between research and engineering activities. The right balance can vary greatly. [Ravi: That's quite fuzzy. But the message that they give importance to engineering/software development as a vital part of its research model comes through clearly.]


5. The paper has some information about Google's research efforts e.g. Google Translate, Google File System.


6. Google publishes research work in academic publications "at increasing rates (from 13 papers published in 2003, to 130 in 2006, to 279 in 2011)."


7. Google feels that academic publications are "by no means the only mechanism for knowledge dissemination: Googlers have led the creation of over 1,000 open source projects, contributed to various standards (for example, as editor of HTML5), and produced hundreds of public APIs for accessing our services."


8. Google has "chosen to organize computer science research differently at Google by maximally connecting research and development. This yields not only innovative research results and new technologies, but also valuable new capabilities for the company."

--- end Google Hybrid Research + Development Model Paper - my perspective points ---

Some additional points regarding Google from a friend

Please note that some of the points mentioned below may have been covered in the above paper itself.

1. Google seems to care about applied research, not pure — a Googler needs to be able to articulate why his/her research will substantially benefit millions of users.
2. Google research is short-to-medium term: a few years at most.
3. Google tries to break research down into a number of intermediate deliverables that each have commercial value.
4. A research project may impact users, or it may advance theoretical knowledge, or ideally both.
5. They don't build elaborate research prototypes. Focus is on real systems with real data and production-quality code. So research is often a component of a production-oriented larger project rather than being a separate research project in itself.

Necessary components of the Google model:

1. Smart engineers
2. Ability for individuals, or entire teams, to transition to or from the research organization
3. Distributed computing infrastructure that lets a small team use tens of thousands of servers, which enables large-scale experiments
4. A billion users
5. Lots of money

The friend reiterated that publishing (academic) papers is only one way to distribute knowledge.

Indian CS Academic Research vs. Google Hybrid CS Research

I (Ravi) find Google's hybrid approach to be very interesting as it is in very great contrast to what I have seen in Indian academic CS research. Very often, the craze is to produce a 'paper' and the 'research' stops there - I have not come across many instances of research efforts from Indian CS or IT academia which went beyond 'paper' to get translated into semi-real-life stuff which can then be handed over to interested software companies for real-life implementation. Maybe I am not that well informed. If Indian CS academia does have a hybrid research + development model then perhaps such models should be given publicity. Anyway I got put off Indian academic CS research due to this 'paper' publication limited goal mind-set - I took a decision to steer away from such 'paper' production oriented research.

The big problem with this kind of 'paper' production research is that, most times, it is out of touch with real-world-software. So many academic conferences are around that getting such an out-of-touch-with-real-world-software paper published is no big deal. Now I am not saying that such  papers have false information in it - No, not at all. They are certainly valid within a very-small-prototype world. The question is whether the approach used in the very-small-prototype world makes sense to be considered in real-world-software. Most readers of such papers would have such questions and may just note the approach used in the paper. Instead, if academic CS research is able to combine research with development in some small way then academic CS papers would have a lot more value. Just imagine such academic papers having a reference to its open source software code + data download link. A reader who is interested in the approach can just download the software + data, and if he likes it, can even consider to do further research on top of this software + data.

I think Indian CS academia should carefully study Google's Hybrid Research + Engineering model and see if it can pick up certain practices of Google and adapt it for use in Indian CS academia.

Comments on Stroustrup's paper, "Software Development for Infrastructure" in IEEE Computer, Jan. 2012

Last Updated on April 16th 2012

This post has my comments on an academic paper (article), "Software Development for Infrastructure" in IEEE Computer, Jan. 2012, by Prof. Bjarne Stroustrup, Inventor of C++, Distinguished Professor & holder of College of Engineering Chair in Computer Science at Texas A&M University, ACM fellow as well as an IEEE fellow.

The comments are provided as separate bullets. For copyright reasons I cannot use too many quotes from the paper and so have tried to provide minimal context by paraphrasing. Reading the comments without reading the paper side-by-side may make it a rather "disconnected reading experience" :).

• This paper starts with some serious concerns about how "Our lives are directly affected by software correctness and efficiency". It argues for the urgent need for improving the reliability levels of "Infrastructure Software".

• I entirely agree that infrastructure software has far higher correctness, reliability, efficiency and maintainability requirements that non infrastructure apps. I further agree that education curricula for infrastructure developers should be different from that of application developers. I also very much like the term infrastructure developer (development).

• It was quite a revelation to me that Google used over 2 million MW power in 2010 ro run its servers. My God! That's a huge amount of power.

• The fact that industrialized society worldwide is heavily dependent on systems which can hurt people physically or economically has been well expressed. It seems to be so very true and so very SCARY.

• There is a huge amount of non infrastructure software (apps) where the tolerance for bugs is far higher. This high tolerance for bugs gives more room for creative software developers who are strong in creativity and ideas and who may not necessarily need very high levels of engineering discipline.

• "I call software where failure can cause serious injury or serious economic disruption infrastructure software." I very much like the simplicity of this definition. The guy-on-the-street can understand this definition.

• "One of my inspirations for quality infrastructure software is the requirement AT&T placed on switches in its telecommunication system backbone: no more than two hours of downtime in 40 years" Ravi: I am lost in ADMIRATION! Hats Off! No wonder AT&T achieved such a FANTASTIC QUALITY reputation.

• I agree that infrastructure software developers should be very serious about reliability. But will the market economic realities accept this argument? Or do we need some regulators like banking regulators to enforce this?

• I felt the author stretched it a little too far when he wrote that but for computerized systems, most of us (industrialized world is what he meant, I guess) would starve. To me, this is quite a statement. Is it really TRUE? Now, I have lived for nearly a decade in a very rural (outback) town but which is an international spiritual centre in India. So our small town is surrounded by pretty rustic villages. Initially I thought our setup is geared to manage life without computers or internet. But then I had a second thought :). I use internet banking to avoid spending time queuing up in the local bank. The local bank itself is HEAVILY COMPUTERISED and network dependent - I mean it uses online systems with centralized databases. The railway reservation counter is also similar. So, I guess, even in my small town a catastrophic internet/network failure will bring banking and railway reservation systems down (railway is the lifeline of lower middle class & the poor in India i.e. the vast majority). Maybe we will not starve as the villages around grow food. But we certainly will take a hit in the MATERIAL QUALITY of LIFE.

• An update on my comments: I would like to withdraw the comment about me feeling that the author had stretched it a little too far when he wrote that but for computerized systems, most of us would starve. In a private mail exchange with one of the leading lights of the software world who seems to have deeply analyzed the extent of computerization in almost every aspect of modern life, he put out a strong case justifying the above 'starve' comment. As I am kind-of out of touch with modern heavily industrialized life I realize that I am not in a position to really comment on the 'starve' point. I think the accurate and truthful thing for me to say is that I am not knowledgeable enough about the extent of computerization in modern life to comment. Prof. Stroustrup may be right. But let me additionally add a prayer to Almighty God that we software chaps succeed in putting our "infrastructure software" house in professional engineering order so that such calamities do not happen.
  

• I did not realize the relation between software efficiency and energy conservation. Fascinating point given the nearly desperate state of affairs in the energy sector hurting both developed and developing countries. And who knows how long the oil is going to last! After Fukushima, even in rural India, nobody wants a nuclear power station in their backyard (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koodankulam_Nuclear_Power_Plant).

• As a former systems programmer (but not a computer language designer/creator) I find the suggestion of using a systematic and structured programming approach involving type-rich programming, for infrastructure code, sensible. It is more cumbersome perhaps for the programmer but pays back in terms of the type-checking and type-safety that the compiler does for him and thereby reduces bugs. I think it would be a fair decision if one imposed such type-rich programming language & programming conventions/style for infrastructure code.

• I buy the argument of designing for compactness and predictable access patterns for infrastructure code. I don't buy it for apps. code that run on a smart phone. Yes, it will drain more power but does that get offset by the benefit it provides to the smartphone user? Perhaps it does. Perhaps one can take a proper call on it only if one knows about the extent of power hit due to a particular app. that is not designed for compactness and predictable access patterns.

• I had not thought through or realized that class objects being allocated in dynamic memory results in an efficiency downside due to non-compact representation. But I did have the general impression that efficiency is typically better for C/C++ programs as compared to Java (or Python).

• For me a "design error" for systems programing (e.g. an automation tool controller software) would be more in the realm of the Object Oriented Analysis & Design of the system, but also possible in the area of code, of course. Though I may refer to it (in code) more as an algorithm flaw rather than a design flaw.

• I feel that if the program did deal heavily with heights and widths of rectangle objects it would be fine to have a Rectangle(Point(100,200), Height 100, Width 50)); constructor too with Height and Width typedef'ed to int (or unsigned int).

• For infrastructure code, usage of static type-safety features must be mandatory as it can eliminate quite a few errors. And it is far simpler than designing for compactness and predictable access patterns.

• I have found C++ especially with its fantastic STL to be far superior to 'C' for writing (more) efficient and robust (reliable) code. My own string 'C' functions will typically not match STL string class functions easily let alone functions of STL vector or map classes. However I have not done any comparative measures of efficiency as that was not required in my work environment. It was easy to convince a knowledgeable senior techie about it and did not need an efficiency comparison metric. I would also like to state here that when I had to teach C++, around maybe 5 to 6 years ago, I changed the course from its earlier structure to ensure that STL classes like string, vector etc. get taught well before we come to creating our own classes. I introduced one assignment where I asked the students (who had learned 'C' in an earlier course) to do a word collection building (from file) program first in 'C' and then in C++ using string and vector. This assignment very successfully drove home to the students how much more easier it was to program in C++ using string and vector and how much more reliable and efficient it was as compared to their 'C' program solution. I taught this course for around 3 years and then this same course structure is being used by the teacher who took over from me and is currently teaching it.

• But the impression that I have is that for very heavily used code like OS Kernel code writing it in 'C' allows for easier and more visible control of overhead costs of function calls (inline does it but sometimes a programmer misses its significance). And avoids RTTI and virtual function call costs. So, even though I am not a kernel programmer or even a serious student of kernel programming, I am not surprised by Linux kernel developers choosing to stick to 'C'.

• I fully agree that "duck typing" should be avoided in infrastructure code.

• The obscure reporting of template errors puts off C++ students in a big way. I had to take very special care to give students the courage to not get thrown into confusion by string template compilation errors that they would see when they were writing their first C++ programs using the string (template) class. I think this may be a reason why, I would not be surprised if, even today, in many colleges and universities in India, C++ is taught with the STL part being a kind of optional add on at the end of the course. The teachers themselves may be finding templates tough to handle due to the really scarily long and completely obscure compilation error messages.

• In my exposure to education of or selection of systems programmers I too have found that the system does not actively encourage teaching of or spotting the ability to deliver general, elegant and simple solutions.

• I am not so sure about too many managers and too many programmers encouraging complicated solutions assumed to be efficient. At least, in my experience of the system software world (late 80's & 90s), especially where there was a system of design and code reviews, general, elegant and simple solutions were given appropriate appreciation. However, not enough was done to ensure that all or most programmers would do general, elegant and simple solutions. I mean, it was not enforced.

• Enjoyed the Alan Perlis lollipop quote :). Ha, ha!

• Code generation tools or systems driven by huge amount of option settings are almost magical! I had some exposure to this in a mini-project oriented course I taught nearly a year back where I got exposure to Joomla, Moodle, Al Fresco etc. The "exactly how it works" level certainly goes down. But from a "mix and match customizer" kind-of app. developer viewpoint I found it is okay. I mean, it is like how I use gmail and the Internet facility from my small rural outback town in India. Sometimes it is not accessible and I live with it. To protect myself from my gmail a/c data getting lost (due to hacking, say) I have my Outlook Express backup of mails. This works out decently. Similar is the case of my blogs (blogger & wordpress). Settings all over the place. Sometimes I can't get my blog show my posts the exact way I want it. But I live with what I can manage. And it has satisfied my needs overall, very, very well. So for the App space a Joomla type of development environment which heavily uses option settings and, more importantly, a bewildering array of components (many being user supplied), seems to be quite acceptable to its more tolerant of errors & outages user community.

• Fully agree that for "infrastructure code" it is vital to clean up our code.

• Absolutely agree that an education/training for applications cannot create a reliable infrastructure component developer. It can be a disaster if such inappropriately trained persons are used for infrastructure component tasks! But some persons can be very capable but "self-taught" infrastructure component developers too. Self-taught "infrastructure developer aspirants" should prove their mettle via appropriate tests. We should not exclude the self-taught community as experience has taught us that many very capable and productive "infrastructure developers" are self-taught. But, I repeat, they should prove their mettle/knowledge of infrastructure software development techniques via appropriate tests/proven credentials (e.g. software developed by them which is assessed by experts whether it proves them to be good enough infrastructure developers).

• It is VITAL to specialize our computer science, software engineering and IT curricula. In fact, I will argue for separate curricula for "infrastructure developer" and "app. developer". There may be some limited overlap but they should be two separate curricula.

• I am not sure about the mathematical basis of all infrastructure developers needing to be strengthened. Of course, a strong mathematical basis may be ESSENTIAL for infrastructure developers who FOCUS on efficiency. But a lot of infrastructure work could be done which is reliable as well as efficient using efficiency measuring techniques & tools which have been well defined by others (the ones who FOCUS on efficiency). I think I got by doing a lot of fairly decent systems software work without having a STRONG mathematical or statistical basis. But then I only used STL - I did not have to design an STL class like vector and prove its efficiency.

• I agree entirely that algorithms, data structures ... must remain core subjects for infrastructure developer (systems software) education. In fact, in my self-taught journey into systems software these were the topics that I had to study rather well. Though I must also state here that I did not have to get into in-depth Design and Analysis of Algorithms as I did not have to write libraries like STL. If I had to do that I am sure I would have studied and tried to master an Aho-Ullman or similar book on Algorithms.

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Some frank comments from a TOP LEVEL MANAGEMENT/ADMINISTRATION view. The paper started off with a very top level view of the need to improve software infrastructure code and the dangers if we don't. Then it delved into language details - which is important, for sure. But then this is just an academic paper. Some people may read it and change somewhat; some may continue with their old ways but most "infrastructure developers" may not even know of the paper's existence.

WHAT WE NEED IS AN "INFRASTRUCTURE SOFTWARE REGULATOR". USA is THE leader in infrastructure software. Top iconic figures of US software academia and industry should suggest an infrastructure regulator organization which lays down guidelines for infrastructure software development companies, and then conducts "infrastructure quality audits" which, if passed, grants an "infrastructure quality" stamp for the software. That may not solve all problems right away but will be a great way to start doing something about bringing a mature engineering discipline to the "infrastructure software" industry similar to, say, the civil engineering industry. If such a suggestion comes from top iconic figures then people in powerful decision making bodies may sit up and take notice.