INTRODUCTION TO DESIGN ALGORITHMS

Mr. Chain Singh, Assistant Professor from Computer Science and Engineering Department of Dronacharya College of Engineering, Gurgaon attended a one week ISTE Coordinator’s Workshop on Introduction to Design Algorithms from 16th to 20th March, 2015. The workshop was conducted by Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, under National Mission on Education through ICT (MHRD, Govt of India).

The main objective of this workshop was to empower teachers of engineering colleges and enhance the teaching skills of the faculty members in core Engineering and Science subjects under Train Ten Thousand Teachers program (T10KT). There were total 221 coordinators from different parts of India from various engineering colleges to attend this workshop.

The inauguration was done by Prof. Ajoy Kumar Ray, Director, IIEST, Shibpur, Prof. Partha Pratim Chakrabarti, Director IIT Kharagpur, Prof. Partha Pratim Das, Prof. Pallab Dasgupta, Department of Computer Science, IIT Kharagpur, Prof. Raja Datta, Department of Electronics & Electrical Communication Engineering. They said that ISTE workshops for empowering teachers of engineering colleges have started over 6 years since December 2009. These two-week ISTE workshops were conducted on various Engineering subjects that benefited more than 55,000 teachers from around 345 distinct Remote Centers across the country.

The 6 days ISTE STTP shall organize an Introduction to Design of Algorithms from May 25, 2015 to May 30, 2015 under Blended MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) model. In 2013 this program was scaled further, to train up to 10,000 teachers at a time. Together, it was mandated through a funded project from the National Mission on Education using ICT (NME-ICT) of MHRD, to train 1,50,000 teachers in 15 such workshops.

Prof. Partha Pratim Chakrabarti, Department of Computer Science, IIT Kharagpur, covered Design and Analysis of Algorithms which is fundamental to correct and efficient design of software programs. Every graduate in Computer Science or Computer Science and Engineering needs to have a detailed exposure to (a) Elements of algorithm analysis, (b) Basic techniques of design of sequential algorithms and (c) Important algorithms that are widely used in applications. Post lunch break another session was taken by Prof. Partha Pratim Das on Elements of Algorithm Analysis.

On 17th March 2015 session started with Prof. Partha Pratim Das, Department of Computer Science, IIT Kharagpur. This Analysis involved an understanding of algorithm complexity through asymptotic analysis of time and space requirements under worst, average and amortized scenarios.

On 18th March 2015, Prof. Pallab Dasgupta, Department of Computer Science, IIT Kharagpur discussed about Design that involves developing and refining an initial solution of the problem using fundamental design techniques like divide-and-conquer, dynamic programming, greedy decomposition, backtracking, branch-and-bound and data structuring. He also discussed about Combinatorial optimization, NP-Completeness, Approximation, Randomization. At end of the day there was a session on Pedagogical Training by Prof. Bani Bhattacharya and Prof. Shyamal Das Mandal.

On the last day, the session started with the explanation of “detailed plan of the main workshop” and Logistic session, by Prof. Raja Datta, Department of ECE, IIT Kharagpur and Prof. Partha Pratim Chakrabarti.

Finally the workshop concluded with Feedback and valedictory ceremony. Shri Prof. Deepak Phatak congratulated everyone for the successful completion of the workshop and also distributed Certificate of Participation.

Some Glimpses: