TRDDC’s 25th year celebrations were held from 11th to 13th December 2006, at its facility at Hadapsar. Redesigned, the spacious and bright environs of the refurbished office set the tone for renewal and resurgence. Ablaze with colour, the garden in the central atrium was a visual treat. Banners and posters suspended from the walls, stairwells and ensconced in niches presented quotations from scientists and philosophers, enhancing the celebratory ambience. Information kiosks near the central marble staircase displayed interactive demos of TRDDC’s latest innovations.
 
 
 
  
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| [Excerpts
from the CEO’s speech]: When we set up TRDDC as the research division of TCS in 1981, it was yet another affirmation of TCS’s pioneering leadership of the IT Industry in this country. TRDDC was the first R&D center in the private sector in India with a clear mandate for applied research in process engineering as well as software engineering. In the last 25 years, TRDDC and the research community in TCS has contributed significantly to TCS in diverse areas - compiler and program understanding, program generation tools, testing tools, Rule bases and knowledge bases, text processing and mining, analytics, algorithm theory, systems engineering and cybernetics. We have done a lot of work in the process area and material sciences, and have contributed to society – water filters, adult literacy are a few examples. Today we have grown beyond Pune – and now have 18 innovation labs across the world focusing on diverse areas like Bio Technology, Embedded Systems, Multi-media, Automotive engineering, Media and Entertainment and so on. I would like to congratulate the TRDDC team and the larger R&D and Innovation teams in TCS on this milestone, and would like to state TCS’s clear and unambiguous commitment to industry leadership, the pioneering mindset and our ability to innovate across all dimensions of our business. Our future depends on our ability to collaborate across our entire ecosystem – our customers, our partners, our internal teams, and how we can build value through innovative technologies, domain solutions and business models. |
11 December
The Symposium on Process Engineering was the focus of events on 11th December. The invited lectures commenced with a talk by Professor P.C. Kapur of TRDDC, on Waste Recycling and Utilization. Starting his talk with a quote from T.S. Eliot’s Waste Land, Professor Kapur highlighted the enormity of the problem of industrial and agricultural wastes. Subsequently, he provided insights on utilizing waste products, as in discussing the cements made from the high silica content in rice husk ash and eco-cement made from fly ash from thermal power plants, as well as the red mud obtained during alumina processing. He emphasized that not only do these cements utilize industrial waste, they are more tolerant to impurities and can be made at much lower temperature, resulting in 50-60% energy reduction, as compared to Portland cement.
In his talk on the Design of Materials, Professor S. Ranganathan (Indian Institute of Science), elaborated on the tetrahedron framework of materials design. He discussed the rich heritage of Indian metallurgy, including wootz steel, which was used for making the Damascus sword. He provided insights on the missing links in multi-scale modeling and the emerging field of materials informatics for material design.
The talk by Prof. P. Somsundaran (Columbia University), on Nanotechnology: Challenges and Opportunities for New Materials contained several examples on nanotechnology applications drawn from nature. He illustrated his premise by mentioning how the same calcium carbonate turns into brittle chalk or strong marble or strong and beautiful sea-shells. He narrated his own inspirations from ‘touch-me-not’ plants to design efficient drug delivery innovations.
Professor S. P. Mehrotra (National Metallurgical Laboratory, Jamshedpur), in his talk on Modeling of Mineral, Metal and Materials Processing, provided a broad overview of various modeling techniques applied for minerals and materials processing. He gave examples of minerals processing such as jigging, floatation, continuous casting and aluminium refining.
These lectures were followed by a lively panel discussion on the Process and Manufacturing Industry in 2020 chaired by Prof. P.C. Kapur. The panelists, Dr. S. Sivaram (NCL), Dr. Sanjay Basu (Sandvik Asia), Dr. Debashish Bhattacharjee (Tata Steel) and Prof. S.P. Mehrotra (NML), provided their views on this topic and responded to various comments and queries from the audience. Dr. Basu emphasized the emerging trend of customised material design with smaller production quantities, which is expected to grow. The lack of disruptive innovations in the chemical industry since 1980 was highlighted by Dr. Sivaram. Dr. Bhattacharjee and Dr. Mehrotra emphasized the lack of research quality and suggested that the research funding should significantly increase.
Opportunities for networking and research collaboration were available on 12th December, when the visitors, speakers, panelists and former alumni viewed the posters and demonstrations of work at TRDDC, presented by the TRDDC scientists.
In the evening, at the Corinthian Club in Pune, a concert of music by the Fusion Ensemble led by well-known flautist Milind Date, mesmerized the audience comprising current and former members of TRDDC, TCS Senior Management, some administrative and HR associates, and managers of TCS-Pune. The Ensemble’s witty and sensuous compositions, interspersed with Date’s jocular asides, were a stimulating interlude away from the strictures of science and technology! In particular, the composition Camel Walk, punctuated by the tabla thumps and evocative meanderings of the flute created a veritable line of camels strung out across a desert landscape… Pandit Uday Ramdas on the tabla, India’s best-known guitarist Derek Julien and bass guitarist and composer Roger Dragonette, together with percussionist Sanjeev Pandkar were co-creators of the magic released by Milind Date. The concert was followed by a sumptuous dinner on the club’s lawns.
Watching people talking, laughing, greeting each other with whoops of joy, re-uniting — in some cases — after twenty years, sharpened the poignancy of the occasion. It was a reinforcement of TRDDC’s own fusion: of the campus and corporate spheres!
Milind Date and his music
group Fusion Ensemble perform as a part of the 25th
anniversary celebrations of TRDDC
13 December
On 13th December, the Symposium on Software Engineering was held at TRDDC. In the first talk of the morning, Prof. Don Batory from the University of Texas, Austin, talked about his views of what programming will be like in the year 2020. He made a simple, yet thoughtful comparison of what programming was like 15 years ago compared to what it is today. Meta-programming, he predicted, is what the whole world is likely to move to. Rather than writing programs to solve a technical problem, ans provides an automated solution for a business problem, programmers would write 'higher-level' programs (known as meta-programs) to express solutions for domain problems. Meta-programs will be written using meta-expressions, and their compositions. Re-factoring will be used extensively to refine meta-programs, and refinment will be expressed as multiple transformations.
Jean-Claude Laprie of LAAS-CNRS, Toulouse, gave an overview of his vision of dependable systems in 2020. He defined dependability as the ability to deliver a trusted service and the ability to avoid frequent or severe failures. He went on to characterize dependability, elaborating the causes of failures in operating systems, web-sites, hardware, etc. Malicious faults is the single largest cause, and security is thereby an important consideration. He brought forth the trends in dependability issues based on the technology trends, and emphasized that sustainability of the information infrastructure is at stake.
Dr. Guru Parulkar, who leads the Next-Generation Internet program, called GENI, in the US, talked about the motivation for creating a new internet. He highlighted the essentials of the Next-Generation Internet, comparing it with the innovations in other infrastructure services like electricity, highways, water, etc. While stressing in the need for security and control, he brought out the possible impact of the next generation internet on mobile wireless, embedded devices and applications, photonics integration, capabilities of distributed systems, networked critical infrastructures, and many others. His approach to work with a broader community was exemplified by his invitation to TCS to participate in the program.
A Panel discussion followed, moderated by K. Ananthkrishnan (Vice President and CTO, TCS). He highlighted the significance of the topic 'From Software to System-ware by 2020', and talked about a few important points for the panel consisting of Kiran Deshpande (President, Air Tight Networks), Dr. S. Muthukrishnan (Consulting Advisor, TCS) and Dr. Gautam Shroff (Vice President and Member-CTO, TCS) participated. Kiran suggested that compilers could become domain-specific and domain specific languages will dominate system building. Model-driven development and knowledge based economy are the mantras of 2020, was the message from Prof. Muthukrishnan. Gautam's opinion was that interpretive systems and composing systems dynamically using ready-made components or services, will be the talk of the day in 2020. Active participation from the listeners made the discussion very lively, when participants came up with their own perceptions of 2020. Interesting remarks of what does IT have to offer came from members of the School Quiz winning teams, who were also specially invited for the panel discussion.
