I’m currently on the second leg of grueling plane ride home from Bangalore and reflecting back on the highlight of the trip which was definitely the opportunity to spend time with a few visionaries in India academia - Vice Chancellor H.P. Khincha, Dr. H.S Jamadagni and Dr. K. Rajanikanth. On Saturday, together we inaugurated a new Parallel Programming Center of Excellence at the MS Ramaiah Institute of Technology in Bangalore. The center will be used to train 250 faculty from VTU affiliate and autonomous institutes on new parallel programming curriculum. Vice Chan Kincha opened up the event by sharing his vision on keeping abreast of technology and the urgency behind updating curriculum for multi-core. Professor Jamadagni officially handed over a new set of parallel programming curriculum which he developed and is making available to this group and to faculty around the world to use. He noted that unfortunately our brains do not follow Moore’s law - with the number of neurons reducing instead of doubling every two years. So we have to be selective in what we teach students and be careful not to get caught up in the technology hype curve. He also discussed the need for more of a community approach to driving curriculum changes where the teacher, learner, employer, philosopher, politician and researcher all collaborate in its development. Prof. MSRIT, then spoke on how center would be used to train some 300-500 faculty from VTU affiliate and autonomous institutes using a train the trainer approach with master faculty trainers. It was amazing to see the level of enthusiasm and proactiveness around updating curriculum which often can be a quite slow moving machine.

A few photos below of the event. Thank you Vice Chancellor Khincha, Dr. Jamadagni and Dr. Rajanikanth for a strong partnership between academia and industry!