R&D Showcase...

As everyone is writing about this I thought why shouldn't I ?? Thought its a little late but who cares :) Well !!! The R&D showcase has travelled a long distance to reach to its current form and status... till 2002 it used to be Open House, then last year it got renamed as Showcase and now the R&D Showcase... The name sounds very cool, but to a die hard Pancham Da fan like me.. it sounds like a musical extravaganza full of "Jhankar Beats". Similar to last year, this time also we got this mail from our project Guide that we have to put our project in showcase. Well !! For every such mail I have only one reaction, I ask Pankaj; What is the situation??? If he gives a green signal then its OK otherwise its a little disturbing... but again not for me ... I know that anyway Pankaj is going to do all the work :) So, it was Pankaj only who did all the work this time. I helped him with setting things up, like moving the system to Data Engg Lab... putting everything in place and configuring network etc... Finally the D-day come. The most difficult thing was to wake up at 7 in the morning... somehow both me and Pankaj managed to do it, we tried to wake up Utkarsh also but all in vain, so we decided that we should leave Utkarsh will join us later.Now it was the time of demonstration... Before writing anything else let me explain what our project is (which I understood that day only :) ) ... Basically our project was to implement a Data Stream Management System with an additional monitoring module. Its the "cutting edge" research that the IIIT always talks about... I won't brag much about this but sincerly speaking Pankaj has done some real good work because Dr Kamal and Dr P K Reddy both were quiet happy with the work. So I was talking about demonstrations. That too was mainly done by Pankaj only. I just stood there to give him moral support. I was feeling very sleepy by lunch so I said goodbye to Pankaj and left for the hostel. Utkarsh came to accompany Pankaj after the lunch. The next day again Me and Pankaj went for the demonstration. As Pankaj was very tired. I reluctantly took command of the demonstration part. I was confident about the students which were coming to see the project but the time any faculty used to come closer I used to start behaving like even I am here to see this project :) ... Well, there were some nice experiences. Once I started explaining a bunch of girls form some college about my project. I explained them for almost half an hour... and at the end I was feeling good that probably I have succeeded in explaining and I was expecting some good questions... but No the questions they asked was "what programming language have you used", "what database have you used ??"... same was the situation with many other guys... vision students were trying to explain some fundas to the crowd and later they came to know that the audience isn't even familiar with simple graphics concepts ... Such was the situation of the audience.. from industry side also we didn't see many visitors... except for the first day when Kiran Karnik came at the very inaugral of the event... The projects were more or less similar to last year... only the students have changed ... conceptually I liked very few projects... some of the vision projects ... some DE projects (mainly Rishi's, Ravi's and the Agrids and ofcourse mine :) ) ... Tintin and Pelu have done some really interesting work... Amal didn't show me his project :( ... Ranta and Bedi were not present on their desk .. but their project was interesting.. Nir's and Chandu's project was good... In communication lab I didn't see any new thing.. all the projects were basically done on existing ideas... LTRC was just repeating what it has done so far... the same old Shiva and Shakti... nothing new... The Building science demonstration was good .. but again that was done last year by the MTech BS guys... Didn't get much time to visit other labs... but heard that there wasn't much serious work being displayed anywhere... Finally me and pankaj were discussing what research is. I thought to start afresh, I searched the dictionary.com to get the definition of the word "research" re·search Audio pronunciation of "research" ( P ) Pronunciation Key (r-sûrch, rsûrch) n. 1. Scholarly or scientific investigation or inquiry. See Synonyms at inquiry. 2. Close, careful study. And both of us found that here we do, may be only the 2nd part of the above definition... I really doubt about the first part... and also the R&D showcase was more or less like D&D only... I haven't seen any other similar activity anywhere else ... so there isn't any example with which I can compare .. but certainly most of the things which were on display didn't qualify for the research .... I don't want to demean anyone .. but most of the projects looked like some sort of cool hacks... Anyway... the good things were that we got 2day's extension for fyp report and enjoyed free coffee, tea and cold drink for 2 days.... The bad thing is that we didn't get the Showcase T-shirts like last time :((