The Shoreline'14 April, 2014 | Page 55

and what is the production source? Project CurioCity aims to develop a platform where students in a particular city can learn about key figures and systems within their city, but it does not stop here. Knowing facts about your city won’t make it better. Can we do something about? Well, yes, if you have real data. Using data visualization techniques and support from government data sources, we aim to build a platform that keeps itself up to date with the latest statistics, and let students play with that data by visualizing it, extrapolating, and thus coming up with better ways to solve the city’s problems. The platform will contain information regarding demographics, transport, energy, waste disposal, healthcare, crimes, pollution levels, forest cover/green spaces, economy, literacy, education etc. The project will be piloted in Mumbai and Bangalore before moving to major cities across the world. We plan to collaborate with several organizations such as IBM, Google and Mckinsey for this initiative in the longer run. The future trends in educational technology Education is in the middle of a disruption. There are several key areas which are being explored and I would like to touch upon the important ones. There is a whole lot of work going on in Intelligent Tutoring Systems, which employ Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Science. CMU’s LearnLab does some amazing work in this field. Work is going on in 3D fabrication and maker culture and its use to teach students important problem solving skills. Stanford’s TLTL lab does significant work in this area. Interesting work is happening in educational games and how they can be used to make learning fun. Another key area coming up is Educational Data Mining and Learning Analytics to model students computationally. Our Team We have an awesome team that works together towards achieving our goals. The members include Dhruv Chand (Mechanical, Third Year), Vikas Yaligar (IT Third Year), Sreecharan Sankaranarayanan (CSE, Third Year), Nimisha Sarath (CSE, Second Year). Our faculty mentors include Dr Annappa B (HOD, CSE) and Dr Mohit Tahiliani (Assistant Professor, CSE). Our remote mentors include Dr. Jennifer Mankoff (HCII, CMU). We are supported by our aluminus Roshni Chandrashekhar (2011 batch) . Joining our team We are always willing to take in more people who wish to change the future of education. Visit our website to get an updated list of projects. Link: www. ulrl.nitk.ac.in eachside Blogging B Mohit Tahiliani is an assistant professor in the CSE department. His research interests include active queue management mechanisms and TCP congestion control. By Dr. Mohit Tahiliani logging undoubtedly is an arduous job, but its benefits are innumerable. It was way back in 2009 that the quest for learning and sharing the knowledge on ns2, a network simulator for research, landed me in the blogosphere. It was only during my time as a Research Scholar at NITK, Surathkal that my blog started to go viral. An amazing idea is absolutely fascinating but utterly useless until we choose to use it. Therefore to experiment with my project ideas, I kickstarted my journey with ns-2. I started writing noddy programs and soon became well-versed with the tool. During this course, I came across several errors that left me clueless. These errors in ns-2 encourage you to stop coding and instead rely heavily upon the script generators. I started posting my queries on forums and was surprised to find the active involv V