The JTG Summer School

in

Information Theory, Networks, and Signal Processing

What is JTG?• Joint Telematics Group of IITs (the six well-known ones) and IISc

• Telematics: Study of control, communication, and computation at a distance

– From telema (genitive telematos), study of distance, as in Rajesh’s Random dictionary of the Engreek language

• History of JTG

– Estd. 1987 to run teacher training and industry training programmes taught by the then very few communications/SP/networking faculty in India

– Since 1995 oversees the organisation of the annual National Conference on Communications (NCC)

– The conference is held at one of the IITs or IISc (Jan/Feb every year)

• Since 2008, JTG has been running a summer school for research students

JTG Summer School Format

• Four days, two topics• Two hours lecture + one hour

discussion/complements in the morning. Same format in the afternoon

• Student research and/or open problem presentations in the discussion sessions

• Advanced, INTENSE, rigorous, primarily aimed at research students and young faculty

• Material for 2009 - 2013 available on the web• Like two mini-courses (8 lecture hours each)

Past Summer Schools• 2008 (Experimental, Zeroth), IIT Madras

– Multiterminal information theory Rajesh Sundaresan– Network coding Andrew Thangaraj and Srikrishna Bhashyam

• 2009 (First), IISc Bangalore– New paradigms in processing large data sets Ravi Kannan and Amit Deshpande– Network function computation D.Manjunath

• 2010 (Second), IISc Bangalore– Physical layer security Matthieu Bloch– Markov renewal processes and mean-field limits Anurag Kumar

• 2011 (Third): IIT Bombay– Statistical recovery problems in high dimensions Martin Wainwright– Optimizing performance of wireless networks Prasanna Chaporkar

• 2012 (Fourth): IIT Bombay– Games and mechanisms for communication systems Bruce Hajek– Communication complexity Jaikumar Radhakrishnan

• 2013 (Fifth): IIT Madras (just finished last week)– Random matrix theory and wireless networks Giuseppe Caire– Stochastic geometry for wireless networks Srikanth Iyer

JTG Summer School 2010 • Registration: Very cheap

(about INR 1000 to pay for foreign speaker travel, about INR 80,000)

• Participant profile: 97 registrations– IISc 41 students + 5 faculty (including speaker)– IITs and TIFR 26 + 3 faculty– IIT participants mostly from IITM, IITB. (IITK had 2)– Others 22

• 13 students gave short talks

• Sponsors:IISc’s ECE department, DRDO-IISc PME (INR 50,000), DST (INR 75,000), Anurag’s and Rajesh’s project funds (balance, about INR 50,000)

• COMSNETS Association offered partial support from 2011 onwards.

JTG Summer School 2013 • Registration: Very cheap

(INR 1000 for students, INR 1500 for others)

• Participant profile: 107 registrations– 69 students (about 60 from IISc/IITs/TIFR)– 23 faculty (about 10 from IISc/IITs/TIFR)– 15 others (companies, research organizations)

• 4 students gave 30-minute talks

• Sponsors:– Registration (INR 120,000)– COMSNETS Association (INR 100,000)– Govt agencies: DST (INR 75,000), CSIR (INR 50,000)– Industry: Saankhya Labs (INR 50,000), Qualcomm (INR 50,000),

Microsoft Research (INR 50,000), Google (INR 25,000)

What we want from IT Society

• Blessing

• Money (USD 20,000 of annual support to help us sustain this program)

• Visibility

• Participation, check it out!

Forecast of Budget (in INR)

• Speaker travel: 150,000• Honoraria: 100,000• Speaker accommodations: 100,000• Student accommodations: 200,000• Food 500,000• Arrangements, stationery 300,000

• Total: INR 1,250,000 ~ USD 23,000

• Balance will be covered by registrations, local funding agencies

Our plan for the future• Name: can be changed if there is sustained funding support from ITSoc

• Round robin schedule

– IIT Madras, IISc, IIT Bombay – institutes that seem to send the most participants– Currently sojourn time: 2 years to exploit organisational lessons learned, tap known funding resources (flexible)– New venues could be added after traction (flexible if there is sustained participation from candidate location)

• Timing: May/June, depending on anticipated local climate conditions

• Topics at the forefront of research in information theory, communications, networking, signal processing, particularly emerging problem areas.

• One speaker from India (to reduce travel cost) and one from abroad (flexible)

• Organising committee: Chooses venue, topics, speakers

– Andrew Thangaraj, Srikrishna Bhashyam (IIT Madras)– Rajesh Sundaresan, Navin Kashyap (IISc)– Vinod Prabhakaran (TIFR Mumbai), Sibiraj Bhaskaran Pillai (IIT Bombay)

– Short-list potential speakers for following year at a meeting during the current workshop.Invitations sent out right after.

• Advisory group: JTG National Coordinator, IT Society President, Prakash Narayan, B. Sundar Rajan, P. Vijay Kumar

– Utter words of wisdom when requested