April 2, 2008 was celebrated as the CSI Day, the very first of its kind in the history of NSIT. The day was dedicated purely to Open Source. It saw a galaxy of towering people from the Open Source world. The Guest of honor, Prof. Ranjit Singh, Director of NSIT, addressed the students with his encouraging words and expressed his felicitations on the occurrence of the seminar and the active work done by CSI-NSIT.
This was followed by a brief talk by Manusheel Gupta, a 4th year IT student of NSIT. He gave a very brief introduction of Open Source and its importance, which was followed by things which students can do right from their first year. The main idea was “Do not focus on hurdles but on generating opportunities out of every stone encountered.”
The next speaker was Mr. Jaspreet Singh, a former NSIT student, currently working in software labs of IBM. He befriended students with Open Source Software named ‘Eclipse’. It is a Java based extensible Open Source development platform having numerous plugins to add to its functionality. The basic working and features of the software were nicely explained. One can work on it as a consumer exploiting its facilities or as a Plugin developer, writing one’s own plugins, which would thus be absorbed by it as its own.
Then came Mr. Supreet Sethi, a Software Artist at MPower Mobiles and riveted on ‘Search Engines’. He informed the students that there is an exponentially increasing pool of information available online. But this plethora of knowledge has to be organized, which necessitates search engines. Supreet Sethi unveiled many shortcomings of the present day search engines. He acquainted the students with many aspects of devising the same so that the budding engineers can also contribute to the development.
Succeeding him was Hemant Goyal, 3rd year IT student of NSIT. He dissertated about Open Source Communities, and how students could be a part of these communities and start contributing to the world of technology. The well-laid presentation familiarized students with two pivotal aspects of software engineering that is Coding and System Designing. A round of refreshments followed this and the hall was abuzz with student’s discussions about the umpteen things they had just learnt.
This discourse quickly settled to give way to Mr. Varun Aggarwal, a former NSIT student. He talked about Aspiring Minds, MIT open course-wares consisting of notes, lectures and assignments of MIT, available online. He then asked students some questions and those who answered earned each a Music CD. The amiable self of the speaker, interactive session and the shelling out of Music CDs rejuvenated the listeners.
The audience next witnessed Mr. Vivek Khurana, an active member of freed.in. He talked about FOSS paraphernalia of entertainment. Hollywood movies like Shrek and Stuart Little saw the use of these software. Amarok – for internet radio, Audacity – for live recording and adding special effects, Cinelerra – for video recording, Creative Commons, Grattsvibes and Blender are among the few software that were introduced. The presentation concluded with a clip showing the best of animated clips submitted in Siggraph competition, all of which were made using Open Source Software.
The seminar successfully met its desired goal of spreading information about Open Source and befriending college students with the facets galore of Open Source.