IIM-Calcutta to boost research and upgrade lab

The Indian Institute of Management-Calcutta (IIM-C) plans to utilize the Rs.20 crore special budgetary grant to help students do research in global finance markets and to upgrade its financial research and trading lab.

Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee announced the special grant to the IIM-C in the union budget he presented to the Lok Sabha on Monday.

"The money will help us upgrade our financial research and trading laboratory into a world class facility. The fund will also help students for further research in global finance markets," Ashok Banerjee, professor of finance and head of the lab, said on Monday.

The lab was set up on November 18, 2008, to support advanced applied research in financial markets and equip finance managers with the mathematical and conceptual theories.

"Lot of money is required for further research in the global finance markets. So, this money will help the students to a large extent," Banerjee told the sources.

"The grant will help us obtain important softwares and global market data. Right now this is going on a small scale. The special allocation will give a boost to our upgradation and research projects," he said. IANS

Source:http://indiaedunews.net/IIM/IIM-Calcutta_to_boost_research_and_upgrade_lab_13611/

Kerala's ICT textbook to teach audio, video technology

Thiruvananthapuram: The text book on information and communication technology (ICT) for Kerala's class-nice school students will help them learn audio recording and video editing, an official said on Monday.

The text book, developed by IT@School Project, will be available from the next academic year beginning in a few months' time.

Apart from Malayalam, the textbook will also be made available in English, Tamil and Kannada languages, said K. Anvar Sadath, executive director of IT@School Project.

The union ministry of human resource development and several other states have shown interest in the ICT-enabled education system enabled inKerala.

The IT@School Project is the technology arm of the state education department. It aims to empower students by providing ICT-enabled education from the grass root level.

Sadath said the new ICT text book includes topics on several free software packages such as Audacity, WinFF, which teach students to re-record a poem as needed, re-edit portions if necessary and even give a new background music to selected portions.

"The textbook also teaches how to use handicams available at schools and also ways to create an educational documentary using the videos," said Sadath.

Last year class-eight students were provided with an ICT text book.

"The new textbook for class-nine is designed completely in tune with the national curriculum framework. With a text book planned for class-10 also next year, the shift to ICT enabled education in the state's high schools will be complete," added Sadath.

source:http://indiaedunews.net/Kerala/Kerala's_ICT_textbook_to_teach_audio,_video_technology_13560/

Huge demand for skilled professionals in IT industry

Many options: IT industry is heavily dependent on the analytical skills of its workforce.

Unlike most other fields, IT sector is human resource-intensive. The skills of its human resources – software professionals – are critical in keeping the sector running.

IT industry is heavily dependent on the analytical skills of its workforce unlike other sectors such as heavy industries, banking etc., where there is considerable scope for automation of major chunk of the operations at the cost of manpower.

As such, there is a huge demand from the IT industry for skilled professionals well-versed with software. But with a range of courses in demand in the job market, there exists some confusion in the minds of budding software professionals on which domain they should opt for.

To help clear the air, here is some fodder on some of the courses in the job market and what one could expect from them.

Solaris, a Sun Microsystems product now acquired by Oracle is an operating system, a close variant of Unix.

This is pretty popular as a programming environment and also as a server system. Although entry level trainings are there, this is more of an advanced topic, says Puran B. Kalapala, an IIT graduate working with a city-based start-up.

Microsoft SharePoint is a family of software products developed by Microsoft for collaboration, file sharing and web publishing. It is pretty popular in the job market nowadays due to the increasing need for common collaboration portals across teams or requirements distributed across geographical locations. As a course, you will get handsome jobs in good companies, as only good companies can afford to buy Enterprise products from Microsoft, reasons Mr. Puran.

ABAP (Advanced Business Application Programming), a high-level programming language (panic not, high level means an advanced language easy for humans) created by SAP has been around for quite sometime. It is mainly used for programming the SAP-Application Server.

SAP is divided into four distinct modules covering typical functions in an organization – HR (Human Resources) Financials and Controlling (FICO), Materials Management (MM) and Sales and Distribution (SD). “In the SAP world ABAP is unavoidable, and for enterprise level systems, SAP is unavoidable,” points out Mr. Puran, “which means, ABAP professionals will be in considerable demand in the market.”

Common Business Oriented Language (Cobol) is one of the most oft-heard software in the market today. But it is pretty much out of favour among the masses except for in IBM where they have legacy systems called Mainframes. “These huge computers (Mainframes) are still in use because of the heavy dependence of large and typically old industries on them, banking institutions and financial giants for example,” says Mr. Puran. “The cost of shifting to newer technologies is way too high when compared to maintaining those old computers, so they stay.”

Job Control Language (JCL) is a scripting language, part of the Mainframes Operating systems. It is used for controlling large batch processes like calculating interests on all savings accounts in a bank. A scripting language is comprised of scripts or pieces of code which do not need to be compiled, and can be put into an already running system and they start running as if it is any other program. Typically programs need to be compiled before they can be run, not so with scripts.

Another of the legacy systems that continues to be in some demand is Customer Information Control System (CICS), part of the four-part IBM Mainframe software. “This is a 'transaction server' and is mainly used to control the database transactions that take place in an IBM Mainframe Operating System.”

DB2 is a flavour of Database. Learning DB2 means learning how to create, manipulate and maintain databases, just like any of the other databases, says Mr. Puran, senior software engineer with Asymptopica Pvt. Ltd. There are many databases in existence like Oracle DB, Microsoft SQLServer, POSTGRE SQL and DB2, and our existence depends on these databases.

DB2 was initially a part of the IBM mainframes system, but now DB2 has moved on and is one of the five most used databases in the world. They can now be used on Windows or Linux systems and so there is a good demand for DB2 administrators or programmers in the market.

source:http://www.hindu.com/edu/2011/02/21/stories/2011022150540100.htm