Fire in Tamilnadu Express

Nothing is worse for a rail fan than the news of a railway accident, particular when innocent lives are lost. And so was the news of S-11 coach of 12622 Tamilnadu Express from New Delhi to Chennai burnt by fire yesterday early morning, around 4:30 AM. Since the TN enjoys a non-stop run from Vijaywada to Chennai, there was no stop for the next three hours (till the train reached Chennai), and hence everyone must have been fast asleep, when the fire broke out.

Here are some links to the news reports:

Times of India
Indian Express
The Hindustan Times

Different accounts report the number of deaths to be between 30 and 47.

The usual things have been done. Everyone has paid condolences. Railways have announced financial compensation. (They can at least change the vocabulary. It seems that they are valuing a life at 5 lakhs. Instead, they can say something to the effect that they are providing financial support to the next of kin.) Everyone will be making an air dash to see the burnt coach, as if it has become a museum piece. An inquiry has been commissioned. And, by tomorrow, the traffic will be normal on the busy route. Media will also forget that yet another accident had happened.

Hints are being given out that it was either an electric short circuit, or a sabotage. It is being suggested that some Railway officials heard a loud bang (which apparently supports the sabotage theory), though some survivors from the coach and passengers in nearby coaches seemed to have heard nothing of the sort. Some others are talking about sound of crackers.

How does it matter whether it was a short-circuit or a sabotage. The important question is why did it kill so many. And that question, I am not seeing debated in the media, but only on the railfan website, http://forum.irfca.org/. It is not being debated, because it brings forth uncomfortable questions for the Railways to answer.

Shouldn't there be electrical safety devices which should detect a short-circuit and break the circuit before a fire gets ignited.

Shouldn't there be some emergency light system in the coach, when there is an electric failure, so that there can be at least a bit of light for people to plan escape.

It has been pointed out that the emergency window exits remained intact in the burnt coach. Why could people not open that. How do we make it more user friendly, so that they can actually be used in an emergency like this one.

Why couldn't people escape to the neighbouring coach. The train has a vestibuled rake. Was it because, it was full of trash. We notice in many trains that the pantry staff keeps trash in the vestibule area. Was the passage closed for the night. What is Railways going to do to make sure that vestibules provide unhindered passage in such emergencies.

Was the coach over-crowded, as is the norm these days. Many unauthorized passengers sleeping in the passage, again, hindering the exit path. Can something be done to make sure that the passage area in the coach is free of any encroachment, particularly in the night.

Aren't the coaches and the upholstery supposedly made of materials which are fire retardant. Then why did the fire spread so quickly, that people did not have time to escape. Have Railways done any testing of these materials.

Who and what caused fire is certainly important, but the more important issue is whether the loss of life was avoidable in such an accident.

My prayers are with the family and friends of those who lost their lives, not because of a fire, but because the fire spread quickly, and the coach design and other practices did not allow a quick exit.

MOOC: Massively Open Online Courses

Lately, a colleague of mine, Prof. T V Prabhakar, has been educating me about MOOCs. He has been forwarding various links on this, including the recent ACM article. Of course, I was aware of the AI course offered in the MOOC format by two Stanford faculty members, Sebastian Thrun and Peter Norvig, in which more than a lakh students registered.

The ACM article is by a professor of University of Massachusetts (Fred Martin) who offered the AI course last fall, using the Stanford AI course as the lecture material. The experience of the course taught by Fred is very interesting, and points to the pedagogical changes that we may be seeing in future. The lecture material will be available on the net, and the class will be essentially a face-to-face discussion session and for any incremental learning. Of course MOOCs also have their own online forums, questions and answers, links to additional information, and so on.

What will be impact of MOOCs on education in India. Very difficult to guess. But let us make some guesses.

A course by an excellent professor in a good university in some part of the world even in an online mode is likely better than the corresponding course offered in an average engineering college in the country, even though latter is a face-to-face communication. Considering this, a college in India may just ask its students to register for the MOOC, and ask students only to give the exams of the university. However, this option does not appear feasible. The language of foreign professors may not be very easily understood by our students because of differences in the accent and pronunciation. A typical student may not have sufficient writing skills to ask questions on the online forums. But, most importantly, there will be differences in a course offered in another university and the syllabus of the local college. And considering that we mostly operate in the archaic affiliation model in India, allowing any variation in syllabus is simply out of question.  Because of this, MOOCs will be used just like the courses on NPTEL. Students will just watch lectures on specific topics from the archives, and institutions will not replace their courses with MOOCs.

Of course, an institution may take care of the exam part by suggesting to the students that parts which are not covered by the MOOC will be taught separately and only that part will be taught. But the language difficulties on one hand and strict university regulations on the other will ensure that this does not happen.

I believe that language difficulties will go away soon. Many courses do have subtitles. Once you have subtitles in a course, to allow a text-to-speech software with a different accent should not be a problem.

Can a MOOC be used in the same format as by Prof. Fred Martin in the ACM article. That is, asking students to go through the lectures, but having an interactive session with them, what is known as the "flipped classroom" model. This also looks unlikely because to conduct an interactive session based on lectures by someone else is not an easy task. It is not like conducting a tutorial where the instructor has provided detailed material to be specifically discussed in that tutorial session. This interactive session invites questions and discussions on almost anything discussed by the lectures on MOOC and beyond. Again, such expertise is not available amongst the faculty of majority of the engineering colleges of the country.

I foresee that in the next 4-5 years, MOOCs will be used primarily by people outside the strict curriculum boundaries. These may be working professionals or even students who are interested in a particular subject and just want to learn it without necessarily this counting towards any degree.

Within the educational institutions, there may be some (like IIIT Delhi has done), who may allow students to go through a MOOC, and have an internal mechanism to test whether the student has indeed learned the material and give him/her credit. This way, they can expand the range of electives that their students can take.
Of course, only universities which are nimble and can approve any new course quickly, can take advantage of MOOC in this way.

My guess is that the scenario will change as and when professors in Indian institutions start offering MOOCs.

Here are some websites for looking for these courses:

https://www.coursera.org/

http://www.udacity.com/

https://www.edx.org/

Another link from CACM: The Coming Tsunami in Educational Technology by John L Hennessy.

IIT Gandhinagar: 1st Convocation

Two students came to my office in the morning and asked me a simple question, "are all IITs similar?" And instinctively, I said, "No, IIT Gandhinagar is different." Well, may be all IITs are different, but when I visit IIT Gandhinagar, and I do that very frequently, it just seems like a very different place, a place which seems to defy Newton. There is no inertia there. There is no resistance to change, and as the cliche goes, the only constant there is change.

I visited them again last Sunday (22nd July), to attend the first convocation of the Institute, to see the pioneer batch of the Institute receive degrees, less than a month after they were notified in the Gazette of India as a new IIT.

The first thing that struck me was the dress. To quote from their convocation brochure, "the stole robe, designed specifically for the first convocation of IITGN, is a combination of the western academic attire and Indian free flowing draped garments." No one seemed to be missing the black robe and the cap.

The Chief Guest was Mr. N R Narayana Murthy, one of the most inspiring leaders of our times, and a role model for the generation that is represented by the graduating batch.

When I went through all the documents that were distributed, it was amazing to see how the young Institute and its pioneer batch has performed. Out of 86 students graduating, 8 were going for PhD programs (7 abroad, and 1 in IIT Gandhinagar itself). 10% of the batch going for PhD has not happened in older IITs for may be a couple of decades. Even Mr. Murthy mentioned that it is unheard of for Caltech to admit two students into the PhD program of their same department from the same external university. There were four more who were going for MS/MTech. There must be something right that the Institute has done over the last four years to enthuse so many of them for higher studies in engineering.

Six graduates have set up a technology innovation start up in the area of distributed computing in IITGN Incubation Center. And one graduate is spending time in improving the machine to make incense sticks (which he had designed himself earlier in the program, and which is helping the poor in Ahmedabad).

The batch had options of either studying for a vanilla BTech or embellish it with an honors or a minor. Only 37 out of 86 decided to graduate with a BTech program, which shows that students were really very keen to study engineering, very unlike the complaints that we hear from faculty of older IITs that students are only interested in a degree and they want to pursue MBAs.

The convocation brochure and the Director's speech talked about several innovations that IIT Gandhinagar has done in its march towards excellence. The focus on humanities and social sciences in the engineering curriculum has been amazing. They have the highest share of HSS courses in the engineering curriculum of all engineering institutes in the country. There is a comprehensive interview of every student in the institute every semester by a panel of faculty. This helps in detecting problem areas early and also identify strong points of the students so that they can be advised accordingly. Short courses of 8-10 lecture hours by distinguished visitors, which give the students 1 credit towards their graduation requirements is another innovation, which is actually being implemented and is not just on paper. They are building relationships with several good institutes nearby by encouraging their faculty to forge research collaborations with IITGN faculty, by encouraging their students to spend a semester or two at IITGN and earn credits which their parent institute may consider towards their graduation requirement, and so on. They realize that for having an excellent research program of their own, they will have to ensure that there is a research ecosystem around them. There were too many initiatives to mention here. Even though I have been going there so frequently, and even been part of some committees, when all the initiatives of the last 4 years were put together, it still was very surprising to me to see what IIT Gandhinagar has achieved.

(Disclosure: I am a guest professor of IIT Gandhinagar, and all my visits to IITGN are supported by them.)

Website of IIT Gandhinagar: http://www.iitgn.ac.in/