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CITRIS joins Indian university in e-learning initiative
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CITRIS director Shankar Sastry spoke at the July event in Washington, D.C., announcing the Amrita initiative. A native of Bangalore, considered India’s information technology capital, Sastry is also NEC Distinguished Professor of Engineering and professor in the departments of EECS and Bioengineering at Berkeley.
UCSD JACOBS SCHOOL OF ENGINEERING PHOTO
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UC Berkeley and the Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society (CITRIS) are two of several partners in a collaboration between India and the U.S. that will use a government-sponsored satellite to transmit educational programming throughout India.
India’s Amrita University will lead the initiative to host faculty from top U.S. engineering centers, designed to enhance learning in India’s fastest-growing universities, many of which are located in remote rural areas. Faculty will teach graduate and undergraduate courses via Edusat, a new satellite e-learning network launched last year by the Indian Space Research Organization.
CITRIS director Shankar Sastry joined representatives of other participating institutions at a Washington, D.C., event in July, where a three-year agreement initiating the program was signed. Also in attendance were Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Venkata Rangan (Ph.D.’89 CS), vice chancellor of Amrita, a Berkeley alumnus, and professor of computer science and engineering at UC San Diego, who spearheaded the project.
“This is an incredible opportunity for us to experiment in distance learning,” Sastry says. “The satellite access available to Amrita is of an order that would be unthinkable in the U.S., difficult to access and prohibitively expensive.” The collaborative aspect of the program, he added, will be mutually beneficial to both nations. Other participants include UC San Diego, Carnegie Mellon, Cornell, SUNY Buffalo, and Case Western Reserve.
Sastry this spring was also appointed principal investigator and director of another collaborative project, a UC Berkeley–led center to improve reliability of the nation's computer infrastructure and protect it from cyberattacks. The Team for Research in Ubiquitous Secure Technology (TRUST) will receive nearly $19 million from the National Science Foundation over five years and unite researchers from eight U.S. universities and industries nationwide.
TRUST was established following a presidential committee report recommending increased funding for cybersecurity research on the country’s increasingly vulnerable information infrastructure. For more information, go to http://trust.eecs.berkeley.edu/. |
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