A Journey Rekindled After Two Decades

 

A Presentation with Purpose

What began as a long and steady professional journey eventually started to feel less meaningful. It was then that pursuing a PhD brought a renewed sense of curiosity, purpose, and intellectual challenge into my life.

On a quiet morning at CHRIST University, I found myself once again behind a podium—not only as a student this time, but as a speaker, mentor, and researcher. Presenting on VM scheduling policies in a research forum, I stood before a group of curious minds and experienced faculty, sharing insights shaped over years of exploration and persistence.

An Unexpected Reunion
But the day held more than just academic exchanges. Amid the bustle of post-session chats and handshakes, a familiar face emerged—my MCA classmate from two decades ago. We greeted each other with the warmth only time can deepen. What began as a catch-up soon became a powerful moment of realization: she was not only a friend from the past but my PhD guide for the past seven years.

A Community of Scholars
We posed for group photos with our peers, fellow presenters, and organizers—some in person, while others joined virtually. Each face in the frame told a story of dedication and academic camaraderie. These were not just colleagues but co-travelers on the same challenging yet rewarding path of knowledge creation.

Capturing Bonds

As we stood together once more, smiling under the soft lights of the seminar hall, I couldn’t help but feel grateful for the chance to collaborate, for the encouragement shared through every milestone, and for the constant reminder that the best journeys are walked together.

A Milestone Preserved
Later, in a quieter corner of campus, we held the symbol of years of research—a bound PhD thesis. Surrounded by mentors and teammates, this moment celebrated more than just an academic milestone; it acknowledged resilience, teamwork, and the unbreakable bond between a student and her guide.

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Gratitude, Guidance, and Growth
What began as a university friendship has grown into a mentoring relationship that continues to inspire me every day. Seven years into this PhD journey, with countless drafts, presentations, and reflections behind us, I remain deeply thankful for a friend who became my guide—and for a guide who continues to believe in me. The road ahead looks bright, especially when walked with such strong support and shared purpose.

AI Tools for Education

 In the previous week, I was studying the tools and techniques that can be augmented for educators. Here we could classify the tools based on the issues we need to solve. Some tools are very specific to a type of teaching. During the online teaching and learning process, the employment of such tools are part of the online meeting tools. Listed a few of them

1. Readai is part of a Google meeting, can summarize the participants, content discussed, etc.
2. Copilot from Microsoft, a Generative AI tool, helps by automating tasks like grading and feedback, allowing educators to focus on critical, human decisions.
3. Kahoot!: Uses AI to create interactive quizzes and simulations. 
4. Canva is a tool used not only for brochures but also to present classroom content.
5. Google Gemini is very useful for generating charts of students' performance, participation, etc.

Here are few of the example for all above from the daily usage

Artificial Intelligence for Learning & Development

Here, I like to explore how artificial intelligence (AI) is revolutionizing corporate training by enhancing personalization, efficiency, and strategic alignment. Here is a five-point agenda that I foresee in the next 5 years.

1. Personalized Learning Experiences: AI enables the creation of tailored training programs by analyzing individual learning patterns, preferences, and performance metrics. This personalization ensures that employees receive content that is most relevant to their roles and learning needs.

2. Enhanced Efficiency and Cost Reduction: By automating administrative tasks such as content curation, scheduling, and progress tracking, AI reduces the workload on training managers. This automation leads to significant cost savings and allows L&D professionals to focus on more strategic initiatives.

3. Data-Driven Insights: AI provides real-time analytics on learner engagement and progress, enabling organizations to make informed decisions about training effectiveness and areas needing improvement. These insights help in continuously refining training programs for better outcomes.

4. Scalability of Training Programs: AI-powered platforms can efficiently scale training initiatives across large organizations, ensuring consistent learning experiences regardless of geographical locations. This scalability is crucial for maintaining uniform standards and knowledge across the workforce.

5. Continuous Learning Culture: The integration of AI in L&D promotes a culture of continuous learning by providing employees with ongoing, accessible, and relevant learning opportunities. This approach supports employee growth and adaptability in a rapidly changing business environment.

In summary, the article highlights that incorporating AI into learning and development strategies leads to smarter, more effective training solutions that are personalized, efficient, and aligned with organizational goals.

Block Chain Applications - Part I

 Here are the outline of several industries that can significantly benefit from the integration of blockchain technology. Here’s a summary of the key points discussed[1]. Along with one example application listed for getting hands-on. 

- **IoT (Internet of Things)**: Combining blockchain with IoT can overcome fundamental limitations, making IoT systems more secure, transparent, and decentralized. Examples like IBM Watson IoT blockchain and IBM Blue Horizon showcase practical applications and experimentation with blockchain-based IoT networks. Gujarat Narmada Valley Fertilisers & Chemicals (GNFC) is one of the largest fertilizer manufacturing companies in India, with products sold all across the country. Owing to its scale and pan-India presence, GNFC operates over a large and complex supply chain. A proof of concept is developed with the GNFC using the IoT and blockchain [2].
  

Figure 1. GNFC block chain based business workflow

- **Government Sector**: Blockchain can improve transparency, security, and efficiency in various government processes, including homeland security, identification systems, and benefit disbursements. There is a National block chain framwork development and installed as portal NBFLite[1] [3].

- **Finance Sector**: While the finance industry is keen to explore blockchain, there are still hurdles to overcome before fully production-ready blockchain-based financial systems can be implemented and more in Part II(yet to come)

Reference

1. Bashir, Imran. (2020). Mastering Blockchain 3rd Edition.
2. Blockchain the India Strategy 
3. Government launches Vishvasya-Blockchain Technology Stack
4. NBF Lite a CDACC platform

OpenStack is here to stay

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Berkeley, Cambridge, Melbourne, Pittsburgh, and Toronto have something in common. The university in these places invested in OpenStack the only stable and reliable open-source distributed environment. That is saving infrastructure costs. They all use it for academic record keeping, hosting research applications, class learning, delivery online, IT infrastructure management, and students and faculty access to a single cloud thereby gaining a return on investment on the IT costs. 

What is OpenStack?

As the name suggests it is a stack of open software that the customers can plug in and pay without any cost rather than the power of the internet.

How did OpenStack start?

To make the cloud affordable to common users, NASA first standardized its websites. Then the same was extended by other services for other organizations. The way it worked is based on the power and storage. Cloud computing is powerful as long as the subscriptions are active on its usage. The inherent nature of having pooled open source codes would make more consumers share their best practices.

Extending OpenStack further, IT is anticipated to implement the necessary changes to existing devices that are not constantly in use, enabling them to share their resources with others when available.

Research continuum

Once the open source software was used for base infrastructure, the researchers started contributing back to the OpenStack in these universities.

DataSets

Workloads for Cloud Computing

K. B., “REAL WORKLOAD CHARACTERIZATION AND SYNTHETIC WORKLOAD GENERATION,” Int. J. Res. Eng. Technol., vol. 05, no. 05, pp. 417–429, May 2016. https://www.statista.com/statistics/1106094/it-workloads-clloud/, Accessed 16.7.2021.

M. C. Calzarossa, M. L. D. Vedova, L. Massari, D. Petcu, M. I. M. Tabash, and D. Tessera, “Workloads in the clouds,” Springer Ser. Reliab. Eng., vol. PartF1, no. December, pp. 525–550, 2016.

M. A. Rodriguez and R. Buyya, “Deadline Based Resource Provisioning and Scheduling Algorithm for Scientific Workflows on Clouds,” IEEE Trans. Cloud Comput., vol. 2, no. 2, pp. 222–235, Apr. 2014.

G. Juve, A. Chervenak, E. Deelman, S. Bharathi, G. Mehta, and K. Vahi, “Characterizing and profiling scientific workflows,” Futur. Gener. Comput. Syst., vol. 29, no. 3, pp. 682–692, Mar. 2013.

http://www.cloudbus.org/workloads.html
https://registry.opendata.aws/
https://github.com/lsv/fifa-worldcup-2018/blob

AIOps lead by DevOps

 DevOps because of agile development practices bought in E2E responsibilities toward software development and delivery.  A Common DevOps cycle of the four stages of observe, detect, engage, and act has introduced ease to the operations team [1]. Still, that does not seem to be enough as post-release of software the operations done manually struggle to scale, are hard to standardize and are error-prone. Given these challenges, fully-automated operations pipelines powered by AI capabilities is a promising approach to achieving the SLA and SLO goals. AIOps the acronym for AI for IT Operations, was coined by Gartner in 2016. Gartner Glossary says, ”AIOps combines big data and machine learning to automate IT operations processes, including event correlation, anomaly detection, and causality determination”. To achieve that level of IT automation, investments in AIOps technologies are imperative. Hence it started appearing in the Gartner Hype Cycle for AI in 2017, along with other popular topics such as deep reinforcement learning, nature-language generation, and artificial general intelligence. Since 2022, enterprise AIOps solutions have been adopted by many companies for their IT infrastructure. This transformation from manual to automated operations using AIOps could be broken down into levels based on AIOps maturity as shown below.

Different systems and different industries may be at different levels of AIOps maturity, and their priorities and goals differ with regard to specific capabilities for adoption. Authors further foresee the trends to apply more complex AI techniques to address challenging business problems. Enabling such a community of AIOps practitioners is the need of the hour.

Interested analysts and developers can further read about the vision, challenges, and how to address them given [2].

Reference

1. https://www.dynatrace.com/news/blog/what-is-devops/
2. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2304.04661