Winter Systems School 2022
The Winter Systems School (WSS) 2022 was organized to bring together senior undergraduate students, graduate students, and working professionals across India and introduce them to the exciting topics in software systems relating to cybersecurity and cloud computing. Held in the premises of the CS department at IIT Delhi, the school saw 550+ applications, of which 80 were selected based on an online test that included programming and other CS curriculum questions. The participants were from all over India, mostly senior UG students from IITs/NITs and other engineering colleges — we also saw participation from several graduate (Masters/PhD) students and working professionals.
The school was held from 5th to 9th Dec. (Monday to Friday), where lectures were held during the first half and lab sessions were held during the second half of the day (on all five days). The topics included research-level material on common security exploits, fuzzing, symbolic analysis, distributed computing, scalability, fault tolerance, etc. More details about the school are at https://systems-rg.github.io/wss22
Winter School on Theoretical Computer Science 2022
The Department of Computer Science and Engineering at IIT Delhi organized the Winter School on Theoretical Computer Science during Dec 5-9, 2022. The goal of this event was to share the excitement of theoretical computer science research with the participants and make them aware of the wide-ranging applications of this area. The event was generously supported by the Mohit Aron Endowment and Google. More than 180 students applied for attending the winter school, and out of them 43 were shortlisted based on their statement of interest, grades, and other relevant metrics. The selected participants comprised of pre-final and final year undergraduate and master’s students from various colleges in India including IITs, IIITs, IISER, and BITS (in total, spanning 17 different colleges across 14 different cities). Check out the winter school website for details: https://cstheory.iitd.ac.in/winter-school/index.html
The first four days of the winter school consisted of lectures by the theory faculty of CSE department, informal interaction sessions among the participants, and “group dates” where each faculty member was joined by 5-6 participants for a casual walk around the IITD campus. The lectures spanned a wide range of topics including cryptography, algorithmic economics, computational complexity, approximation algorithms, online algorithms, graph algorithms, and quantum computing. Some lectures were followed by activity sessions that involved brainstorming over “challenge” problems. On the final day of the winter school, the student interacted with the faculty members (both senior and junior faculty members from theoretical CS as well as other areas) on the topics of “How to plan a research career in CS?” and “What is it like to do a PhD in India (and specifically at IITD)?”. These sessions were followed by a farewell lunch, and to top it off, there was a “Delhi darshan” excursion trip.