September 2008

A live video conference, the first of its kind in the region attracted a huge crowd in excess of 1000 people to IIT-Guwahati on September 5, 2008. Held in the newly inaugurated auditorium at IIT, Guwahati, the place was jam-packed with enthusiastic students, participants, faculty members and even school kids, who were a part of the national level Olympiad ‘Technothlon’.

The premier show of the Assamese movie "Prem Joubonote" was held in Cinema 2 of Northwest Film Forum in Seattle, Washington, USA, on September 13, 2008. For the first time, the premier show of an Assamese movie was organized in the USA. Prem Joubonote is being produced by Vavani Sarmah, a Non-Resident Assamese (NRA) and directed by Loknath Deka of Assam with assistance of Vavani Sarmah.

The train came to a standstill after several hours. It was total darkness outside; I still knew that we were hours from Guwahati. I was sitting by the window trying to get some sleep. I had a difficult time sleeping - the excitement of the impending event was tremendous. I never thought that this train journey from Dibrugarh to Guwahati would be so memorable. As the train rumbled on slowly, I began to recollect the previous day’s events.

Jugal Kalita, Professor of Computer Science, was recently inducted into the Millionaire Club for obtaining more than a million dollars in contracts and grants to the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs. Jugal’s areas of research are artificial intelligence, machine learning, natural language processing and bioinformatics. Jugal has published more than fifty refereed papers in his areas of research. He is advising or has advised 10 Ph.D.