A National Effort for Motivating Indian Students and Teachers towards Algorithmic Research

TL;DR

This paper reviews a nationwide initiative in India from 2008-2015 that organized workshops to motivate students and teachers in graph and geometric algorithms, aiming to foster research interest.

Contribution

It documents the organization, funding, and impact of a series of workshops designed to promote algorithmic research among Indian students and educators.

Findings

Increased awareness of algorithms among participants.

Enhanced research motivation in Indian academia.

Positive national impact observed from workshops.

Abstract

During 2008-2015, twenty-two introductory workshops on graph and geometric algorithms were organized for teachers and students (undergraduate, post-graduate and doctoral) of engineering colleges and universities at different states and union territories of India. The lectures were meant to provide exposure to the field of graph and geometric algorithms and to motivate the participants towards research. Fifty-eight professors from TIFR, IITs, IISc, IMSc, CMI, ISI Kolkata, and other institutes and universities delivered invited lectures on different topics in the design and analysis of algorithms, discrete applied mathematics, computer graphics, computer vision, and robotics. The first four workshops were funded by TIFR, BRNS and IIT Kharagpur, and the remaining workshops were funded by the NBHM. In this paper, we present the salient features of these workshops, and state our observations on the national impact of these workshops.