TEACHING LEARNING CENTRE RAMANUJAN COLLEGE (University of Delhi)

TWO-WEEK FACULTY DEVELOPMENT PROGRAMME

on

RECENT ADVANCES IN RESEARCH METHODOLOGY

17– 28 JANUARY 2020

The Teaching Learning Centre (TLC) at Ramanujan College, University of Delhi organized a

Two- week Faculty Development Programme on “Research Advances in Research

Methodology” for research scholars and teachers of higher education in the country from January

17 – 28, 2020 under the Pandit Madan Mohan Malaviya National Mission on Teachers and

Teaching (PMMMNMTT) scheme of Ministry of Human Resource Development (MHRD),

Government of India in collaboration with the Ramanujan Centre for Applied Mathematics and

Research, Ramanujan College, University of Delhi. There were 31 participants from all over the

country and across disciplines such as Commerce, Computer Science and Management.

Participants included several young research scholars, assistant professors, & few associate

professors.

Day-1 (17th January 2020)

The registration started at 9:30 a.m. on 17th January 2020 in TLC office. After high tea, the

Inauguration ceremony took place at 11:00 a.m. in the TLC room of Ramanujan College place

in the presence of Dr. S.P. Aggarwal, Principal, Ramanujan College. The Chief Guest for the

ceremony was Dr. A. K. Singh, Scientist-E, Department of Science and Technology, New Delhi,

who was also the speaker for the first session of the FDP.

The inauguration ceremony of the FDP commenced with the felicitation of the chief guest Dr. A.

K Singh, Scientist E, Department of Science and Technology (DST), New Delhi by Principal of

the college and TLC Director, Dr. S. P. Aggarwal. In inaugural speech, Principal of the

Ramanujan College emphasized on the need to promote recent advances and trends in

technologies. Dr. Aggarwal also reiterated the vision and various applications of machine

learning techniques and block-chain technology.

Dr. A. K Singh delivered a lecture on different research and project Schemes of DST. His

speech was an amalgamation of both academic and motivational facets for the faculty members

and researchers. He first emphasized the need of continuous and sincere dedication towards

research which is not affected by age or other commitments. He reinforced the mantra of

sincerity, honesty, ethnicity and dedication towards one's work to achieve great

accomplishments. Dr Singh also enlightened the participants with various research schemes for

projects like MATRICS, Start-up Research Grant, etc. Post Lunch, the two sessions of the day

were dedicated to “Introduction of Python Programming.” The resource person for the same was

Prof. B.P. Sharma.

The session commenced with a discussion on basic concepts of programming languages as the

participants are of different streams. The idea of procedural, structural and object-oriented

languages were elaborated. Dr. Sharma discussed different IDE of Python programming. The

Anaconda software were installed on each system of lab. The basic functions type(), print() and

their applications were explained. Subsequently, he explained two data types in Python-

Numbers and strings. The mutable and immutable data types were explained. The

participants were the given time to perform hands on session on the topics covered.

Day-2 (18th January 2020)

The second day of the session was dedicated to the python programming. Prof. Sharma begun

the first session by clarifying the doubts of participants. After that he continued with the other

data types in Python: Lists, Dictionaries and Tuples along with examples. Simultaneously, the

participants performed programs on their systems given by Prof. Sharma.

After lunch, the session started with idea of libraries in Python. Prof Sharma told the

participants how to use numpy and matplotlib library. Histogram and bar plot were also

practiced.

The last session of the day commenced with the introduction of functions in Python. The inbuilt

and user defined functions and their syntax were explained. The recursive function were also

nicely elaborated. How to use lambda- function was also discussed.

Day-3 (20th January 2020)

With a lot of zeal and enthusiasm, participants attended the 3rd day of the programme. Prof. C. P

Gupta, National Institute of Financial Management, University of Delhi conducted all 4 sessions

on Time series analysis. The session started with the different examples of time series. The

concepts of independent events and correlation were nicely elaborated. The difference of time-

average and ensemble-average was well taught.

From second session Prof C P Gupta with Mr. Harendra Pratap Singh, assistant professor, I. P.

College, University of Delhi demonstrated the ideas of time series analysis by doing hands-on

practice using python programming. The participants also enjoyed the hands on session.

After lunch, Prof. C P Gupta taught ARIMA model and the next session was dedicated to hands-

on practice on ARIMA model.

Day-4 (21st January 2020)

The speaker for the Day was Prof. G. Panda from IIT Bhubaneshwar. In his first session, Prof.

Panda motivated the participants how machine learning techniques are solving real life problems.

He told how he used machine learning techniques to find out the reasons of unsubscribing the

airtel network. In another example, he observed the reasons for the unrest in a company. He then

described the steps of data analysis including Pre-processing of data, Generation of missing data,

Normalization of data, features Extraction and Features reduction. He then explained decision

techniques for data analysis like filtering, Clustering, Forecasting/ Prediction, Classification,

Parameters Estimation/ System Identification/ Pattern recognition/ Direct Modelling of systems.

In the 2nd session, two techniques were explained: k-means clustering algorithms and particle

swarm optimization (PSO). Clustering is an unsupervised learning technique where clusters are

formed and in each cluster data points are of same characteristics. The algorithm of k-means

was explained with iris flower data set.

The next technique that the participants learnt was PSO. In PSO, the solution of a problem is

optimized. Each candidate solution is called particle. The particles change their position and

move to another place with a velocity. The particles evaluate their position using the function to

be optimized. Prof. Panda explained the PSO algorithm with elaborative diagrams.

After the lunch, Prof Panda emphasised on “How to do research”. He explained the paper writing

procedure and emphasized that the introduction, abstract and conclusion section in paper should

be written lastly. SCI and Scopus journals, i-10 index, h-index and plagiarism were nicely

discussed. The participants enjoyed the session.

The last session of the day was conducted by Dr. Nikhil Rajput, assistant professor. He gave

introductory session on LaTeX.

Day -5 (22nd January 2020)

The first two sessions of the day were taken by Prof. Panda. In the first section he explained

genetic algorithm based on the mechanics of biological evolution. Genetic Algorithm (GA)

provides efficient techniques for optimization and machine learning applications.

In the next section, Prof. Panda delivered a lecture on ant colony algorithm. The basic idea is as

follows: When a food source is found, the ant that discovered it communicate this information to

its peers, who thus follow that insect’s pheromone trail. As more and more ants travel to the

food source the pheromone track becomes thicker and thicker attracting more and more ants who

in turn deposit their own pheromone and so on. When confronted to the obstacle on the preferred

path, the ants quickly switch to the next most efficient line to the food. A high level of pheromone

on the right path gives the ant stronger stimulus and has higher probability to turn right. All the

sessions of Prof. Panda were appreciated by all participants and they learnt a lot.

After lunch, the next two sessions were conducted by Dr. Abhinav Gupta, associate professor,

JIIT Noida. He introduced google Colab to the participants. It is an online python platform of

google. Dr. Abhinav told how to work on google Colab. The participants practiced python

programming on Colab. After that Dr. Abhinav explained clustering and gave hands-on training

to the participants. All participants took iris flower data set and applied k-means algorithm using

python programming on Colab.

Day-6 (23rd Janauary 2020)

Dr. Abhinav Gupta conducted 2 sessions. He delivered lectures on linear regression and

cumulative neural network. These ideas were practiced on co-lab by the participants. He also

gave glimpse of video forensic by using machine learning techniques.

Post lunch was conducted by Prof. R.K.Aggarwal, Dean, School of Engineering, JNU, New

Delhi on Classification.

The last session of the day was conducted by Dr. Nikhil Rajput on Latex. The offline as well as

online latex (overleaf) were used. Basically, Dr. Nikhil Rajput focused on the following key

points like Installation and setting up, Preparation of Latex documents, Preparation of

bibliography in LaTeX , Working with mathematical formulae and Paper writing in LaTeX.

Day -7 24th January 2020

The speaker for the first two sessions of the day was Dr. Nikhil Kumar Rajput. He conducted

sessions on Knime software. It was a hands on activity. The participants were divided into 5

groups and separate projects were assigned to each of the group. The projects were based on

clustering and the data sets for those projects were taken from data@gov.in. The participants

were enthusiastically involved in the project. Some of the groups used Knime software whereas

some used Google Colab for python programming.

For the Post Lunch sessions, we had invited Dr. D. K. Vishwakarma, associate professor, Delhi

Technological University, New Delhi. In his first session, he introduced the participants with the

neural networks followed with a hands on session on Support Vector Machines in the second

session.

Dr. Chhavi assisted the participants along with Dr. Vishwakarma to resolve the queries arising

during the practice session using Google Colab.

Day-8 25th January 2020

The First two sessions on this day were allocated for the project related work assigned on day7.

The participants were assisted to help them complete their projects on machine learning

techniques.

The session post lunch was conducted by Dr. V. B Singh, Associate Professor, University of

Delhi. The topic of the session was “Applications of machine learning techniques”.

We had Prof T.V. Vijay Kumar, dean, SC&SS, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, to

deliver a lecture on nature-inspired algorithms in the last session of the day. He spoke about the

behavior of ants, birds and the ant-colony and particle swarm optimization algorithm. The

participants were enthusiastically involved during the session.

Day-9 27th January 2020

The ninth day of the Faculty development Programme was completely dedicated to the Network

Science. The first session of the day was conducted by Prof. Vasudha Bhatnagar, University of

Delhi. She taught the basic concepts of graph theory and their applications. From the second

session onwards, Ms. Kirti Jain took over and conducted the hands-on session on Google Colab.

For graph theory related problems, NetworkX library was used.

We had Dr. Sharenjit Kaur, ANDC College, University of Delhi for the post lunch session. She

briefed the participants about network science concepts like centrality, community based

detection etc. The hands session of these concepts was conducted by Dr. Rakhi, Deshbandhu

College, University of Delhi.

Day -10 28th January 2020

On the last day of the FDP, Dr. Ganesh Bagler conducted two sessions on complex networks. He

spoke about small world networks, scale-free networks, power law behavior and many more

concepts. For analysis purpose, he gave an overview of the Cyctoscape software. Dr. Bagler

elaborated the concepts of complex networks with the help of examples like world wide web,

Internet traffic and computational gastronomy.

The Closing ceremony of the Faculty development was held post lunch in the TLC room of the

Ramanujan College. The Chief Guest was Dr. Jagannath Chaudhary, Ramanujan College. The

closing comments in the form of feedback were taken from the participants.

Most of the participants were highly satisfied with the content and objective of the programme.

The participants spoke about their experience of learning during the entire course. They also

appreciated the choice of highly qualified, experienced and knowledgeable resource persons for

the entire programme. All the participants gave a positive feedback for the hospitality and

management of the Faculty development Programme.

All the particpants who had successfully completed the Faculty development Programme were

awarded with the certificates by the chief guest. Dr. Chaudhary then addressed the gathering and

thanked them for participating whole heartedly in the program.

Lastly, the convener, Dr. Amit Kumar Singh gave the formal vote of thanks. The ceremony

concluded with a High tea.