Automation for IISc

Have you ever felt frustrated to find the bathroom lamp broken and having to go all the way to the complaint cell to lodge a complaint? It's not the going which is the painful part, rather the remembering-to-go part which is painful. How nice would it be to be able to lodge the complaint right at the moment you notice or remember it? A bit of automation would definitely help, wouldn't it? If, just by clicking on a link, you could lodge your complaint and track its progress, it would bring in so much more sanity in our life. Another example: Booking the guest rooms and tracking the vacancies online etc etc. That would save us the trouble of waiting at the Hostel office at 4 PM a month before the occupation date (and then possibly getting disappointed).

I intend to maintain a list of ideas for automation that can be done in the day to day working in IISc. The idea can be picked up by the administrators for implementation. This is a very humble effort. The more difficult part -- that of implementing and deploying and getting them accepted by the IISc system -- remains by far the tougher part of the job. I consider it a viable idea to create proof-of-concept prototypes in the Software-Architecture course term-projects by CSA students. The analysis and design, and possibly the source-code, can then be reused to implement the deployed system. I think getting them implemented by professional software developers is very much a possibility. It shouldn't be unaffordable.

Foreseeable Problem
An obvious hurdle in getting this working is that of coupling this with a centralised database of IIScians. That system has to be 24 X 7 available, up-to-date, consistent and secure. While setting up of such a database would require some work, the development of the above systems can be done in parallel with some foresight.

Visitors to this post may contribute by:

• Suggesting additional such problems
• Providing links to already existing resources which can be reused
• Providing the solutions themselves, partial or complete
• Pointing out possible problems in implementation of these systems. The problems would preferably be technical, or at least apolitical.

Online Complaint Cell
It should be possible to place civil and electrical complaints online by all members of the campus. The system should allow tracking of the complaints.

Online Guest Room Booking
Making the process of guest-room booking online will make the process fast, trouble-free and transparent. It should be possible see the accommodation status of various guest-houses in the campus online.
(Think of the Railway, Airline, Hotel ticket booking systems we use so often).

Online Course Registration
Instructors may float their course on the department web page with a provision for students to apply for registration. The instructor may then go through the details of the student and decide to pass or reject the application. Depending on the availability of course/participants, the complete thing can be automatically scheduled (I had implemented a program that modelled this part as a graph-colouring problem to create a schedule, unless unschedulable).

Automated Web-Page Creation
It's so much easier to reach out to the world if you have your own official webpage. Being in IISc, and having to create webpages in geocities and googlepages is a lot less cool. Can't we have an equally convenient system which allows creation of our webpages in our departmental servers? The creation and editing should be easy with a couple of clicks of buttons.
(think of orkut, geocities, blogspot etc. which allow creation of whacky webpages with a few clicks of buttons.)

Research Publications Page
We could have a portal that gives an interface to manage our publications page. It allows us to add/modify/delete entries, organise them in different categories (conference, journal etc.). This could be a part of the automated web-page creation portal.


IISc Blog (eVoices)
I see it as some kind of an idealised 'Voices' where IIScians blog freely. The featured blogs can then be published in a hard-copy version of Voices.
(We had implemented a primitive version of this long time back, but it needed a lot more work to scale up).