A Report, by Meena Mahajan, IMSc, Chennai (meena@imsc.ernet.in)
Traditionally, a Business Meeting of the Indian theory of computing community takes place during FST&TCS, typically on the evening of the first day of the conference. This meeting discusses issues of general concern to the community. It has now acquired the status of the General Assembly of IARCS.
At the 17th FST&TCS Conference at Kharagpur, the agenda for the Business meeting was as follows:
You will find the NSTCS and FST&TCS announcements elsewhere in this issue. And of course you are already reading the newsletter! So I will now tell you about the remaining things discussed at the meeting. In the absence of the IARCS President R. K. Shyamasundar, the meeting was presided over by P. S. Thiagarajan (PST), who is a member of the IARCS Steering Committee,
PST recalled that IARCS is to be formally registered as a Society. The preliminary steps have been taken by the Steering Committee. Now a legal Constitution has to be drafted, and a mechanism defined for fixing the Office Bearers of the Society. PST said that the process is currently going on, and that he expected to have more concrete details ready to be posted in the next issue of the Newsletter. On the next page, you will find a draft of the IARCS Constitution.
There was an open-ended disussion regarding additional activities that IARCS can take up in future. Possibilities mentioned included starting a journal of the IARCS and holding more specialised schools and update meetings. Increasing participation in FST&TCS by ensuring no overlap with other major International conferences, and increasing IARCS membership by allowing Institutional membership and by allowing members to pay fees for longer periods at one time, were suggested. The timing for the National Seminar, in the middle of summer, is not convenient for everybody, and some of the constraints were mentioned. A major constraint of course is that of the host institutes; in 1997 when NSTCS was at MCC, it could not have been postponed any further since the MCC term began soon after. Another point made was that news of academic events (schools, tutorials, workshops) often does not reach everybody within the country. We must evolve a better system for dissemination of such information.
Somenath Biswas, who is also a member of the Steering Committee of IARCS, announced that the Ministry of Human Resources and Development has set aside some money specfically for funding educational activities at the college level. Specific proposals for relevant events, such as conducting teacher-training workshops, will be considered for funding. IARCS members may wish to use this opportunity to organise some events. This further led to a discussion on the paucity of good and affordable books; the community can and should take up the task of writing basic texts in computing science.
The meeting ended with sincere thanks to all the organisers for a wonderful job done in hosting FST&TCS'97 and an open invitation to as many people as possible to participate in NSTCS'98 at Bhubaneshwar and FST&TCS'98 at Chennai.