Embedded systems and Robotics are subjects that involve multi-disciplinary approaches to problem solving with an emphasis on hands-on experiments. Due to lack of infrastructure — robotics labs to execute projects, or trained teachers to mentor projects — engineering students in India do not get the benefits of hands-on experience. e-Yantra Lab Setup Initiative is designed as a scalable and sustainable approach that addresses infrastructure creation and teacher training to create an ecosystem at colleges to impart effective engineering education. In this paper, we discuss the three-pronged approach used in eLSI to: train a team of four teachers from each college and enable setting up of a robotics lab at each college. Analysis of feedback received from 64 teachers who participated in the pilot: (i) after the two-day workshop, (ii) at the end of e-Yantra Robotics Teacher Competition, (iii) during a visit to labs post lab inaugurations, and (iv) during a symposium held a year later for sharing and showcasing projects implemented in their robotics labs — shows that eLSI is effective in sustainable knowledge creation. The model used to establish robotics labs at 35 colleges across five regions of India in the current phase proves the scalability of the model.

e-Yantra Robotics Competition (eYRC) is an initiative of the e-Yantra project to bring the experience of Project Based Learning to engineering students by using a competition to deliver hands-on training on-line. Five hundred students forming 131 teams were selected from across India to participate in the pilot run of the competition, eYRC-2012 that consists of a set of tasks through which students are evaluated. We map the tasks such as theme analysis, implementation analysis, and video demonstration to outcomes such as acquiring basic knowledge, application of knowledge, and critical analysis. Results show that over 95% of the teams participated imbibed basic knowledge of embedded systems and robotics, 60% of the teams applied their knowledge to develop a solution to a given problem, while over 30% of the teams could critically analyze the problem and come up with an effective solution. These results are confirmed by similar effectiveness studies of the eYRC-2013 competition. This competition was conducted completely on-line and students did not incur any costs, ingredients essential for ensuring scalability and inclusiveness of the project. Students transfer the Robotic kits to their respective colleges at the end of the competition enabling nurturing of future generations of students at the colleges.

Emerging applications such as distance education and corporate training are examples of delay tolerant multimedia applications, where clients request the start of play back at a convenient time specified by (t+di) where t is the current time and diis the delay tolerance acceptable to client i. Such applications typically involve a Closed User Group (CUG) network that exhibits heterogeneous characteristics, where a Content Service Provider (CSP) disseminates multimedia content to geographically dispersed clients. Our research deals with the issue of maximizing rates (quality) at the clients while satisfying their delay tolerance with minimal additional resources. As a first step to this end, we have developed an optimization-based approach to determine the best quality that can be delivered to the clients through judicious placement of resources such as buffers and transcoders. Simulation results demonstrate the usefulness of exploiting client delay tolerance specifications for delivering enhanced Quality of Service (QoS) with little or no additional resources. By maximizing QoS to the clients with given resources, CSPs can (1) maximize the utilization of links (2) provide differentiated services to their clients, and (3) offer upgraded services to some clients (which may have a revenue implication). Our ongoing work deals with scheduling and admission control issues which would maximize profits for the CSP while satisfying the admitted clients' requirements with optimal resource utilization.

We consider multimedia applications where clients specify a minimum desired stream rate (quality) and a time till when they are willing to wait, termed delay tolerance. The content service provider's (CSP) objective is to service as many clients' requests for the same multimedia content with a single stream while satisfying their requirements. We propose an optimization approach to determine the rates delivered at clients and study three transcoder deployment strategies: (i) Source transcoding (ST): when content encoded at different rates are available only at the source (ii) Anywhere transcoding (AT): when transcoding capability is available at all intermediate nodes, and (iii) Selected node transcoding (SNT): when transcoding capability is available at selected intermediate nodes. Considering the complexity of the optimal solution, we propose a set of heuristic based algorithms for delivering enhanced rates to clients using the three strategies. A practical content dissemination network is used to demonstrate the effectiveness of our strategies

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