FOSS Young Professional Meet on Free Software held at Technopark

TechnoparkToday.com (Sept,2013) >> The FOSS Young Professionals Meet 2013 organized by International Centre for Free and Open Source Software (ICFOSS) was inaugurated by Prof. M S Rajasree, Director, IIITM-K. The Meet has been organized as ICFOSS’s initiative to expose young professionals to the opportunities in FOSS and introduce them to emerging FOSS-based tools, technology and trends.

Welcoming the youngsters at the Meet, ICFOSS Director Satish Babu said, “Through FYPM we aim to highlight the opportunities in the FOSS domain to young professionals and enable them to acquire information, skills and competencies. Kerala has an abundance of young professionals in Information Technology, including students, young graduates, start-up companies, and students who are in the process of completing their academic programs out of college. Besides their energy and vibrancy, this group is also a significant source of innovation in technology domains, which is a much-needed input for the future development of the country.”

In her inaugural address, Dr. MS Rajasree said that in the initial years of computing, programmers worked very close to the hardware, but in later years, additional layers of abstractions such as languages and frameworks were built around the hardware. Today, there is a return to directly programming the hardware in the form of open source hardware, which is capable of being used for numerous applications on a very light-weight and agile model.

The lead theme of FYPM 2013 is “Open Source Hardware”, which is a sector that is growing explosively. The Meet has several presentations on emerging technologies such as Big Data; FireFox OS and the Mozilla Development Network; Multilingual computing; and Open Source Robotics & Automation; as well as workshop tracks on Drupal Programming, Open Source Hardware, Mozilla Development Network, and Project Code Incubation that would enable students to join international programming projects such as Google Summer Code and Rails Girls.

A Project Contest on Open Hardware based solutions is also being conducted at the event. The winners will be announced at the valedictory function to be held on Sunday, September 29 and they will be awarded with attractive new generation gadgets.

The event is supported by IEEE Computer Society and IEEE GOLD of IEEE Kerala Section.