Red Hat Scholarships awarded

On July 8, 2005, Red Hat India announced the winners of the 2004-2005 Red Hat Scholarships program—The Lord of The Code contest—an education initiative designed to encourage future open source software developers.

The program, jointly conducted with Kanwal Rekhi School of Information Technology at IIT Bombay, was opened to students across India last year. The objective of the Red Hat Scholarships is to reach out to Linux enthusiasts in colleges across India and encourage the adoption of the open source philosophy. Scholarships will be awarded to qualified students on a yearly basis.

The program has seen participation from across India including Mumbai, Manipal, Coimbatore, Bangalore, Noida, and Pune. Interesting projects like College Information System, Virtual Private Server, Mapping a lLip Movement to Meaning, and A Front End for C Compiler were submitted for review.

Finally, 33 students were awarded the prestigious Red Hat Scholarship Awards 2004-2005. The first prize was given to a team of students from the Army Institute of Technology, Pune for their project Virtual Private Server (VPS) 2.6.5-1.358.

Javed Tapia, Director, Red Hat India said "Red Hat Scholarships is a program aimed at encouraging talented young programmers in India. The largest number of engineers graduate out of India and, given the right guidance, the next Linus Torvalds can emerge out of our country."

First Award

Winners: Amit Yadav, Pranay Pramod, Narender Kumar, Nishant Kumar
College: Army Institute of Technology, Pune
Project Title: Virtual Private Server (VPS)

Description: A VPS will provide multiple virtual hosting environments on the same physical server. This will eliminate the need for separate physical servers for hosting different websites. It will also provide clients with an economical solution for hosting their website and allow web hosting providers (WHPs) to use their resources efficiently. Each VPS acts as a dedicated server with full root access. The benefits from such products are efficient use of existing resources by sharing them between various customers, provides more security than other sharing hosting techniques, provides root access inside each VPS though with limited capabilities, faster context switching, and minimum modifications to kernel.

Second Award

Winners: Ramasamy C, Muthiah A, Hemant Kumar, R Saravana Manickam
College: National Institute of Technology, Tiruchirapalli, India
Project Title: Octave Gtk

Description: Octave-Gtk aims to bring a full-featured toolkit like GTK to GNU Octave, to make scientific computing tools with a GUI front-end scripted from Octave itself. This directly translates to end users as a new and powerful paradigm for constructing GUIs with minimal knowledge of the constructs and easy interface for scientific programs in a really short time. Octave-Gtk is an Octave Gtk binding, which helps you access the GTK C API from the GNU Octave, an interpreted language. This cross language interoperability is achieved by Octave-Gtk binding code, which enables type safe, idempotent access of functions and objects from the either domains of Octave and C in a clean, and transparent manner, hiding the details to the end user.

Third Award

Winners: A.K.Karthikeyan, O. Ratna Srikanth, K.Karthikbabu, Vamshi Krishna Sadhu
College: Scient Institute of Engineering & Technology
Project Title: College Information System

Description: The College Information System is essentially a system which can be used in a college/university setting to impart technology teaching and handling ofvarious management activities. It allows students to access various teaching resources and manage schedules, projects, and deadlines. For teachers, it provides facilities to monitor student progress, assignments, answer doubts, etc. It has special support through various modules to allow for teamwork and group discussions.