Kathmandu University (KU) is the third oldest university in Nepal located in Dhulikhel, Kavrepalanchok District, about 35Km east of Kathmandu. KU was established in 1991 with the motto "Quality Education for Leadership". The university operates through its six schools and from premises in Dhulikhel, Lalitpur and Bhaktapur. Read More

Kathmandu University Website: http://www.ku.edu.np

Divon Lan, Product Manager, Next Wave Emerging Countries, Google Inc
with Kathmandu GTUG, we visited KU School of Engineering, especially Department of Computer Science & Engineering faculty and students.

I personally have never visited KU before but liked the overall surrounding and educational environment there. After visiting KU, their computer science faculty and interacting with engineering students - I would recommend KU to anyone if living outside Kathmandu Valley for education is not a big concern.

KU environment captured in snaps

 

Meeting the faculty

Meeting with KU faculty was good experience for Kathmandu GTUG as well. KU faculty are well versed with their educational requirements and have clear idea of how their research wings would contribute to the ICT development in the country. We had one hour meet with faculty but all those intellectual discussion, I could have listened to those discussions forever.

KU faculty have contributed to localizing Linux distribution. On Divon’s question about usefulness of this effort, Asso. Prof. Bal Krishna Bal pointed out that localized linux distrubution (NepaLinux) is not used widely in urban areas but is liked by people from rural villages.

I found one topic about localizing “Google Chrome OS” intriguing. Actually, in Nepalese context most people use computers for internet/communication purpose. Rather than focusing on localizing whole set of desktop environments and apps if we could work on localizing Chrome OS, which is particularly designed to be used as internet for everything – the discussion concluded – it would leave larger impact.

KU R&D has been involved in developing machine translation system for Nepali to English translation. They worked on “rule based” machine translation with 100K parallel words, output was satisfactory but not as expected. Work is going on for building Nepali OCR - recognition engine for Nepali language.

Faculty were positive to finally have a direct communication channel with Google. We are hopeful that this visit would open lots of possibilities for both KU and Google. On discussion about topics for research Divon emphasized to “work on one thing that is global.“

Giving focus to student’s tech inclination, KU department is positive to collaborate with Kathmandu GTUG for bringing android workshops in the university.

One important thing I noted during discussion was different views on current status of open source development and contribution in the country. People here in Nepal are aware of Open Source technologies, this is a good thing. But, when it comes to actually contributing to development of the projects and implementing algorithms for building software systems we find very less talent. Lack of expertise in open source contribution should be taken seriously. Everyone involved in Open Source sector in the country should work on transforming their open source knowledge to actual implementable development skills.

Google resources for Universities

http://google.com/edu – Course materials, resources for University.
http://youtube.com/edu – Videos lectures for varieties of interest.

 

Q/A Session with Google representative

Participants : ~40
Engineering Students from Kathmandu University

The students of engineering and computer science were very curious to know more about possibilities of working at Google. They were eager to know more about Google as a company and also Google as a helping hand for emerging countries like ours.

During the informal Q/A session at KU, Kathmandu GTUG have circulated quick feedback form to the students. We got 29 filled responses.

 

Participants : Overview

Gender wise participation seems better than TU but still is less.

The “other” response were Yes and with some explanations.

KU students seemed more interested in Android and Google Data APIs development.

 

Do you have any question to Google ? Divon answers.

We tried to collect the response via Collaborative Google Docs available at http://bit.ly/divonqa KU students are helping us collect the answers. This section will be updates once we get the report from students.
 

Do you have any question to Google ? : Feedback Form

With just one hour interaction program hope students were able to get answers to their question. We hope other questions collected via feedback form will be answered in next official Google visits. From these questions one can get overall picture of the interaction program.

Is Google focusing on technological advancement only or taking social responsibility ? Elaborate Corporate social responsibility of Google.

Is there any job or internship opportunities of Google in Nepal ?

Does Google provides security of information, since it searches everything ?

Google+ is very complex for a normal user. Can't you make it simple if you want it to be more popular than facebook ?

What does Google mainly focus on besides searching ?

If have some ideas of technology that can be used in Nepal then with whom should I communicate ?

Do you think that the content should be filtered before being uploaded ? Does that violate the freedom of speech ?

What about IPv6 ?

Google future plans and policies to students. As to sharpen their knowledge and also wake them globally slow in competitions. How Google looks at the graduates from Nepal ?

How does Google search engine works ? Does it looks at the meaning of the sentence ?

How can Google help students (specially Nepalese) ?

What is the qualification of Network administrator of Google ? (main server or proxy or even cache server ) ?

Google is earning a lot and rules the internet. How is Google contributing to the society and the world ?

Can Google start an institution for providing internship for students in Nepal ?

The Open Education project of Google is very beneficial for the students. But it’s not as interactive. It'll be more interesting if its made more interactive.

Since, there is no any office of Google in Nepal, How can we be prepare or develop any platform or face any challenge or be aware of working with Google ?

Has the Google taken the necessary steps in keeping away the public information and censored sites ?

What are the further gadgets or application that Google is going to launch ? Is there something special for users ?

Recent Google searches show Lord Buddha was born in India but we all knows its Nepal. So how does Google handle / correct such mistakes ?

Can we Nepalese Developers collaborate on Open Source project to give quality products to the community?

We had another question in the feedback form. We wanted to hear how students were willing to contribute to the overall Open Source software/web development scenario of the country. Below are the responses we got. Hope this will help Kathmandu GTUG and other communities actively working in Nepal find a more focused approach on bringing future events on Universities here.

Yes. We can. Google should open a Google lab in Nepal to explore our visions and capabilities.

Yes, we Nepalese developers can collaborate on Open Source project. There are students and employees at various companies  who are working in projects like docnex.com etc. So I think we Nepalese can also definitely work in Open Source project.

For Nepalese Developers, it requires sufficient technical support as well as the knowledge. Open source project should be mostly prioritized in relation to daily usable products.

Of course yes.

Yes. By sharing our ideas and works with others.

Yes, we can work to provide qualitative software because I think we are working to better ourselves in terms of knowledge.

Yes, it can be done by organizing events frequently in collaboration with IT companies and mainly universities in Nepal.

Sure and its going on well by FOSS community of Nepal.

Of-course. Providing training, workshop to the interested person might not be from the field of computer but who are interested.

By providing projects to Nepalese developers & judging them by experts.

Of course, we can collaborate as we are working a lot in open source projects as projects of our courses.

Yes, We Nepalese Developers can also collaborate on open source project to give quality products to the community. Technology is same all around the world. Nepalese developers have the same idea about computer technology as the developers from other countries.

Yes, we can of course do it. We have to train the students from UNV level and provide them necessary resources. Moreover, working in group/community and sharing your achievement with others is also very important to produce quality product.

The Open Source development community of Nepal FOSS Nepal is regularly arranging conferences for the development of FOSS. Also, they are arranging conferences for other sectors. There are many open source developers working together for different projects.

Yes, we can develop and collaborate with the product of the various opensource project in Nepal.

Yes, there is no doubt that the Nepalese developers are not as good as the other countries. The only reason is that the opportunities that arises here are minimal and should allow the software development and increase the investments in such projects.

Yes as a Nepali developer we can collaborate on open source project as we are talented and share knowledge and skills for further development and quality products.

Surely, multiple minds can tackle and solve problems more easily than a single mind. We can maintain threads and discussion on the site of this group and Q/A could be easily communicated for proper help and development of open source project.

Any remarks or suggestions to Kathmandu GTUG?

Now this remarks/question comes to us – Kathmandu GTUG. Hope we would be able to follow up these questions and bring more events, workshops and such interactions to university students.

Internship Program : Is an immediate act for students like us. When are you going to open this.

-> Kathmandu GTUG is a group of individual like you who are students, some professionals and we are trying to include private companies in our circle too. We do not directly open internship programs or such, however, private companies who care about Google Technologies and GTUG in Kathmandu, and who happen to be searching for fresh university graduates with knowledge in Google Technologies to be their interns would sure post thread in our Google Group. So please join our Group and keep up with the updates.

How can I get updates of Kathmandu GTUG ?

-> One way is to join our Google Group. For after events reports you can subscribe to our blog.

Is the membership in Google Group (GTUG) Open to everyone ?
-> Yes this is an open group. Feel free to join and communicate.

Google should try to involve more and more information about everywhere possible, IT awareness is most important since people even know to use Google.

Is it possible to make a GTUG group in KU itself as well ?
-> Yes of course. It would be nice to have another GTUG chapter in Nepal. Not as a expansion of Kathmandu GTUG but as formulation of independent GTUG chapter we will have agenda for this in our next meetup. Hope to see you there.

Learned what is it. In future will remain in touch.
-> Thanks.

It needs to be more focused on reaching out the information about GTUG to the students. I guess its lacking and many more students are unaware about it.

It should be more involved in developing standard of the developers in Nepal.
None at the moment. But would like to check out the website and comment there.

Are there any projects related to Google product that are initiated by the Community ?
-> Not yet. Thanks for the gentle reminder, this is a really good suggestion to our community.

Kathmandu GTUG need to organize more workshop, training in different web technologies.

Please provide all essential details to all the university level of Nepal.
The initiation of the seminars and interaction programs are to be done more often.

What sort of activities does GTUG participates in ?
-> Refer : http://ktmgtug.org/blog

For more photos from the events
Google Visits - Kathmandu University Jan 19, 2012 (Kathmandu GTUG)

Photo Credits
Bhupal Sapkota, Bhuwan Pokharel - Kathmandu GTUG

Thanks all Kathmandu GTUG guys, KU faculty and students who actively supported us in the event.
-
Bhupal Sapkota
Community Manager
Kathmandu GTUG