Alumni Association is very actively involved in social activities and exchange of information between Alumni and Alma mater. It was thought approriate that in addition technical activities may also be planned. Information Technology being a topic of great current interest, it was decided to arrange a Seminar on "Information Technology, State-of-the-Art" on 23rd November '98. It was or ganised a day earlier to the Alumni Day to enable our Alumni to attend the Seminar also. This seminar is first in a chain of such technical activities to follow. Microsoft had sponsored the Seminar along with a number of government and corporate organisations who actively participated in it- M/S Owens Broackway (India) Ltd., UPSBC, UP Awas Vikas Parishad, Deptt. of Telecommunication, Pickup, RDSO, to name a few. About 125 delegates participated including a large number of students and staff of the university along with Alumni. The Seminar was inaugura ted by Er. H.S. Agrawal, President of RUAA. Prof. N.C. Nigam, Vice Chancellor & working president of RUAA presided over the function.

Er. Y.L. Agarwal (alumnus 1959), Managing Director, HFCL and Er. N.S. Kalsi (alumnus 1975), IAS, Secretary, Technical Education, Govt. of Punjab were the keynote speakers. Experts from four reputed organisations in IT business, Tata IBM, Microsoft, Oracle and SCO delivered the guest lectures.

Er. Y.L. Agarwal, and Er. N.S. Kalsi in their keynote addresses spoke at length about the Internet and how it is being increasingly used to enhance the various important applications of IT, like e-commerce, business marketing, eduction, etc.

Prof. Surendra Kumar presented a report on the progress in Campus Networking at the University of Roorkee. This was followed by very informative presentations by four leading IT vendors on their state-of-the-art products and a peep into the not-so-distant technologies.

Dr. Arvind Shukla, of Tata IBM Ltd., spoke on IBM's concept of a 'global campus' which is already in place in countries like USA, Japan, Korea, Australia and which is now envisaged in the Indian hi-tech cities of Bangalore and Hyderabad, in the form of schools of Internet Studies & Centres for Electronic governace.

Mr. Sunil Mehra, of Santa Cruz Operations(SCO), demonstrated their UNIX vers 7, a 64 bit O/S, for use with Intel systems in the new millenium. He also highlighted SCO's mission to be the leading suppliers of network computing software, with their Java Online Development environment. Mr. Mehra also presented the UNIX vers 7 to the Vice Chancellor Prof. N.C. Nigam.

Mr. Anurag Dubey, an alumnus of 1993, representing Oracle Systems, traced the evolution of IT from mainframes to PCs to the world wide web and showed how their latest product, the Oracle 8i rdbms, would help change the face of businss computting using the Internet.

Mr. Vijay Mishra from Microsoft, focussed on the growing needs of Intran ets & Extranets, in today's business houses. He discussed the benefits & challenges of Info-Publishing and gave a live demonstration of Microsoft's Paperless office through their MS Market package.

Mr. I. K. Pandey (alumnus 1969) IAS,Managing Director PICKUP, presented IT mission of U.P. Govt & Informed the house that it envisages U. P. as a "SMART STATE" by the year 2008.

The Lec-dems were followed by a short, but very interactive Panel Disc ussion, in which many people voiced their excitement as well as apprehension ove r the ever - emerging and fast - changing products and technologies in IT. The d ay's Proceedings concluded with the hope that University of Roorkee would pionee r the use of Information Technology and remain in the forefront of techincal edu cation in the new millenium.