Poruri Sai Rahul

Here is a reverse chronological list of my talks, tutorials and workshops.

FOSS in Engineering Education:

I gave a talk on FOSS in Engineering Education at MEC.Conf Kochi on October 6, 2024. The talk was mostly attended by first year students, with a few students from second, third, and fourth years of college. The talk is intended to help students understand how they can use, contribute to, and create FOSS. The content is tailored to an Engineering audience but it is broadly applicable to any Science & Technology student audience.

Let's talk about Software Patents at ChennaiFOSS 2024

The recording of the talk is available on YouTube. Slides are available on my Google Drive.

I really liked this talk very much not only due to my novelty but also the importance of the topic that was discussed. Rahul illustrated how the patents with broad definition can be used by the companies to gain a leverage over other companies and thus their should be hard regulatory measures in place before the providance of software patents or they mustn't be provided.
There was a talk on patents which initally sounded odd thing in a FOSS conference but it was very well put out sometimes you need to make patents to keep something as opensource and it clearly reflected on the need to avoid patents on software considering how broad a patent can be. It was a great session.
It was a great session by Sai Rahul Poruri for sharing the drawback of patents in india
Engaging with Sai Rahul Poruri provided a fascinating dive into software patenting and the pivotal role of policymakers and communities. Our chat with Eshanth G was definitely a days highlight!
Sai Rahul Poruri's insights into software patenting were eye-opening, emphasizing the role of policymakers.
Sai Rahul Poruri's thought-provoking exploration of software patenting not only elucidated the complexities surrounding intellectual property but also sparked a profound reflection on the pivotal role of policymakers in shaping the future of innovation
"Software Patents" by Sai Rahul Poruri delved into the intricacies of patents, discussing their significance, limitations, and their potential negative impact on innovation.
Sai Rahul Poruri talk on software patents is unlocked new area that i really don't know about. How dangerous software patents can be ? and what are all the bad things happend due to software patents in US? So we need keep eye on this and spread about software patents to more people.
Among the insightful discussions on open-source software and hardware, the highlight was a captivating speech by Sai Rahul Poruri who is the Head of Software at SoftCircuits Labs shedding light on software patents and related cases. His expertise not only clarified many doubts but also inspired a deeper understanding of the open-source ethos.

An invited talk and a panel discussion on "Opensource and Innovation Ecosystem":

I loved speaking and being part of the "Opensource and Innovation Ecosystem" panel at the Cloud India Conclave. It was a great privilege sharing the stage with stalwarts of Indian Academia and Industry.

Based on my experience at Enthought , I had three key points to the audience at the Conclave.

  • Teach computing to domain experts. Solving the problems that domain experts have using computer science is only the first step. Teaching domain experts to write scripts isn't enough. Only when you enable domain experts to build and maintain large-scale software can you really enable #digitaltransformation within their respective companies.
  • Acknowledge the Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) that you use, both in Academia and in the Industry. While a few popular FOSS projects are well recognized and funded, a large chunk of projects don't get the recognition they deserve, let alone funding to sustain the projects in the long term. The first step towards contributing to such open source communities is acknowledging their use publicly. Kailash Nadh and the folks at @Zerodha are great at this because they not only acknowledge usage, they go into how they are used and how much money they save thanks to FOSS. After acknowledgement, you can start considering potentially contributing code to the project directly and/or contributing financially to the project.
  • Most of the time, when people talk about #opensource , they are referring to open source code but that's not always the case. Dr. Vijay Chandru of Strand Genomics mentioned how open biological datasets could revolutionize the biotech ecosystem. A fundamental failing of most western #ai and #ml models is their inability to handle diverse data. We need to recognize that Diversity is a key strength for India and we need to tap into this by creating diverse open source datasets (with the relevant legal protections for privacy) which will enable the creation and sustenance of an innovative ecosystem.

    • I cannot thank the organizers of the Cloud India Conclave enough for inviting me and letting me share my perspective on #opensource.

A Lightning talk on the Digital India Act 2023:

I gave a short lightning talk on the upcoming Digital India Act 2023 at the March 2023 monthly meetup of BengaluruFOSS. I simply used the slides from MEITy

Let's skim the Digital Personal Data Protection Bill 2023

The last date for comments on the draft Digital Personal Data Protection Bill 2022 is behind us but that shouldn't prevent us from understanding and discussing the bill, its contents and its impact.

In this interactive talk, I focused on the definition of "Personal Data" as covered by the bill, what a "Data Fiduciary" is, the rights and responsibilities of a "Data Principal", the "Data Protection Board", ending with proposed limits on penalties that can be imposed by the "Board" for non-compliance.

This talk is not a policy analysis. I pointed to reports put out by organizations like the FOSS United, IFF, eGov Foundation instead.

Slides are available at GitHub. A recording of the talk is available on YouTube

Praise for the talk:

  • "The next talk was by Mr. Poruri Sai Rahul, an energetic and talented guy. His talk was about Digital Personal Data Protection Bills (DPDPB). This was again a new topic for me. And this talk was the one I enjoyed the most. In short, the bill was about the protection of your data collected from whatever online platform you use. It may be a search engine or any other app. He started with a game called “Cost and Benefits”. What we had to do was just point out when the Cost and Benefits were high in a particular paragraph from the Data Bill. In my opinion, this was the only talk that was very interactive of all."

    From Mangesh

  • "I had the pleasure of attending an event at Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay hosted by FOSS United, where Sai Rahul Poruri delivered an insightful talk on the draft Digital Personal Data Protection Bill 2022. Rahul discussed key aspects of the bill, including the definition of 'Personal Data', the role of a 'Data Fiduciary', the rights of a 'Data Principal', and proposed penalties for non-compliance. He also facilitated engaging discussions with the audience on topics such as personal identifiable data and notices and consent. It was a great opportunity to learn from a knowledgeable speaker and connect with like-minded individuals in the tech community."

    From Shree Mundade

  • A wonderful talk on Digital Personal Data Protection Bill 2022 by @rahulporuri at @FOSSUnited

    From Amogh Lele

Scientific Computing 101 with Python:

With the recent interest in Data Science, a good understanding of the scientific libraries central to pursuing Data Science using Python is essential, libraries like Numpy, Pandas and Matplotlib. These libraries are central to Scientific Computing and Data Science with Python and this workshop meant to provide a solid foundation.

The workshop was completely delivered using Jupyter Notebooks. The relevant material can be found in my talks GitHub repository. The notebooks introduce the libraries and the features they provide us. I have also added exercises and references in the notebooks.

As always, comments and suggestions are welcome and highly appreciated. If you have any, make an issue on the same GitHub repository or mail me.

Virtual environments and Standalone environments in Python:

Virtual environments and Standalone environments in Python are two ways to keep your system Python installation clean and work on multiple projects without worrying about dependency problems.

This was a brief 20 min talk at the April meet of the PythonPune meetup group. The slides can be downloaded here

Cython:

If you didn't know, Cython is used to speedup Python code. Cython is actually two things - Cython is a language, which is a superset of the Python language and Cython is a library that can understand and compile Cython code.

In this brief talk, I briefly talked about why Python is slow and what other alternatives were available for someone interested in speeding up their Python code. Then, I cythonized a simple function and demonstrated Cython syntax. I then demonstrated how Cython code can be compiled and used.

The content was first presented at a 20 min talk at a local meetup.

The slides can be downloaded here. If you have any comments on the content, flow or presentation of the talk, please feel free to leave a comment on the Google Slides

Advanced concepts in Python:

Starting with reading from and writing to files, I introduced advanced concepts in Python and how to take advantage of core concepts in Python, instead of simply rewriting C code with different syntax. The slides cover a few types in python, context managers, iterators, functions, classes & methods and generators in Python.

The content was first presented at a ~5 hour long workshop held at the Indian Institute of Technology Madras, Chennai.

The slides can be downloaded here. If you have any comments on the content, flow or presentation of the talk, please feel free to leave a comment on the Google Slides

Good enough practices in Scientific Computing:

I introduce a few good practices to follow in Scientific Computing. The content was first presented at a ~5 hour long workshop held at the Indian Institute of Technology Madras, Chennai.

The slides can be downloaded here. If you have any comments on the content, flow or presentation of the talk, please feel free to leave a comment on the Google Slides

Automated Testing in Python:

I introduced the unittest and mock modules and gave examples of how tests can be written using the TestCase class from the unittest module. I also introduced how the mock module can be used to mock entire objects or attributes/methods defined on an object.

The content was first presented at a ~3 hour long workshop at SciPy India 2016, which was held at IIT Bombay, Mumbai. I also presented the same content at a local meetup.

The slides can be downloaded here. If you have any comments on the content, flow or presentation of the talk, please feel free to leave a comment on the Google Slides

An introduction to Git and GitHub:

I introduced Git and GitHub to the audience using two workflows, a basic workflow which talks about commits and pushing and an advanced workflow that introduces the concept of branches in Git and PRs/ merging branches in Git/GitHub.

The content was first presented at a ~2 hour long workshop at SciPy India 2016, which was held at IIT Bombay, Mumbai.

The slides can be downloaded here. If you have any comments on the content, flow or presentation of the talk, please feel free to leave a comment on the Google Slides