IET India: focus for action and debate

There was brainstorming and debate when a select group of academics met, discussing the IET India Scholarship. Following this, the final of the Bangalore PATW competition stirred up excitement in the student community.

IET India Scholarship

On 16 June, the ‘who’s who’ of Indian academia joined together at the IET India office in Bangalore forming the IET India Advisory Committee to build a framework rolling out the 2012 IET India Scholarship Awards. Professors and vice chancellors of universities including Jadavpur University, Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Delhi, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, International Institute of Information Technology, Bangalore (IIIT-B), University of Calcutta and University of Chennai, all took time out to provide the necessary guidance and inputs.

The committee broke down some of the stereotypes on various aspects of the Scholarship criteria with their thought-provoking recommendations. Key areas including evaluation parameters, eligibility criteria, number of awards, general and woman engineer award categories, appointment of jury and distribution of the scholarship amount were discussed and debated at length. The committee agreed to meet again in July to finalise the details. Members of the Advisory committee are as follows:

• Dr A. Chakrabari, vice chancellor of Jadavpur University, West Bengal and chair of the Committee
• Dr P. Aravindan, vice chancellor, MGR University, Chennai
• Dr (Mrs) Balvinder Shukla, pro vice chancellor, Amity University, UP
• Dr H.P. Khincha, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore
• Dr S.S. Murthy, Department of Electrical Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi
• Dr Samarjit Sengupta, Department of Applied Physics, University of Calcutta
• Professor Sadagopan, director, International Institute of Information Technology, Bangalore
• Professor Madhuri Joshi, professor and dean R&D, College of Engineering, Pune.

Leadership talk

At the beginning of June, IET Bangalore Local Network’s first technology leadership talk in Mysore, pictured above, was delivered by Dr Gopichand Katragadda, managing director, GE India Technology Centre.

Speaking about ‘Innovation and challenges in emerging technologies’, Dr Katragadda stressed the importance of shifting from a knowledge-driven economy to an innovation-driven one in the transforming business scenario that we are currently in. He took the audience through a fascinating innovation timeline highlighting some of the most memorable advances of our time, from Edison to Steve Jobs demonstrating their passion for innovation, underlined with an urge to excel. As a leader who has been at the forefront of technology and innovation, Dr Katragadda was able to share his extensive knowledge and insight from first-hand experience. By the end of the session, the inspired audience had caught a rare glimpse of what goes into creating breakthrough innovations.

More than 50 professionals from industry, academia and start-ups attended the technology leadership talk, the first in a series of innovation-focused events planned by the IET to equip its members with innovation capabilities at their workplace.

IET Present around the World

Bangalore has found its young engineer to represent the region at the South Asia regional finals of Present Around the World (PATW) being held on 3 August in Bangalore.

Anubhav Gupta (4th year electrical & electronics engineering student of Dayananda Sagar College of Engineering) won the PATW Bangalore title for his presentation on ‘Preparation & Characterisation of Organic Solar Cells’ and will go on to participate in the South Asia regional finals. Runner-up Shree Gowri (MBA student of SDMIMD, Mysore) presented on ‘Web 3.0 and Semantic Web’.

PATW Bangalore brought together young engineers and their ideas to build a better world through engineering and technology. Twenty two young engineers (both students and young professionals) presented on the theme ‘Future Technologies for Emerging Markets’ in the two-day battle for the coveted title held on 18-19 of May.

Participants were judged on their presentation skills and technical content, with a panel of judges comprising Dr Sudhakar Reddy, senior scientist and Centre of Excellence leader, GE (General Electric) India Technology Centre, Dr M. Ravishankar, head, Department of Information Science, Dayanand Sagar College of Engineering and Dr Hemantkumar Aiyer, senior scientist, Laird Technologies.

Istanbul beckons

IET student member, Vinod S (3rd year electrical and electronics engineering student) is a proud young man having had his research paper on ‘Obstacles Incentivise Human Learning – A Network Theoretic Study’  accepted for publication and presentation at the prestigious International Conference on Advances in Social Network Analysis and Mining (ASONAM). The conference is an interdisciplinary event bringing together practitioners and researchers from a variety of fields to promote collaboration and exchange of ideas and practices. The conference will be held in Istanbul, Turkey, in August.

Vinod has co-authored the paper with Dr Sudarshan Iyengar (Indian Statistical Institute, Chennai), Dr Pandurangan (Indian Institute of Technology, Chennai), Amitash Ramesh (Dayandanda Sagar College of Engineering, Bangalore) and Soumya Ramesh (Dayananda Sagar College of Engineering, Bangalore).

The paper attempts to understand how humans navigate themselves while facing a network using a network puzzle called Wordmorph, when the ‘landmark’ nodes are blocked. As an example, consider the navigation in traffic from point A to point C when Point B is blocked, B being a landmark node). During the study, the group introduced blockages in the network and found an incremental improvement in performance of humans while navigating through them. The work observes that humans learn to cope, despite continued introduction of blockages in the Wordmorph network. The study hypothesises that humans learn only the bare essentials to navigate the network unless blockages are introduced. These blockages force humans to explore newer ways of navigating and countering the challenge. A parallel is then drawn by the study to human problem solving, proposing that obstacles are catalysts for humans to innovate newer techniques to solve a restricted variant of a familiar problem.

The road ahead

With a workshop on Functional Innovation, IET India Scholarship roll out, the South Asia Volunteers Conference Weekend and PATW on the horizon, 2012 will continue to be a busy, eventful year. Watch this space for more updates.