Let’s celebrate technology! Indeed, Pragyan 2015, did just that. This annual techno-management festival of National Institute of Technology, Tiruchy (NIT-T), held here recently, saw the celebration of technological prowess, of its budding engineers as well as eminent technocrats from the industry.
The four-day event that saw participation from 45 countries for Pragyan’s innumerable online competitions, saw a footfall of more than 2,700 people including students from various colleges and the general public. With 15,143 registrations that included online participants, 1.35 million online hits and 61,600 unique hits Pragyan was a huge success, thanks to the impressive managerial skills of the students.
While prizes worth lakhs were up for grabs during the events, competitions and workshops held over three days, the guest lectures provided enough food for thought for these aspiring engineers to mull over.
After the inaugural speech, Guest of Honour, Jay Marshall Strabala, studio head of the world’s tallest building, the Burj Khalifa in Dubai and Shanghai Tower, China’s tallest building, awed a packed hall of over 500 students, teachers and guests. Talking to the students about tall structures around the world in London, Chicago, Beijing, Taiwan, Kuala Lumpur and Shangai, he spoke about technicalities like wind vortex and traffic planning; the subject of sustainability being the focus of his talk.
“When do you see India getting a Burj of its own?” quizzed one of the students and he reportedly said, “According to my knowledge, Mumbai has looked at four really tall structures but I’m not sure about whether they are implementing tall plans. India also has huge scope, and even small cities like Vadodara have a population greater than most cities in US. But the fact that they are expanding laterally and not vertically is disheartening.”
Technology beyond the planet
Giving Day 1 of Pragyan a celestial touch was Jill Tarter, American astronomer and former director of the Centre for Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) Research, California, who addressed the students through a video conference. She opined that the search for extraterrestrial intelligence was one of the most important projects of human kind and should be done in India as well as the United States and all over the world. “It will help us have a long future as a technological civilisation,” she said.
Urging the students to be a part of SETI’s exploration she said, “This is in your future. This is something you can be a part of. This exploration of looking for a second genesis, a second origin of life, somewhere else in our solar system is important to all of us.”
For over an hour, Tarter gave flight to the imagination of the students as she traversed through stars, plumes and interstellar medium during her talk, and invoked the spirit of curiosity, discovery and research in her listeners. “Is it really just us? Are we really alone in this colossal sea of matter, energy, Chemistry and Physics? Well if we are, that’s such an awful waste of space!” she quipped, as the audience in the auditorium burst into peals of laughter.
“What if we’re not alone? What if somebody else is asking similar kind of questions? What if someone’s looking up at the night sky at the same star but from the other side?” she questioned adding that the discovery of another older cosmological culture might inspire us to survive our own increasingly uncertain, technological powerlessness. “Quite knowing that someone else is out there and has survived for a long time might motivate us to figure out how to do that ourselves. That’s a part of what our study is about,” she said about SETI.
She asserted that while technology may change with time, the Physics of the Universe doesn’t and hence, this Physics can be used to guide explorations. “Previously, we used radio telescopes, now we use optical telescopes. We use these tools to look and to listen for the science of someone else’s technology. Our own technology is visible over interstellar distances and ‘their’ technology may be as well. We don’t know what that might be, something totally unforeseen that might generate signals at radio wavelengths, which determined programme of searching might discover,” she concluded.
Affordable technology
After a bout in Space where the cost of technology that is used is understandably high, a discussion on providing affordable technology ensued. The speaker to steer the conversation was one who specialises in affordable technology; the mastermind behind the world’s cheapest tablet — Aakash, Suneet Tuli, CEO of Datawind. The man at the helm of affairs of a company specialising in wireless web access products and services, maintained throughout his talk here that the challenge today was to bring the ‘real’ India online. The real India, he said, resided in the innumerable towns and villages, and not in the metros.
Reflecting on the 90s he said that back then nobody bid for the telecom spectrum in tier 2 and tier 3 cities, and Bharati Enterprises was the only company that ended up bidding for it. “Today, Airtel Bharati has a billion mobile customers,” he said, inferring that the future belonged to those who saw possibilities even before they became obvious.
“Four billion new customers will use the internet in the next five years,” he said, prophetically, bringing to the fore some immediate challenges that needed to be addressed. Among those were electricity, illiteracy, affordability and network deficit.
There was a gap of four billion between cellular subscribers and internet users, he said. “Anybody who has a mobile doesn’t need electricity to be online,” he pointed out explaining that in a country where frequent power cuts are common, a mobile handset could eliminate the need for electricity if one wanted to use the internet.
On the affordability front, he said the mobile market had exploded the moment the price dropped below Rs 2,500. “For a billion people who live on a monthly salary of Rs 10,000, even Rs 500 makes a lot of difference,” he said, reiterating that affordability played a key role in the success of any product.
Considering the fact that more than 80 per cent of the mobile towers provide only 2G coverage out of 4,50,000 mobile towers in India, low buffering speeds can be a major turn off for customers, he pointed out and said, “If affordability and network deficit problems are solved, there will be an internet revolution.” The students quizzed Tuli on his transition from engineering to entrepreneurship as a student, on the debate surrounding net neutrality and Aakash 2 among many others.
Moon rock
The cynosure of all eyes, the 3.75-billion-year-old moon rock that was on display at the festival for four days, is definitely worth a mention.
The 120g rock on display, a mare basalt (type of lunar rock), was an Apollo 17 lunar sample collected by Astronaut Jack Schmitt near the Lunar Module landing site. Scientific research is being done on the rest of this sample at NASA’s Johnson Space Centre in the United States.
Sangam projects
Creativity of NIT-T students was at its best at Sangam, where in-house projects done by the students were exhibited, attracting huge crowds for their ingenuity.
Second-year engineering students Sudharshan Suresh, Senthil Hariharan, Narendar Sriram and Anjana Gayathri presented a real time 3D object reconstruction project that employed the use of Xbox Kinect and Meshlab to convert real time objects to digitised images.
“The world is now going digital, from modelling, simulating to designing. Status quo doesn’t give you the flexibility of recreating from the real world, without professional help. What if I saw an intricate vase in front of me and wanted to use it in my design? The reverse engineering process involved in our project measures an object and then reconstructs it as a 3D model,” explained Sudarshan.
Priya Kumari, Madhuri Priya, Alok Kumar and Manish Jaiswal, third-year Civil Engineering students had on display a model of an elliptical geodesic dome that was not only energy efficient but also boasted of a sound structure. These domes are normally used for construction of sports stadiums and seminar halls. As opposed to the conventional cuboidal structures, this model offers more surface area. “If you observe other domes, they are round in shape. Our model is elliptical. It is extremely durable and feasible, even cost-wise,” said Priya Kumari.
Developing UAVs has become a fad among engineering students and NIT-T is no stranger to this. Adarsh Jagan S, Prakash B and Sabhari Natarajan displayed a quadcopter at the exhibition, which could fly at low altitudes like 12-15 feet and be used for monitoring crowds and recognising criminals through its facial recognition software.
“The quadcopter is mounted with a smartphone and we have used a 3D printed clamp which is lightweight but strong,” said Adarsh, explaining its components adding that since a GPS module is on board the quad, one also knows the location of the criminal when the quad is in pursuit. This information can then be sent to the police. “Until they arrive to arrest the culprit, we can have the quadcopter follow him,” he explained.
When one of the visitors questioned what was new about the project as UAVs were easily available in the market, the team was quick to reply that they had developed their own control algorithm and hence was unique.
Suyash Behera, Bharath Chandra, Arnab Saha and K Vignesh Ram presented the Smart Energy Monitor that regulates the energy consumed by electrical devices by keeping a tab on the energy consumption in a particular household.
The features of the Smart Energy Monitor include home automation from a remote location, sensing appliance type and standby mode. The usage patterns recorded can be useful both for the user and also for the manufacturers of that specific product.
M Sidhaarth, R Suraj Kiran, Aditya Balaji and Jayadev Kumar exhibited the Smart Cycle that sought to address the most common problems faced by cyclists like a flat tyre, lack of lights, maintenance problems and so on. Explaining the self-inflating tyre feature, Jayadev said, “The motion of the pedal drives the pump attached to the cycle frame. The pump lets out the pressurised air into a pressure chamber, and the air released from the chamber flows into the tyre.”
Tejas Simulator
The simulator of the Light Combat Aircraft (LCA), Tejas was a major attraction at Pragyan as every student worth his salt tried to understand the simulator architecture and tried his hand at the flying and landing gears. The excitement was palpable as students were vying for space and struggled to lend an ear, amid the noise, to Suresh Kumar, Deputy Project Director, Aeronautical Development Agency who explained the various sub systems of the aircraft to the students.
“Not many students are aware of LCAs in Tamil Nadu. We have done 3,000 hours of flight testing with Tejas and 70 per cent of it is indigenously built. It is light and easy to fly. There are no dials. Acquiring targets, releasing air-to-air, air-to-ground, long-range or short-range missiles is easy. It has been tested in all temperatures,” Kumar said.
“The Tejas Flight Simulator is the closest the students will get to in terms of flying a real aircraft. I am impressed by the knowledge exhibited by some of the students here, we need to have an MoU with the institute to impart more knowledge and training to the students,” he added.
Foster interdisciplinary thinking
Ananth Krishnan, the Chief Technological Officer of Tata Consultancy Services, received undivided attention from the students as he spoke about computing in the digital era and the intersection of Computer Science with other disciplines. Mobility, Social Media, Data, Cloud Computing and Artificial Intelligence are the major drivers of any innovation and industry, he opined. “Today, CS does not provide interesting research papers. CS along with genomics and metagenomics produce the most interesting research papers,” he pointed out explaining the importance of interdisciplinary study. Intersection of multiple technologies is driving the industry, he stated. Simplification, digital re imagination, governance and sustainability were other industry drivers according to him.
When asked if technical institutes have the onus of inculcating the same in its students he replied, “You need to create a virtuous industry, academia and alumni triangle. While academia takes care of innovation and fundamental research and alumni take care of testing, industry should look at proliferation.”
As many other eminent speakers and guest lecturers inspired and motivated the students, competitions like Robowars where student-built robots fought tooth and nail to test the efficiency of their design tested the technical aptitude of the students. Coding events like Byte Code offered as much as Rs 90,000 prize money after testing the participants’ coding skills at various levels.
Ideation, brain storming, healthy competition and above all team spirit was the major driving force in making this year’s Pragyan a major success. The organisational capabilities of these students sets the bar high for technical festivals in the country and would leave any professional event organisers pleasantly surprised.
suraksha@newindianexpress.com