Events

• 45th Meeting of the Senate was held on April 8.
• Interaction between Mr. Samir Kumar, MD of Inventus Advisors and Innovators and Incubation companies was held on April 20. He shared his views and insights on how startups should pitch to a VC, and what VCs look for in a startup.
  
  
• excITe programme for high school children was held during April 20 -24. 39 students from Kumaran's Academy and 12 from four different Navodaya Schools participated in the week-long programme. Many of our faculty participated by giving lectures and demos on high-interest topics such as Graphics and Visualization by Jaya Sreevalsan Nair, Electronics by Prof. Joy Prabhakaran, Big Data by Prof. G. Srinivasaraghavan and Prof. Tricha Anjali, Mobile Apps by Prof. Srikanth T. K., Cryptography by Prof. Ashish Choudhury and Machine Vision by Prof. Dinesh Babu Jayagopi. The students also visited the facilities of companies such as STPI, Infosys, Siemens and 3M. Our Incubatee companies also participated by showcasing their work. Overall, the programme was a success with positive feedback and increased awareness among the students.
• As part of I-MACX, IIITB conducted a “Build with Watson” hackathon on April 25. This hackathon was sponsored by IBM, Airtel and choreographed by Ace Hacker. (www.acehacker.com/bluemix.html). The response was huge - with over 600 registrations and 215 hackers at the hackathon. Around 25 students from IIITB also participated. The inaugural speech was delivered by Prof. Sujit Kumar Chakrabarti. The hackathon concluded with the apps evaluated by a panel of 9 distinguished judges from both industry and academia - with the IIITB team of Ms. Neha Upadhay (MT2014076) and Mr. Navin Pai (MT2013087) winning the 2nd prize. Their application was called "Watson Music" (http://watson-music.mybluemix.net), and used keyword extraction and semantic analysis to play music as per user inputs (eg. "Watson, play me a relaxed song about rain" or "Watson, play me a song by Bryan Adams about summer" or "Watson, play me a sad song about loneliness”). The hackathon involved developing an application using IBM's Watson service, which provides Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing capabilities, in a time span of 7 hours. Naveen and Neha also been invited to demonstrate the application at the Bangalore Startup Night in May 2015. 
• The Graduation Ceremony for 1st batch of MIIT PGDSD was held on April 28 at Mandalay. 30 students received their diploma certificate. The Union Minister and other Ministers and Rectors / Senior Professors from Universities, Myanmar, Indian Ambassador and Task Force Chairman Mr. S. Ramadorai, India and Prof. S. Sadagopan, (Director, IIITB) Prof. Debabrata Das (Dean Academic and R&D, IIITB), Prof. K. R. V. Raja Subramanian (IIITB) were present in the event.
• IIITB achieved 100% summer internship placements for the iMTech 2012-17 batch. The internship period is May 15- July 21.

Publications

• Vijayavani, Kannada daily carried an expert opinion by Mr. V. S. Prakash, the Registrar, on the recent earthquake in Nepal.The article says that the buildings which were relatively new with Earthquake resistant technology survived the mega disaster. The article emphasizes the window of opportunity in developing an "Earthquake Resistant Nepal".  The importance of preparedness and mitigation measures, which heavily depend on Science and Technology, are highlighted. 
  For details: http://goo.gl/iXYHrz

Faculty & Staff

• Balaji Parthasarathy and Jennifer Brant (of Innovation Insights, Geneva) co-authored a paper titled "The Dynamics of Global Technology and Knowledge Flows". Released on March 20, the paper is part of the International Chamber of Commerce (ICC) Series on Innovation and Intellectual Property Research. The paper is available at the website of the Social Science Research Network (http://papers.ssrn.co/sol3/ papers.cfm?abstract_id=2587205).
• Prof. Sadagopan, the Director, attended the inauguration of STPI SMART (Semiconductor Measurement Analysis and Reliability Test) Lab and lay the foundation for STPI’s new Incubation Facility on April 2. Hon’ble Minister Shri Ravi Shankar Prasad, Minister for Communication & IT, Govt of India, has inaugurated the lab.
  
  
• Prof. Shrisha Rao taught an invited tutorial on "Safety Issues in Complex Engineered Systems" on April 13 at the 9th Annual IEEE International Systems Conference conducted by the IEEE Systems Council in Vancouver, Canada.
  
  
• Prof. Amit Prakash was invited to deliver a talk on social media for development and governance at a capacity building workshop organized jointly by the United Nations Asia Pacific Centre for ICT and Development (UN-APCICT) and Bhutan's Ministry of Information and Communication during April 14-15 at Thimphu, Bhutan. The workshop was attended by the Prime Minister, Ministers and senior civil servants of the Royal Government of Bhutan.
  
  
• Prof. K.V. Dinesha gave a talk on April 22 on Big Data and its effects on human behaviour at National College, Basawanagudi, Bangalore organised by Bangalore Science Forum. In his talk he mentioned about how social media and use of machines, sensors has brought about changes in data collection and hence data management systems. He also talked about how this development has helped society and also the risk of negative use.
  For details: http://goo.gl/UiyFTg
  
  
• Prof. G. Srinivasaraghavan was an invited speaker at the Big Data meet-up organized by Target at their office on April 25. The title of the talk was "Cutting Edge Research in Analytics". The event was attended by a number of startups, VCs and large retailers (FlipKart, Target, Tesco, etc.) in the analytics space.



• Balaji Parthasarathy was invited by Samsung Research Institute Bangalore to deliver a talk titled "From infomediaries to infomediation at public access venues: Lessons from a 3-country study" on April 27.

Students & Alumni

• Srinivasa Gopal (MS2010505) has developed a new mobile application for Teaching Indian Classical Dance. The application was uploaded on April 14 and has got good number of installs.
  This application teaches students some preliminaries as well as advanced topics in Bharathanatyam. The lessons are divided into Beginner, Intermediate and Advanced. Video tutorials are provided under each level. The videos are short and crisp and range between 2 to 9 minutes. The videos are ably demonstrated by Dr. Ranjani , founder of the Ponnambalam Temple of Fine Arts, Mumbai.
  For details: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.ics.Bharatanatyam&hl=en
  
• Putluru Sravani (MS2013004) has completed MS by Research Thesis Oral Examination on April 30. Her research domain is Wireless Communication and title of the thesis is "Designs of 3D antennas for 24GHz ISM band applications”, supervised by Prof. Madhav Rao.
  
  
• Balachandra K. (PH2013006) completed Ph.D. Comprehensive Examination on April 14.
  
  
• Neha Oraon (PH2013008) completed Ph.D. Comprehensive examination on April 23.
  
• Shweta Ghodeswar (PH2010903) completed Ph.D. Open Seminar on April 29.
  
  
• During the visit of Honorable Prime Minister, Mr. Narendra Modi, to Germany in April 12-14, he had called for a closed group dinner meeting with Indians. Akhil Agarwal (2000003), had the honour of being invited for the dinner. Akhil, who is an alumnus from the first batch at IIITB, currently works as a Development Architect at the SAP Innovation Center Potsdam, Germany. He attended the event with his spouse, Gunjan.


• whatfix (a startup by Khadim Batti (99014), an alumnus from the first graduating batch), raised INR 5.5 Cr as seed round from Helion, PowerHouse, GSF and angel investors from the Silicon Valley.
  For details: http://goo.gl/5XZUlo

Guest Talks

• April 8: "Spirituality in Management" by Mr. Pitchiah, Finance controller, IIITB.
• April 15: “Wideband Circularly Polarized Antennas” by Dr.Trivesh Kumar, Senior Research Associate, IIT Kanpur.
• April 20: “Adventures in Human Sensing using Smart Devices” by Dr. Venkat Padmanabhan, Principal Researcher, Microsoft Research India.
  
  
• April 22: “Theories of Change in Researching ICT for Development” by Prof. Andy Dearden, Sheffield Hallam University, UK.
  
  
• April 22: “High Gain and Wideband Multilayer Antennas for Wireless Applications” by Dr. Avinash Ramnath Vaidya, Ph.D. from Indian Institute of Technology Bombay.
  
  
• April 24: “The Ever Changing Brain: Rewiring and Remodeling of Brain Circuits” by Dr. B.S. Shankaranarayana Rao Department of Neurophysiology, National Institute of Mental Health and Neuro Sciences (NIMHANS).
  
  
• April 24: “How to Elevate yourself into a Mature Product Manager/Leader” by Mr. Pitchiah, Adviser (Finance), IIITB.
  
  
• April 27: "Computerization of India's Food Security System: Lessons from Karnataka" by Dr. Silvia Masiero, London School of Economics and Political Science, UK.
  
  
• April 29: “Improved adaptive video delivery system using a perceptual pre-processing filter” by Dr. Rahul Vanam, Staff Engineer,  InterDigital Communications, San Diego, USA.

Campus Visitors

• April 2: Dr. Roger Moser, Professor of Strategic Management at the University of St. Gallen (visiting faculty IIM-Bangalore and Udaipur)
• April 6:  Mr. Sanjay Nayak, CEO & Managing Director, Tejas Networks Ltd.
• April 22: Mr. Ganesh Ayyar, CEO, Mphasis, Dr. Jai Ganesh, Vice President & Head, Mphasis NEXT Labs & Ms. Deepa Nagraj, Head, PR & Social Media.  Mphasis visited IIITB in the view to develop a partnership in the areas of Mentorship, Involvement in the Incubation Center, Scholarship for students and research collaboration with the faculty.
• April 23: Mr. Vikram Bellur, Global Alliance Manager- Strategic SI Partners at VCE and Mr. Praveen Akkiraju, CEO, VCE.
• April 28: Prof. Theo Ungerer, Department of Computer Science – Augsburg University (Germany) and Delegation of Technical Center India (TCI) team from Infineon Technologies. Infineon Technologies is interested in the opportunities for joint research collaborations between IIITB, Infineon Tech and Augsburg University in topics such as Embedded Systems, VLSI/FPGAs, Software Technologies, Architecture, Functional Safety, AUTOSAR, Hardware/Software partitioning, Automotive applications including ADAS, Autonomous Driving. Infineon Technologies are looking for students for Internships, Sponsored M.Tech possibilities, Mentorship of Start-ups in the IIITB Innovation Center, Advisory Board and a joint collaboration research project with the University of Oxford, Infineon and IIITB.

• May 4-9: Finals week.
• May 9-31: Vacation period
  
• May 15: Shortlist for research degree programme admissions will be announced
  
  
• May 18: Master of Science (Digital Society) Entrance Exam
  
  
• May 18 - 20: Master of Science (Digital Society) Personal Interviews
  
  
• May 30: Last date for iM.Tech online Applications Submission