September 3, 2009
Center for E-learning, Amritapuri
 
An IEEE student chapter was inaugurated at ASE Coimbatore by Dr. Shankar Sastry, Dean of the College of Engineering at the University of California at Berkeley. Speaking on the occasion, Dr. Venkat Rangan, Vice-Chancellor of Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham, remarked, “University of California at Berkeley is one of the top universities in the world. Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham is one of the fastest emerging universities in India. Together we have a lot of common interests.”
 
A President’s Gold Medalist and an IEEE fellow, Dr. Sastry also expressed great enthusiasm for planned joint initiatives between Amrita and Berkeley. Discussions are afoot for collaborative programs in wireless sensor networks and cybersecurity. Dr. Sastry’s lecture focused on What Makes a World-class Engineering Institution? He should know. Berkeley’s college of engineering, with 20 Nobel laureates is ranked among the best engineering colleges worldwide.
 
Prof. K. Gangadharan of Amrita, IEEE Student Branch Counselor presented the IEEE scroll to Dr. Sastry. “We were fortunate to have Dr. Sastry for the launch,” he shared later. “ACM, IETE and CSI student chapters are already active on campus. Shortly, we plan to conduct India’s first ACM Student Convention. With the launch of this new IEEE chapter, we hope to have more activities.”
 
ACM (Association for Computing Machinery), IETE (Institute for Electronics and Telecommunication Engineers), CSI (Computer Society of India) and IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers) are all world-wide professional bodies. Student chapters of these bodies are active at the three Amrita Schools of Engineering. For example, CSI’s National Student Convention (NSC) will be conducted in Coimbatore during September 24-25; Amrita will participate in a big way.
 
“We are helping with the organization of the Convention,” stated Mr. Prashant Nair of Amrita, who is also the Joint Secretary of CSI’s Coimbatore chapter. “Several of the Amrita faculty are on the advisory and program committees for this convention. The NSC is one of the flagship CSI events and has been regularly conducted for the past twenty-five years in India. It has emerged as the leading computer science students convention in India. We are happy to have this opportunity to contribute.”