A student team from the School of Engineering, Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham, Coimbatore campus, has emerged as the champions of the Scilab Toolbox Hackathon 2020. Seven hundred student teams and startups participated in this hackathon organized by Free/Libre and Open Source Software for Education (FOSSEE) Center of Excellence at IIT Bombay and supported by National Mission on Education through Information and Communication Technology (ICT) of Ministry of Education, Government of India.  The Amrita team, “Scipandas”, worked on a project to Interface Python Data Analysis Library (Pandas) for the Scilab toolbox, which is an open-source alternative to Matlab, used by researchers worldwide.

Dr. Sasangan Ramanathan, Dean, Faculty of Engineering, Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham, said, “In the last 3 years, Amrita students have emerged as champions in several international and national hackathons such as HackHarvard,  TCS Digital Twin Challenge, Smart India Hackathon, etc. These hackathon successes are a direct result of Amrita’s initiatives in mentoring and encouraging our students to be innovators and not followers. It’s reassuring that providing the right environment for education can foster creativity. My heartfelt congratulations to Scipandas team members, Sundeep V.V.S. Akella of 2017-2021 batch B.Tech. Computer Science and Engineering and Aditya Dhinavahi from 2018-2023 batch Integrated M. Sc. Data Science and mentor Prof. Prashant R. Nair, Associate Professor, Dept. of Computer Science and  Engineering, School of Engineering, Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham, Coimbatore campus.