The School of Engineering, Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham, Coimbatore campus, has been conferred the award of ‘Best Institution of the Year – Tech & Innovation Eco-system’ at the Computer Society of India’s (CSI) TechNext India 2019 event at Mumbai, on September 28, 2019. This award is in recognition of the spectacular hackathon successes at Amrita in the last couple of years, as well as the support system facilitating the same such as Cisco ThingQbator IoT Makerspace, Institution Innovation Council (IIC), Anokha techfest, and competitive programming initiatives like ICPC.

Dr. (Col.) P. N. Kumar, (Chairman, Department of Computer Science & Engineering (CSE), School of Engineering, Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham, Coimbatore campus), shared, “The hackathon culture is vibrant and wide-spread among students of Amrita across departments. We are in the process of leveraging this student innovation to transform the Amrita Coimbatore campus into a smart campus. One student innovation, e-wallet developed by our CSE students, has been deployed in various locations on the campus for cashless transactions. Another CSE student has contributed towards the Campus Management System (CMS) and Amrita repository apps. In continuation of this, we have recently organized AiSmart Hackathon in collaboration with Intel Software and Institution of Electronics & Telecommunication Engineers (IETE) Coimbatore center. In this hackathon, students have developed prototypes on smart and green themes like smart dustbins, smart water management, water and air quality management, wastewater management and smart parking, which we hope to build upon”.

Representing Amrita, Prof. Prashant R. Nair, (Associate Professor, Department of Computer Science & Engineering (CSE), School of Engineering, Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham, Coimbatore campus), received the award from Mr. George Arakal (Director, Digital India corporation, Government of India). Apart from being the Anokha techfest convener, he has mentored the prolific Amrita CSE hackathon team, ‘Team Vision’ that won Smart India Hackathon, TCS EngiNX and secured top 5 ranks, representing India in Singapore-Hackathon, all in 2018. Dr. Shriram K. Vasudevan, (Assistant Professor, Department of Computer Science & Engineering (CSE), School of Engineering, Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham, Coimbatore campus), was conferred the award for Best Faculty of the year – Thought Leader award for his prolific mentoring of Amrita CSE hackathon teams with successes and victories in TCS EngiNX, NEC Hackathon, Rackathon, TITAN Wear your smarts, Tata Crucible Hackathon and Health Hack, etc. He is accompanying a team to Harvard University for HackHarvard Global Hackathon in October 2019.