Amrita wins Computer Society of India’s Awards for Excellence in IT for path-breaking innovations in education and e-learning solution. Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham has emerged as a big winner in the Computer Society of India’s (CSI) national-level IT Excellence Awards for its premier research centers of excellence, Amrita Amrita Center for Research in Analytics & Technologies for Education (AmritaCREATE) and Amrita Multi Modal Applications Using Computer Human Interaction (AMMACHI) Labs. The duo won awards and accolades for its path-breaking innovations in education and e-learning solutions.
Amrita Center for Research in Analytics & Technologies for Education (AmritaCREATE) entry for the project, “Online Labs for School Experiments (OLabs) for Rural Schools”, won the top prize for Education & E-learning after an exhaustive three tier jury selection process with Deloitte as the knowledge partner. The award carries a citation and prize money of Rs. 1 lakh.
The Online Labs (OLabs) for Science experiments, offered free to schools, was developed to overcome the limitations faced by schools in India, especially rural schools, due to either insufficient time or instruments in laboratories. The OLabs projects reached a significant milestone early this year, when it was officially endorsed by the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) for its 14,500 schools. The research on OLabs was presented at leading conferences such as ASEE/IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference (FIE 2013), the International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE 2013), and showcased at the National Conference on ICT for School Education which was inaugurated by HRD Minister, Hon’ble Dr. M.M. Pallam Raju. Over 56,000 students and 4,300 teachers have been trained to use Olabs. Future plans for scaling the OLabs for Pan India includes cloud based deployment to support 36 lakh students and the training of 30,000 teachers across India.
In the same category, AMMACHI Labs secured the IT Excellence Appreciation Award for its technology innovations aimed at women empowerment through the Sakshat Amrita Vocational Education (SAVE) project. The goal of the SAVE Project at AMMACHI Labs is to foster technological innovation in vocational training to help alleviate poverty and to preserve dying skills. SAVE has developed educational applications using multimedia, virtual reality and haptic technologies, enriching the individual’s learning experience by simulating real-life situations and providing portable, cost effective, scalable, and standardized vocational education and training courses. AMMACH Labs has recently trained over 3000 women in Kerala and Tamil Nadu through the Women Empowerment project. Most recently, the AMMACH Labs is developing an online vocational education portal, MySangham, that will make computerised vocational education training accessible to all. (Learn More »)
In the concurrently held CSI Academic excellence awards, the CSI student branch of Amrita School of Engineering, Coimbatore was adjudged as the best in India out of more than 600 colleges and students for the third consecutive year.
In 2010, CSI had constituted the IT Excellence awards as an initiative to recognize and benchmark IT excellence in India. These awards have become one of the most visible IT awards nationally.
On behalf of AMRITA, Prof. Bhavani B, Director, AMMACHI Labs and Prof. Prashant R.Nair, Vice-Chairman- IT, AMRITA received the awards from Shri J. Satyanarayana, Secretary, Department of Electronics and Information Technology (Deity), Government of India at a colorful function at Visakhapatnam on 14 December, 2013. Dr. S.V. Raghavan, Scientific Secretary to Government of India and President of CSI & Mr. Anil Srivatsava, Joint Secretary, Ministry of Civil Aviation, Government of India also participated in the awards ceremony.
OLabs is developed by AmritaCREATE, in partnership with CDAC, Mumbai and is funded by research grants from Department of Electronics and Information Technology, MCIT.
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Top Award from Computer Society of India in Education and E-learning
