Dec 18, 2009
Amrita School of Engineering, Bangalore
 
Amrita’s Dr. Kumar Rajamani will join hundreds of engineering faculty from around the country at NIT Surathkal this weekend to participate in the 39th National Annual Convention of Indian Society for Technical Education.
 

Dr. Kumar has been invited to speak about the follow up of the 2009 Faculty Leadership Institute (FLI) Program. Instituted by the Indo-US Collaboration for Engineering Education (IUCEE), this program seeks to enhance the quality of engineering education and research in India and aims to make it more relevant to the global context.
 

Earlier this year, Dr. Kumar had participated in a workshop on Graphical System Design using Lab View-II as part of this program. LabView or Laboratory Virtual Instrumentation Engineering Workbench is a development environment that enables electrical and electronics engineers to develop advanced applications.
 

During the workshop, Dr. Kumar learned about Ni-Yantra 2009, a collegiate contest for embedded system applications. “I thought that this was a great opportunity for students to learn,” Dr. Kumar stated. “Lab View is so popular in the community of scientists and industry professionals.”
 

Dr. Kumar’s students at the Bangalore campus came together in teams and entered the competition. His colleagues at Amritapuri contacted him to obtain details. The students learned LabView to build systems on hardware loaned by National Instruments. All teams selected projects that could benefit society. (See News »)
 

“Our students did very well,” Dr. Kumar proudly remarked. “They worked hard between classes and exams to complete the projects in a record time of few weeks. Four of our teams placed in the top ten in this nation-wide contest.”
 

The students had the opportunity to demonstrate their winning entries during the Educators Day celebrations on November 6 at the Chennai Trade Center. Dr. Kumar was invited to talk at this event. ‘Entrepreneurship using Labview’ was one of the topics of his talk and he quoted from the examples of the student projects.
 

“I would like to acknowledge IUCEE 2009 FLI for having given me the opportunity to obtain all training materials,” Dr. Kumar remarked. “We continue to use Lab View at Amrita for other projects as well.” Dr. Kumar’s talk at NIT Suratkal will highlight some of these projects.
 

For example, Dr. Kumar is currently engaged in an MHRD funded effort to build virtual labs that will help bring engineering education within easy reach of youngsters, who can’t currently afford it or don’t have access to it. Amrita is partnering with several top universities in the nation to bring this project to fruition.