April 17, 2009
School of Engineering, Coimbatore
 

Engineering students at Amrita’s three campuses regularly participate in inter-college fests and bring home honors and awards. In this feature, we profile the distinctions obtained by students of 2nd year ECE (Electronics and Communication Engineering) at the Coimbatore Campus.
 

 

---

 
During the second week of February, Vignesh K. and Ganapathy Raman K. participated in a technical symposium at the Coimbatore Institute of Technology. The team competed with over 50 teams, to win the first place in an event named Yours Digitally. Based on Signal Processing, the event included quiz rounds with questions on network functions, convolutions, structure of filters and functions and graphs. “For example, we were asked to state whether DFT is N/2 times the fourier series or not,” shared Vignesh. “We were able to give the correct answer, which many didn’t know,” added team-mate Ganapathy. “DFT is actually N times the fourier series.”
 
One week later, Karthik D. and Sai Pramod U., also 2nd year ECE students, participated in a national level technical symposium conducted by the IEEE Student Branch of PSG Institute of Technology. The team beat nearly 70 teams to emerge as the overall winner in Circuit Design. “We were asked questions on DAC, astable multivibrator, butterworth filters, etc. — some of these topics were recently covered in the college laboratory,” said Karthik. “In the final round we were asked to design circuits,” added Sai Pramod. “I guess it is the strong grounding we have received in analog and digital electronics that helped us win.”
 

In the first week of March, several Amrita students participated in a fest, billed as an international eco-friendly event, also at the PSG Institute of Technology. Balasubramanian R. and Vignesh K. won the second prize in a programming contest based on MATLAB, beating nearly 150 other teams. R. R. Shrihari and Rahul R. M. won the third prize in a puzzles contest. Among other things, they were asked to find the anagrams of “Eleven plus Two” and “Statue of Liberty.” The solutions, which the team was able to provide, were “twelve plus one” and “built to stay free” respectively. The one-hour contest had nearly 450 contestants.
 

Ganapathy Raman K. won the second prize in Mathemagic. “Nearly 100 students participated in the prelims,” he stated. “This was a written test with questions from algebra, trigonometry, geometry, probability, calculus etc. I was one of eight students selected for the finals.” In the finals, Ganapathy was able to solve 3 of the 5 questions the judges posed to him. For example, Ganapathy was asked to mathematically interpret the graph shown. “The graph starts from infinity and then alternates between 1 and 2 before converging to 1.6108. It gives the ratio of two consecutive terms in the Fibonacci series (0,1,1,2,3,5,8,13,21…) i.e. 1/0, 1/1, 2/1, 3/2, …” was his confident and correct answer. We congratulate all the participants and the winners.