“Over the years, Amrita has made significant contributions to the fields of education, technology and entrepreneurship,” proudly noted Dr. Balakrishnan Shankar, Associate Dean, Amritapuri Campus, during the inaugural ceremony of an IEEE Symposium at Amrita.
This IEEE Symposium on Education, Technology and Entrepreneurship attracted participation from over 320 delegates representing nearly 30 different colleges.
Amrita students who were on vacation, returned to college early, to help organize and participate in the event.
Dr. Rob Reilly, President of IEEE Education Society and Visiting Scientist at the Centre for Educational Computing Initiatives, MIT, was the guest of honor at the Symposium.
“The scientist seeks to understand what is, the engineer seeks to create what never was,” Dr. Rob emphasized, speaking to the young delegates.
Mr. Satish Babu, Chair, IEEE Kerala, also spoke during the inauguration.
Post the inaugural ceremony, participants had the opportunity to attend a workshop on entrepreneurship, where they learned from the first-hand experiences of two young and successful entrepreneurs.
Nelvin Joseph was only 23 when he launched his first product that helped reduce the power bill of enterprises by automatically switching-off electronic devices that were not in use, such as, computers.
In May 2008, Nelvin’s company Artin Dynamics was acknowledged by PC Quest Magazine as India’s first artificial-intelligence-based company. The company is now valued at Rs 170 crore.
“Knowledge is power, but using knowledge for the right reasons is what is going to make you successful,” Nelvin told the participants.
Delegates also learned from Deepak Ravindran, CEO of Innoz, who co-founded his company while he was still a student. Today Innoz owns the world’s largest mobile search engine and is listed among the top 8 emerging companies in India by NASSCOM.
“The best way to predict the future is to invent it,” he told the young students.
“Follow the 10,000-hour rule, that is the key to success in any field. It’s a matter of keeping at a specific task for at least 10,000 hours,” he explained.
Technical tutorials on Hardware Description Language (HDL) and Data Converters followed.
The day also saw the inauguration of the two sub-chapters of the Amrita IEEE Student Chapter – Education Society (EDSOC) and Robotics and Automation Society (RAS).
“The Symposium was really awesome. The workshop on entrepreneurship was really helpful. Not attending it would have been a really big loss,” stated Arjun S., a student who attended from Trivandrum.
“The technical workshops were excellent,” commented Vishnu Namboothiri from Pathanamthitta, who had helped develop the IEEE website.
“The hard work and dedication of our IEEE student volunteers helped make this event a success,” summed up Br. Rajesh Kannan Megalingam, IEEE Student Branch Counselor.
August 5, 2012
School of Engineering, Amritapuri
