Alumni

Amrita IT Alumni Scholarship Program

The Amrita IT Alumni Scholarship program was initiated by the 1999-2003 BTech IT Alumni with the inspiration from Prof. K. Gangadharan, Professor, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, School of Engineering, Coimbatore. Twenty-nine alumni came for the event from various parts of the globe. The event was hosted by the  Department of Computer Science and Engineering (CSE), School of Engineering, Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham, Coimbatore campus, on August 5, 2018, at Amriteswari Hall. 

The event was coordinated by Dr. S. Padmavathi, Assistant Professor, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, School of Engineering, Coimbatore, with the help of Mr. Vijay Narayanan, Alumni Coordinator. Dr. Sasangan Ramanathan, Dean, School of Engineering, Coimbatore; Dr. T. R. Padmanaban, former Dean of Engineering and HOD of the alumni batch; Prof. K. Gangadharan, Head Academics and Vice HOD of the Alumni Travel batch and Dr. Latha Parameswaran, Chairperson, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Coimbatore Campus, were present on the occasion. Dr. Sethumathavan, .Head, TIFAC CORE in Cyber Security, Coimbatore; Dr. B. Rajathilagam, Associate Professor, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, School of Engineering, Coimbatore and Ms. Suja P., Assistant Professor, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, School of Engineering, Bengaluru, who have handled courses for the alumni batch, happily participated in the event. Dr. G. Jeyakumar, Associate Professor, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, School of Engineering, Coimbatore and Mr. Sathish, Secretary, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, School of Engineering, Coimbatore, also took part in the event. 

Around 150 BTech CSE students participated in the event. After the formal inauguration, Dr. Latha Parameswaran welcomed the gathering. Dr. Sasangan Ramanathan, Dr. T. R. Padmanaban and Prof. K.Gangadharan, addressed the gathering. A short video about Amrita campus was screened and sequence of interaction with the alumni happened until 1 PM. The alumni gave scholarships to 5 BTech CSE students on the stage. The beneficiaries were selected earlier by the team headed by the chairperson, class advisers and batch coordinators of CSE department.  Mementos were given to the alumni as a token of appreciation. The alumni gave mementos to the faculties who were present for the event and for the coordinators. Prem (Alumni) and Dr. S. Padmavathi delivered the vote of thanks which was followed by a photo session and the participants dispersed for lunch. The lunch was provided in the PG boy’s mess hall for all the participants. Ragasudha team from the third year CSE department performed music after lunch. Mr. Satish (Alumni) screened the teaser of his short film followed by a stage performance by Ms. Ganga (Alumni). The group dispersed after the tea at 4 PM.

• Higher Studies at GaTech, CMU, Oxford etc.,
• Google Anita Borg Memorial Scholarship Award – $10,000 – Ms. Preethi Ramesh
• Best performer Award-2010, Infosys – Ms. Saranya Kannan
• Data Warehousing Domain Topper-2010, CTS – Mr. Balachandar
• Service Excellence Award-2012, IBM, 2012 – Mr. P. Prem
• Best Innovative Project Award, Siemens R&D Lab – Mr. Gowtham Balasubramanian (Co-Founder, BackStroke Labs)
• Siemens Interns Challenge Award – Mr. Gowtham Balasubramanian
• Patents filed for proposing a new technique to monitor & control Type B Diabetes – Mr. Gowtham Balasubramanian
• Best Employee Award-2012, L&T InfoTech, Mr. Karthik
• Bravo Award for Best Performance, Infosys – Mr. Tharun Emany
• Spot Infosys Awards – Mr. R. Sridhar • Member, Center of Excellence in Data Stage, CTS – Mr. M. G. Rama Krishnan
• Best performer for the Project-2010, CTS – Mr. K. Adithya
• Top Performer-2010, IBM – Mr. Kishore Muthu • Scientist, CMERI-CSIR – Mr. Srinivasan A.
• Winner IT Invention Test – 2010, Deloitte – Mr. Vibushan
• Ph.D at Max Planck Institute for Informatics, UK – Mr. Kaustubh Betkar
• Ph.D at Imperial College, London – Mr. Sainath L.
• Senior Scientist, ISRO – Mr. Mukesh
• Senior Scientist, ISRO – Mr. Kumar Jyothi
• MathWorks – Ms. Jotirlatha. V

Sarup Banskota

Sarup Banskota is a Nomadic remote web developer specialized in writing semantic markup and clean stylesheets. He works with the latest in responsive web design, typically on Ruby on Rails projects. He has been involved with the Fedora Project since 2013. Over the years, been helping out in multiple ways:

Design Team

• Co-authored GlitterGallery, a collaboration tool for open source designers.
• Along with Suchakra, led the redesign of the Ask Fedora Project
• Conducted front-end best practices workshops at local conferences

Ambassadors Team

• While in college, led the Fedora community, working towards attracting more Fedora users, and introducing potential contributors to starting points
• On a regional level, conducted installfests and workshops on a variety of topics ranging from generic FOSS introduction, version control, web development in Indian universities
• As Ambassador for the Asia Pacific region, helped with budget planning and conducted technical workshops at South East Asian universities and conference environments

Mentoring

• Mentored Kalpani Anuradha over Google Summer of Code 2015 to work on the Ask Fedora redesign project
• Mentored Aditya Prakash over Google Summer of Code 2015 to work on the GlitterGallery project

Forte

• Wireframing products that are in a “confused” state
• Writing good HTML/CSS – I do vanilla Sass + media queries as much as I do Twitter Bootstrap
• Writing jQuery to help with interactions • Clean website landing pages
• Responsive HTML emails • Visualizing your data with interactive charts
• Mobile first front end, which is snappy and feels clean
• Reasonably complex backend for an admin module perhaps, with Rails

Alumnus Talk Report

1. A talk by Mr. Nikhil Mahendran(CSE 2014-2018 Batch) on 19.11.2020

• Getting Started with Competitive Coding

Mr. Nikhil Mahendran’s talk on competitive coding included the importance of starting to practice coding skills early on in students’ college careers, introduced students to Code forces, an online coding site, and talked about the benefits of coding with peers as a way of learning from each other.

2. A talk by Mr. Eric Joseph (CSE 2016 – 2020 Batch) on 30.1.2021

• Commercialization of SIH Project sponsored by MHRD, Government of India implemented for Ministry of AYUSH

The talk highlighted the journey of Mr. Eric in participating in hackathon and commercializing the project.

3. A talk by Mr.Darshaun(CSE 2014-2018 Batch) Date: 30.1.2021

• How to Make Your Way into an Organization

He explained how to take part in competitive coding and other competitions that help to learn and grow many skills.

4. An Alumnus meet by CSE 2015 – 2019 Batch on 20.2.2021

• Speakers
• Gopalakrishnan C (Data Scientist @ Optisol Business Solutions, alumnus Politecnico di Milano) Manoj R (Cyber Security Research Scientist @ FireEye Inc) Mukund WN (Site Reliability Engineer @ Cisco) Pandu Ranga Reddy (Quantum Software Developer @ QuantumBase Security Solution – Lancaster UK, alumnus Lancaster University) B Shreehari Nair (Consultant Engineer @ Cisco Systems, alumnus Uppsala University) Arunachalam M (CS grad student at New York University)
• Post Undergrad CS Careers Talk

This event was aimed at bringing alumni experiences and industry trends that they had experienced in the 2 years after their graduation, to current students studying at Amrita CBE.

G D Raja

The number 60, prominently written on the registration plate of the BMW 3-Series car, almost reads as ‘GD’. Sensing my inquisitive look, he said, “Yes, it’s 60, and it’s my idea,” he says, with a triumphant grin on his face. “It stands for Gunasekaran and Devaghi, my parents. All my vehicles have the same number,” says 32-year-old G.D. Raja.

Raja has a chain of businesses – commodity broking (Adventures India), instant coffee export, a chain of coffee pubs (Goodmorning Café), logistics (LRG Logistics), real estate (GD Shelters), jewellery retail (GD Gold Garden) and a play school (GD Public School). Ask him whether he became an entrepreneur by accident or was forced upon him, he says, “No, no. It’s purely by choice.” His father, who runs a transport business in Chennai, wanted to see him as a top-level executive in a big corporate house. Despite his father’s persuasion, he chose not to take part in any campus interviews when he was doing his MBA at Bharathidasan Institute of Management, Tiruchi. “Because, I was very stubborn that I should start something on my own,” says Raja, founder CEO of the GD Group of companies.

In 2003, after he completed his MBA, he ventured into a business as planned, with an initial investment of Rs. 3 lakh, which he “borrowed” from his father. He took distributorship of food products from various manufacturers. He stocked and distributed many products from packaged atta, maida to asafoetida to provision stores from a small portion of a building in Chennai. There was an 8-10 per cent margin. As most of the products were sold on credit, and the shop owners did not pay on time, it often landed him in financial problems. “During such a crisis, my friend, Rajam, who studied with me at BIM, used to bail me out by lending money from her salary.” But, that did not go on for a long time. At one point, the situation worsened and he could not even pay the rent for the portion he had taken on lease. He quit the distribution business. And that is when the idea of having his own brand struck him, and they (Raja and Rajam) finally narrowed down on instant coffee. It was in early 2004, when Sunrise and Bru were the dominant players in the market. When approached, Consolidated Coffee Ltd at Hyderabad readily agreed to manufacture for him. ‘Goodmorning Cafe’ was born. He positioned it as a B2B product and sold it to commercial establishments, “as this segment was not very brand conscious”.

The first month sales were Rs. 8,000 but in three years, the annual turnover went up to Rs. 4 crore. CCL could not meet his demand, as it had to meet its own export orders. In a tight spot again, he decided to set up his own manufacturing facility. Though many banks rejected the project because of his age and lack of collateral, thankfully, State Bank of Hyderabad agreed to extend the loan. “That was the breakthrough for us,” says Raja. In late 2011, when he was 31, he set up his instant coffee manufacturing facility at Andimadam in Ariyalur district of Tamil Nadu, with a 200-tonne-a-month capacity. After that there was no looking back. As there were a lot of enquiries from overseas, he started exporting too. Now the unit is converted into a 100 per cent export-oriented-unit. The unit is now being expanded to manufacture 750 tonnes a month. He extended his coffee export business by foraying into ‘coffee pubs’, under the brand Goodmorning Café. It’s a chain of five outlets, now only in Chennai. In between, in late 2004, as he had “a lot of free time in the evenings”, he started a commodity broking firm, Adventures India.

The peak business time for the Commodity Exchange is towards the evening (to coincide with the New York exchange). “I learnt that commodity market has a higher potential than the stock market, and took membership from MCX,” he explains. He positioned his broking firm as an ‘exclusive commodity broking firm’. Due to lack of awareness, he had a tough time bringing in investors. His perseverance paid. Now Adventures India carries out transactions worth Rs. 600 crore a day. “We are South India’s leading commodity broking firm with more than 200 branches across the country,” says Raja. His logistics business too has an interesting story behind. He invited P.R. Ramasubrahmaneya Rajha, Chairman of the Ramco group, as the chief guest to inaugurate an Adventures India outlet in Rajapalayam. During their conversation, Rajha asked him to start a transport business, with a promise to award Ramco’s contracts in that region. LR Logistics was started with 30 trucks. And, now it runs 54 trucks, exclusively for Ramco. Now his group employs a little over 300 people. “My dream is to expand the business and employ at least 1,000 people by 2015,” says Raja.

Creative Monkey Games and Technology Pvt Ltd Team

CHENNAI: With over a million downloads of their games, Coimbatore-based Creative Monkey Games and Technology Pvt Ltd team, is on a high. The one-year-old company launched their new game, ‘Chennai Bus Parking’ on Thursday. Deepak Aravind P, a 20-something young lad and his wife, Kavitha G, are the directors of this company, who also have a keen interest in gaming.

“We aim at making games that educate, inform and also care for the health of the people who play our games,” said Deepak. The Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham alumnus was an avid gamer since his childhood. While in college he developed a fascination towards scripting stories and directing. “Being a Computer Science and Engineering student I liked programming too. So, I joined all the dots and started making game apps. I come up with a story and share my vision with my team of four and we create the app,” he said and added that he worked in a software company for eight years, before his wife, also a software engineer, asked him to develop his own games. The new app ‘Chennai Bus Parking’ is modelled on the Koyambedu Bus Stand in Chennai. “I am representing Tamil Nadu in my games hence Chennai was my choice. There are many bus parking games available on play store, but I think ours will be different; we have the option of having the instructions in Tamil and each level has a different bus with the bus number and its destination. This way one also gets a little information about the bus numbers in Chennai,” explained Deepak.

City-based Creative Monkey Games and Technologies Pvt Ltd, a gaming app making company, recently launched a new game called ‘Chennai Bus Parking’ modelled on Koyambedu Bus Stand. Talking to CE about preparing the sketch of the game, Deepak said that he and his team gave attention to minute details like the recently launched Metro Rail and writing a couplet from the Thirukkural inside the bus, which is a common sight in all buses in Chennai. “The Metro Rail began functioning when we were in the middle of the project. We had to change the appearance and show a train appearing for a few seconds while you play,” he said. The game has 20 levels and different modes in which you can play the game. The user can navigate either by swiping the screen or use the steering wheel option. The app is available only in Google Play Store as of now. The iOS and Windows models will be out in September. ‘Chennai Auto Traffic Race’, which was among the first few apps Deepak and Kavitha developed, garnered good response from all over the world. “I have always wanted to do something that is native to us. Chennai auto rides are maddening and during one such ride I felt that it would make for a good racing app.

We made the app with local tunes and colloquial words. People loved it. I took this app to some auto drivers to check their reaction. While they enjoyed the game they did not understand the instructions. Hence, we came up with the idea to have a Tamil version in the new game,” he said, and Kavitha added, “We are working on a sequel to that app and that is a huge responsibility.” Apart from these the team has developed games like, ‘Half Wings’, ‘Highway Attack: Moto Edition’, ‘Desert Attack: Moto King’, ‘Twin Racers’ and ‘Math-O-Math’. “Our target is — for every two India-based games, there should be one that is of international level,” he said. The background music for the new app is scored by short film and ad film music director SreRam Anand. The games take about 45-50 days to complete. Others in the team are Ramkumar, game artist and caricaturist, Karthik Naga Bhopathi, 3D artist and animation is done by Bhoopathiraja. Talking about the health aspect, Deepak said, “Parents usually worry when children are always playing on phone. We are looking at developing an app where you play along with the phone. They will be games that emphasise on physical activity. For example, you might have to jump or skip in order to play the game,” he said. While Deepak’s dream project is to create a game on seven births, currently he is working on the ‘Teasing series’ that is similar to Talking Tom. “We would also like to make games based on movies and movie characters, if approached. While many such games have been introduced, none of them have become hits,” he said.