Breakthrough ideas in diverse domains marked inGenius 2021, the 10th iteration of the annual 24 hour hackathon hosted by the CSE Department of PES University Electronic City Campus. The hackathon was preceded by #getsetprep, a set of five preparatory workshops and Pursuit, an online treasure hunt, where participants had to clear technical and logical reasoning rounds. The winner, Team BlockOps created a decentralized platform for content creation on blockchain which eliminated most downsides that occur in centralized platforms like data privacy and copyright issues. The first runner-up, Team FAD came up with a system to prevent injuries from exercising with wrong postures or gestures in an effort to promote safety and health while exercising at home. The second runner-up, Team Hive developed a system that aimed to ensure driver safety by using sensors connected to an independent module that monitors driver alertness, checks for intoxication and confirms other safety measures such as seatbelts. Amogh K, Suhas, Niyam Momaya and Adithya R were declared the winners. The jury comprised of alumni from PES University Aravind Subramaniam, Ankit Sinha and Simran Makhija. The hackathon was conducted on November 12-13, 2021.

Inauguration and orientation of First Year Classes for B.Tech/B.Arch/B.Pharma programs 2021-22 was held at the PES University campus. Dr. Pradipkumar Thaker, Country Head and Vice President, Marvell Semiconductors inaugurated the program. Dr. Kumar while addressing the students stated that success for achieving in life is different for different people. The students should hear to their inner voice. He said that the world is in a challenging situation, with Covid19 pandemic having affected everybody at a different level. The positive side of the crisis is the transformation of the virtual platform and digital connection. In the coming days, there will be more of artificial intelligence and machine learning that will facilitate everything. Innovation can facilitate the execution of business realities and it is the key to success to entrepreneurship. A relentless mission is important to fulfill the vision. Students and professionals should have the integrity to succeed in their life.

Dr. Pradeep Kumar lauded the city of Bangalore for its salubrious climate and the people which it is attracting from all parts of the country. It is also called the Silicon city as it houses a vast number of industries. He said that among 200 nations in the world, India stands out for its culture. Even during COVID India was able to produce its own vaccine to protect the citizens which is a remarkable achievement.

In his presidential address, Dr. M.R. Doreswamy, Chancellor of PES University spoke on the need for industry professionals joining academics and involving teaching activity in the New education policy should attract talented people to teaching and a closer relationship between industry and academia is the need of the hour. PES built a tradition of recognizing merit. And has so far has given Rs. 35 Crores as scholarship since the inception of the University. remembering that PES stands number one in placements in Karnataka amongst 210 Engineering colleges. 1458 students are placed already from the eligible list of 1550 students with the highest compensation being Rs. 1.5 Crore/annum. Dr. Doreswamy added that the new students should have Sir M. Visvesvaraiah as their role model to achieve success in life. Every student should be an asset, not only to his family but also to the nation. He urged students not only to be job seekers but also job providers or entrepreneurs. PES through its PESU venture labs is funding Close 1.5 Crores for those passionate in becoming entrepreneurs and start their new venture.

PES University Vice-Chancellor Dr. J. Suryaprasad welcomed the dignitaries and audiences. The dignitaries distributed the CNR Rao merit scholarships to the awardees. Dr. K.S. Sridhar, Registrar of PES University rendered the vote of thanks. Prof. D. Jawahar, Pro-Chancellor of PES University, and Prof. Ajoy Kumar, COO of PES University were also present on the Occasion.

When computer science graduate from PES University on Saturday bagged a record offer from a global company there was more to it. Sarang Ravindran (22), an engineering graduate in Computer Science technology was hired by a pioneering global company that is reimagining business operations with digital and cloud technology. To meet the expectations of the fast-growing global businesses is made possible by the ability to solve real world problems with technology, innovation and hard work and PES University endeavours to prepare the students on all these fronts. A visit to the campus could prove it better than anything else. The campus is abuzz with technical events, advanced research infrastructure, enriching interactions with committed teachers, community outreach initiatives, industry academia collaboration and many such activities. The focus on all round development of the students gives them a head-start when they are ready for a professional career. The University is committed to providing education for the real world that inspires students to realize their potential.

Also read Deccan Herald article: https://bit.ly/3kcvi7y

Abhigna Shastry led the team that won the second place in the ASEAN-India Hackathon. The team built a product that facilitates maritime security by providing an early detection and alert on piracy attempts in oceans. The six member team consisted of participants from Indian, Singapore, Vietnam and Philippines. The contest, an initiative of the government of India is a 36 hours Hackathon in which participating countries collaborate, with each team comprising participants from different countries. The first-ever ASEAN-India Hackathon concluded on February 4 with more than 400 students, mentors, and officials from 10 ASEAN countries and India participating.

The workshop introduced the students to building an application using Node.JS, Angular.JS, Express and MongoDB. The workshop also touched upon security and best practices. The workshop started with the basics of Javascript, followed by programming the front-end and back-end design. It included cloud Database connectivity using MongoDB. The interactive workshop was conducted by Mr. Ravi, Engineering Manager, Solutions Engineer and Mr. Aman and Mr. Eyad, Software Developers at Meltwater and alumni of MCA. The Department of Master of Computer Applications (MCA) organised the day long online workshop for its final year students on Aug 29, 2020.

The competition saw new ways to maintain to-do lists efficiently. The participants competed to design an app for efficient and creative maintenance of to-do lists. In the design phase, participants had to build a UI/UX design for the app and were judged for navigation intuitiveness, content, organisation of design structure and creativity. In the next phase, the participants developed the application. The jury of Raj Dedania, Founder of Design and Code community, product designer and Lavish Motani, Senior Product Designer at Edelweiss Financial Services evaluated implementation of design to code, organization of components, scalability and completeness. The event was registered on Devpost. The final results were announced in the virtual meet and greet with the jury. The participants got the opportunity to know the judges views about their projects’ shortcomings and future possibilities. The overall winner was Team Presta of Tejaswini V Balaji, Gana VI L, Tushar Sethi; the design phase winner winners were Ishita Datta, Nidhi Raniyer, Shloka Lakka and development phase winners were Arnav Dewan, Kulachi Thapar, Namith Telkar. The event was held online over a week, from July 25 to Aug 2, 2020.

Araz’s idea on improving the quality of online classes and assisting teachers won first prize in the software category. The theme for the national level Ideathon was Campus Life Post-Lockdown. The event was conducted by Institute of Engineering and Technology, Lucknow. Araz Sharma, a second year student of CSE is working on the implementation of the idea. The final round was streamed live on YouTube on June 6, 2020.

Department of Computer Science and Engineering emerged as winners in the The Inter-Department Throwball competition was held at the Electronic City Campus on Feb 6-7.

Taran Thrivikraman and Animesh built Doctor's Scribe that supports the doctor by reducing the time they spend on writing patient reports and reading long patient histories. The software application was adjudged as the best student project in the Student Project Showcase at 9th IEEE International conference on cloud Computing in Emerging Markets. The workshop offered an opportunity for undergraduate and graduate students to do more effective and impactful student projects as part of their requirements of an academic degree in areas of applying these technologies in assuaging problems in contemporary emerging markets. The workshop as a prelude to the conference was held on Feb 29, 2020 at The Oterra, Electronics City, Bangalore.

Department of Computer Science and Engineering won the inter-department Volleyball competition and Department of Science and Humanities emerged as runner up. The contest in which 9 teams participated was held at EC campus from Feb 3-5, 2020.

Khushboo Gupta winner of The Women of Future Award 2019 for her contribution to the society talked to the students about the emerging ideas and trends on how to improve interpersonal skills. She stressed on the preparations students need to do to face interviews. Intuitive concepts such as Johari Window and Elevator Pitch were discussed at length. She emphasised the importance of being able to introduce oneself in an interview with confidence. Extensive information on the various kinds of interviews was shared and a glimpse of how one could approach each kind of interview was discussed. She shed light on how one can represent them better and leave an impression on the interviewer. The inspiring and informative lecture was held at the EC campus on Feb 11, 2020.

Miss Deepika P Karanji, 5th semester Computer Science Engineering student of PES University battled away and won the coveted first prize in the prestigious and premier debate contest conducted by Federal Bank in association with The Times of India and Vijaya Karnataka at Bengaluru. Eight finalists battled on ‘Speak for India (Karnataka Edition) 2019, a state level inter-collegiate in the fiery debate contest held at the Sheraton Grand, Rajajnagar. Deepika P Karanji of PES University was crowned the winner with a trophy. Merit certificate and a Cash Award of Rs. 1.5 lakh. A total of 38,000 students were screened hailing from 1,200colleges across Karnataka. 124 speakers were selected at zonal level, 30 could make to semi-finals and among them only 8 were selected for finals on Thursday,the 12th Dec 2019.  Deepika finally emerged as the winner endorsed byeminent three-member jury that included Govindaraj Hegde of NLSIU, Kavitha Lankesh, noted film director and Ruthuparna Sharma, a youn writer. Deepika spoke impressively on the debate of impact of artificial intelligence. She propounded that the fear of jobs being taken away existed in during the Industrial Revolution as well, so reskilling people is important. On winning, Deepika said that she is lucky to have won this massive debate during her very first attempt and was owes the prize to her parents and to the Chancellor and Vice-Chancellor of PES University who facilitated her participation in the contest. Dr. Doreswamy, the Chancellor of PES University showered praise, appreciation and congratulated Deepika on this memorable feat. He recalled her parents meeting him during Deepika’s admission to National Public School and said that the University is proud of her laudable achievement.

Preetham Upadhya (7th Sem -CSE) and Akhil Siddharth (7th sem - ECE) have won the Rajagiri National Business Quiz, held in Kochi, for the 2nd year in a row, defeating over 2000 teams, in the process. This is one of India's largest business quizzes and features both colleges and corporates competing against each other

The tech intensive interaction featured expert speakers sharing their insights about the emerging technologies and how it shaped their lives. Nikhil Raichur, Community Manager for DSC (Developer Student Clubs) talked about the various programs of the GDG (Google Developers Group). Bharat Chetty, software engineer at NASDAQ, alumnus of PES University, and invitee to the recently held Google I/O highlighted the importance of learning the basics before diving into the world of tech. Nikita Gandhi, Project Coordinator for EngEDU's ML Program at Google talked about AI being a boon or bane and how students should work towards becoming better engineers with the help of developer communities. Pavankumar Manjalagiri software engineer at NASDAQ talked about Google Cloud. Shiv Prakash, data science engineer at AsknBid and Mathang, expert in Machine Learning helped the students with their doubts on Qwiklabs. The Cloud Study Jam conducted by DSC PESU held on July 20, 2019 was attended over 180 participants. Qwiklabs session saw participation of around 150 students with 30+ Quest completions.

The inauguration saw enthusiastic students and parents on the campus. Addressing the students, Mr P.R. Devaraj, Global Head, IT Infra, Cognizant Technology Solutions said that they should be thankful to their parents and teachers for their sacrifice and support for preparing them for their academic future. He urged the students to make their parents proud with their achievements. He emphasised on the importance of values in life and upholding them. He pointed that the world is changing, technology is all pervasive as a part of every change and wanted students to accept the change. Mr Devaraj said that Bangalore is the fourth largest technology hub in the world and wanted students to be proud of their city. In his presidential address, Dr. M.R. Doreswamy, Chancellor, welcomed the aspirant engineers and their parents. Dr. Doreswamy said that the meaningful education can be provided by an institution through the support of management, teachers, students and the parents. He recalled that PES started with 60 students and 12 teachers in 1972 and has grown to become a large educational institution with over 24000 students and 2500 faculty members. Karnataka State Higher Education Council Survey ranked PES as the number one private university in Karnataka. Recently concluded Outlook survey placed PES as the 6th top ranked state university in India. He felt that PES is synonymous with quality education and values and an institution that expects the students to follow the Sir M Visvesvaraya as the role model. He observed that this motivates the students to aim beyond being job seekers and emerge as entrepreneurs. He wanted students to remember and be proud of their Mother, Mother Tongue and Mother Land to understand the essence of life. Prof. D Jawahar, Pro Chancellor, delivered the orientation lecture and outlined SPIRIT a unique process framework put into practice successfully by PES University that enables the students to realise their potential. Dr. K.N. B. Murthy, Vice Chancellor welcomed the guests and audience. Dr. V. Krishnamurthy, Registrar of PES University rendered the vote of thanks. Dr. Suryaprasad, Director, PES Electronic City Campus was present on the occasion. The inauguration of First year B.Tech (CSE), B.Arch and B.Des programs was held at the PES University campus on August 2, 2019.

Dr. Snehanshu Saha wins PEACE Award-Distinguished Researcher of the Year Award, 2019 in Machine Learning & AstroInformatics. World Research Peace Award powered by RULA recognizes distinguished contributions in a subject area of high potential impact by a thorough review of published work, open source contribution and pedagogy among other things. PEACE is a foundation in Far East.The award is based on impactful publications in the field and citations received against those publications. The award contains a plaque, trophy and citation and lifetime free membership of the foundation. Dr. Saha has been contributing vigorously in the development of AstroInformatics, a niche area at the intersection of Machine Learning and Astronomy, developing novel; algorithms and methods to understand complex patterns in large and diverse astronomical databases. He and his collaborators proposed two novel metrics for computing habitability of Extra-solar planets by a fusion of computational modeling and machine learning methods. His work in this area in well cited. He and his team are developing fast computing pipelines for classification of large, heterogeneous data. His contribution to this field in the last five years include setting up AstroInformatics Research Group in PES University, endorsed by IEEE and International Astrostatistics Association.

Bhaarat Chetty, a final year B.Tech. Computer Science student of PES University Ring Road Campus attends Google’s annual developer conference, Google I/O - 2019, held at California, United States from May 7-9, 2019. He returned to India after his three-week long stay in USA. The conference provided him an opportunity to interact with some disruptive change-makers in technology including, but not limited to, the likes of Sundar Pichai (CEO, Google). According to Bhaarat, the reason technology fascinates him is that it has an answer to almost every problem the society faces today and it thrills him to be able to bring a change with his passion for science and technology. He is passionate about making tech more inclusive, especially for those from underrepresented backgrounds, and He wants to use design and technology for empowerment and accessibility. Bhaarat Chetty was the only student from the Developer Student Clubs 2017-19 INDIA to have made it to the annual Google I/O conference, California this May. Thrilled to have shared stage with global leaders and developers, he says the opportunity helped him engage in fruitful discussions on building applications with Google and many open source platforms (TensorFlow, Flutter, APIs, Google Web Toolkit, App Engine). “Travelling all the way to California to witness this landmark moment was nothing short of a life-changing moment for me. I would urge the other young students to realise that hard work can make dreams come true and take you places,” said Bhaarat. " Today, with technology at my fingertips, I keep updating my repertoire, with skills like ML and AI empowered apps, because there is no better way of implementing your idea than by doing it yourself. Learning something new everyday is a major means of my subsistence " The Google staff made sure we had enough opportunities to break ice — an AI Concert, a magic show, performances by a few international bands and a dinner with the Indian community. It helped us get to know each other better. It was nice talking to them about aspects that could enhance our career prospects.” He has been a part of the Machine Learning facilitator group with Google India, and has trained over 1200+ students through Google’s MLCC program. He currently leads the Google Developers Group (GDG) Bangalore chapter , as a part of the GDG program he helps evangelize technology. He is a tech speaker who loves, taking the stage on topics related to Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence. For those aspiring to make it to future Google I/O conferences, he suggests, “Enrolling in many community programmes beyond college is necessary. It will give you a direction. One must focus on academics, but shouldn’t compromise on their true calling.”

Bhaarat Satish Chetty, Lead, Google’s Developer Student Club (DSC) at PES University, is invited to attend Google I/O in Mountain View, San Francisco, USA in May 2019. The conference will provide him an opportunity to interact with global change-makers in technology of the likes of Sundar Pichai. Google I/O will enable Bhaarat to network with the best developers, designers, Google engineers and experts. Bhaarat is happy that, “I will run into researchers, professors, entrepreneurs, founders, and other people I have only read about in tech blogs. We will be mentored by Google Experts and also attend Machine Learning office hours at Googleplex.” Bhaarat is a 8th semester student of CSE.

A book co-authored by Abhishek Narain, Understanding Azure Data Factory, Operationalizing Big Data and Advanced Analytics Solutions, was released recently. Abhishek works as a technical program manager on the Azure Data Governance team at Microsoft. Previously he has worked as a consultant at Microsoft and Infragistics and he has worked on various Azure services and Windows app development projects. He is a public speaker and regularly speaks at various events, including Node Day, Droidcon, Microsoft TechEd, PyCon, the Great India Developer Summit and many others. Before joining Microsoft, he was awarded the Microsoft MVP designation. Abhishek student of BE Information Science at PESIT graduated in 2009.

The Mind Install team from PES University devised the winning hack, Non Intrusive Self Sleep Monitor System using In Ear EEG to take home the first prize. The system keeps track of a person's sleep cycle to avoid problems like sleep apnea, depression and anxiety. It uses ear EEG which is more comfortable and cheaper than conventional EEG devices. An android app was developed to show results through which user can directly share the reports to a doctor with a single click. The team of Prasanna Venkatesan and Pavitra N, 7th semester students of ECE and Sameer Gadicherla and Akash Nagaraj. 7th semester students of CSE won the cash prize of Rs. 35000 at the hackathon conducted by RVCE Hacks on November 2-3, 2018.

A hands-on experience of IoT and sensors brought forth the immense opportunities this domain offers in solving practical problems quickly and cost effectively. The workshop covered IoT related: physical and logical design, enabling technologies and levels, domain specific applications and platform design methodology. Participants also learnt about setting up, booting and using Raspberry Pi and got a quick overview of Python. The two day workshop held on Aug 10-11, was inaugurated by Dr.Mrunalini P, Associate Professor, Dept. of Computer Applications, MSRIT and Dr.Veena.S, Chairperson, Dept. of Computer Applications, PES University was present on the occasion.

The workshop saw the presenters sharing their experience of successfully using the Vedic approach in their own professional and personal lives with excellent outcomes and as a form of service to society, in India and the world over. Dr P.R. Mukund Professor, Dept. of Electrical Engineering, RIT, Rochester, New York and Dr. Ananda Gopalan, CTO, VeldonycLidar, USA participated in the event. Dr. Veena S, Chairperson, Dept. of Computer Applications, PES University was present on the occasion. The three traits of human being were compared to sathva, rajhasa and tamasa to induction, resistance and capacitor. Process of learning was demonstrated by shravana, manana and nidhi dhyasana. The speakers talked about DECATRAIT approaches related to knowledge, passion, attachment and detachment, awareness of the self, absorption, confidence, conviction. The importance of balance, vitality and strength for attaining success, position, fame and for personal growth was highlighted. Over 75 faculty, principals and institutional nominees, over 100 students from various institutions and over 100 working professionals attended the workshop held on July 26, 27 and 28, 2018.