Industrialization is undergoing transformation with digital technologies and emerging market dynamics. The expert talk by Sumithra Ranganathan covered various aspects of the new wave of industrialization, its beginning and implementation in India, impact on GDP and employment opportunities. A case study about the growth due to Industrialization 4.0 and the allied work culture made the session relatable. The participants got a view of how companies undertake feasibility analysis, conduct sales pitch and study the market. Sumithra Ranganathan,Vice President Engineering, ER&D GBL, Capgemini spoke at the session conducted by the Department of management and commerce on February 8, 2022.

The interaction aimed to help students planning to pursue master’s abroad who needed guidance on the requirements, preparation, application process and other strategies. The panel consisted of PES seniors admitted to renowned universities like CMU, Columbia, USC, and NYU. The members of the panel shared their experience and journey about the preparation and application process from start to end. The panel also resolved queries that were filled by the participants in the pre-registration related to exams, profile, purpose, research papers, extracurricular activities, application process, scholarships and expenses. The ACM-W PESU Chapter conducted the virtual webinar Master Your Masters on MS Teams on June 26, 2021.

Photonics is playing an important role in driving innovation in the field of science and technology of generating, controlling, and detecting photons. The webinar mentored by Dr Kaustav Bhowmick was an opportunity for the participants to learn about an approach to put the concept in code, visuals and creating software more than just using photonics based software. The webinar was conducted by IEEE Photonics and Solid State Circuit Society of EC campus on June 27, 2021.

The students got an opportunity to understand the theory behind the use of Arduino, commonly used sensors and how they work. The session on connecting circuits on Tinkercad platform allowed users to make connections using sensors and an Arduino board. Ashutosh Rao who conducted the workshop is a student of ECE program. The workshop was organised by PES Innovation Lab on Google Meet on June 19, 2021.

The webinar provided insights about Machine Learning and Deep Learning and how they are shaping the world we live in. The session covered the fundamentals of Machine Learning and Deep Learning. A variety of data training models including linear and logistic regression were explained. The concepts of supervised, unsupervised and reinforcement learning were introduced with examples. The implementation of ANN, CNN and RNN in various domains was discussed. The session was conducted by Jayanth Shreekumar, an alumnus of PES University, Electronics and Communication engineer who works as data science intern with Perfios Solutions and plans to pursue a Masters degree in electrical and computer engineering at the University of California, Los Angeles this fall. The webinar was organised by IEEE student branch on MSTeams on March 5, 2021.

ACM-W aims at guiding women on developing coding skills to thrive in the tech world. In the orientation programme, the new members were introduced to the club and its benefits, and the organising team gained insights about the activities the club can conduct, participating in growing the club at PES University. The programme held on Nov 4, 2020 was a great opportunity for the members to interact with seniors and ACM-W alumni and receive guidance on higher studies, interviews, internships, and leadership.

The talk focused on developing a relationship dynamic so that students could get to know how to interact, communicate and work with others. The speaker Mr. Ananth Vallabh made the attendees aware of the art of how they show up, build the context for what we co-create together today and moving forward in our relationships. The on-line talk organized by Dhruva Club for students at RR campus was held on Sep 10, 2020.

The COVID 19 pandemic has created a formidable challenge for businesses. The webinar invited industry experts to explore – how corporate entities are tackling the COVID 19 pandemic situation and the sorts of changes that could become an enduring business model for that particular industry. The five sessions in this series of webinars focused on: Insurance and IT logistic, advertising, FMCG and IT Sales, financial services and financial market. The speakers included: Abhishek Mukherjee, Digital Practice Head, Wipro; Rohit Srivastava, Dispatch Manager, Oracle India; Bodh Deb, Vice-President and Nishanth Anantharam, Creative Director of Autumn Grey; Gaurav Pundlik, Branch Head ITC; Santosh Banerjee, Account Executive Sales, Dell; C S Sudheer, Managing Director IndianMoney .com; Shreyas Kumar M, Director, and CFO Carl Zeiss India; A Benil, Head-Market Research Our Business ladder and Karthick S, Co-founder Knowise Learning Academy. The weekly webinar series was organised by the Department of Management Studies every Saturday from July 18, 2020, to August 18, 2020.

The Vaada Vivaada club hosted an online English debate to provide a platform for students to express their opinions and ideas on Work From Home: Boon or Bane and Do we need more feminists in India to ensure human rights? First place was won by Jayalakshmi of Christ University and second place was bagged by Rakesh of PES University, Hanumanth Nagar. The event on Zoom was held on Sep 1, 2020.

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.

Students, chefs and faculty across the country got an opportunity to listen to Atul Kochhar on what it takes to be a Michelin Star chef. He is one of the first two Indian chefs to receive a Michelin star, awarded in London in 2001 whilst at Tamarind. Talking about the future of the industry and the important qualities for success, he observed that consistency is the key to deliver unmatched value in the food business. The webinar was held on Zoom platform on July 28, 2020.

The International Yoga Day was celebrated at PES University in virtual mode. Over 60 yoga enthusiasts participated online on a video platform, some of them were joined by family members. A demo video was shared with the registered participants before the event. 21 Surya-Namaskaras each comprising 12 asanas were followed by 10 minutes of Shavaasana. Mr. Santosh Katti and Ms. Deepthi, Asst. Professors from the Department of MCA, anchored the event. The event hosted by the Department of MCA was held on June 21, International Yoga Day.

Understanding consumer satisfaction, consumer and service recovery and service recovery paradox are key to success in the hospitality industry. Covid-19 pandemic has thrown up new challenges in this area. Prof. Ashish Parthasarathy conducted an online session on understanding guest satisfaction and handling guests' complaints. He addressed the students of School of Hospitality, Tourism & Events, Faculty of Social Sciences Leisure Management, Taylor’s University, Malaysia. The session concluded with a comparison of Covid-19 impact on both the countries. The interaction was part of PES University’s international collaboration with Taylor's University, Malaysia. The interaction was hosted on Zoom video platform on June 9, 2020.

Job opportunities in the post pandemic times stand disrupted. Mr. Kallol Saha, alumnus of 2006 batch and Director of Human Resource Radisson Blu Dwarka shared his views on evolution of opportunities and scope of work of support staff in the hospitality industry in areas of housekeeping and maintenance. He underlined the importance of up-skilling to make the most of the opportunities in sales and marketing. The webinar was organised by the department of hospitality and event management on May 27, 2020.

The exponential increase in the distribution and interactivity of multimedia content expects the students of computer applications to update themselves on the developments in networking technologies. The speaker, Mr. Manakamana Mishra made the students of MCA aware of the importance of Networking in academics and how it is helpful in industry. He highlighted the necessity and significance of how the other courses like Data structures, Computer Architecture, Analysis and Design of Algorithms are interlinked. He touched upon the usage of linked list, tree structures, programming skills and networking concepts in real world network applications. The standards of various protocols, he said, across vendors are important to be interoperable. He illustrated a simple problem where a million nodes are connected and the demand was to see that the network never goes down for more than a second. Reducing the down time from 7 seconds to 1 second was a great challenge as he recounted. The Cisco team worked on the underlying data-structure and reduced the downtime. He advised students to practice reading, participate in IETF interactions, comment and suggest ideas at Quagga and present novel ideas for RFC. Answering the queries of students, he spoke about how hands-on knowledge and expertise is more important than mere certifications. He also asked the students to explore more on Machine Reasoning, which is a deterministic approach. He shared insights about Cloud Networking and Cisco Silicon One as requested by the attendees and assured the students of assisting them in their projects and proposals. The session was conducted on CISCO WebEx platform. Mr. Manakamana Mishra, Technical Leader at Cisco, SanJose, USA is an alumnus of PES from the MCA programme. He has been with Cisco for over a decade and presently works on Routing. Manakamana has to his credit 2 patents and 20 patents applications and more than 10 papers with IETF. The department of MCA organised the live streaming of Guest Lecture on May 1, 2020.

Students got hands-on experience in setting an E-Commerce website. The workshop made the students aware of the right skills to become online commerce entrepreneurs in a short duration. The workshop was conducted by Mr. Shivam Bansal, Trainer at Indian Institute of Digital Education is India’s Premier School For Digital Marketing established in 2016. The online workshop organised by the department of hospitality and event management was held on Zoom video communication platform on May 7, 2020.

Students got an opportunity to understand an expert’s perspective on software quality. Mr. V Mani who leads the Metrics team in IBM Quality shared his insights about Software Quality drawing on his deep expertise in process models. He shared insights about software quality definition and assurance, quality metrics, and defect management. The online guest lecture organised by the department of MCA was held on April 9, 2020.

As the global tourism and travel industry is passing through an unprecedented crisis a look at the various dimensions of the Indian context gave a realistic picture of the industry to the students. The veterans of the industry shared their insights about the future of tourism, trends in sales and marketing and the career opportunities for the students. The speakers included Mr. Anurag Gupta-Secretary-SKAL Bengaluru, Chief Architect-Indian International Travel Exhibition, Mr. Raj Andrade- Chief Commercial Officer-Air India, SATS Airport Services, Mr. Saravanan Dhanabalu- Group General Manager-ITC Fortune Hotels, Mr.Niranjan Bhargava-Managing Director-Traveler’s & Choice & Hon.Secretary ofTravel Agents Association of India and Mr. Mithun R Krishnan-Head-Asia Market-Windows DMC, Vietnam and PES alumnus of 2008-2012 batch. The speakers shared their views about the present situation with a focus on safety, security and hygiene in the hospitality industry, data analysis for travel prediction, acceptability prediction of travel and revenue management after the pandemic is overcome. Dr J Surya Prasad was the guest of honour for the webinar. Prof V Jayakumar welcomed the attendees and Dr Vijay Kumar offered the opening remarks. The webinar organised by the department of hospitality and event management was held on April 16, 2020.