Entrepreneurship is about transforming ideas to market ready products and solutions. The E-summit virtual event, provided the participants an exposure to the wide array of skills that are essential to take a plunge into entrepreneurship. The live virtual event coordinated from two campuses reached over 800 students from colleges all over India. Experienced professionals and successful entrepreneurs shared their insights experience in talks, workshops and a panel discussion. Seven companies participated in the event. Five competitions tested the abilities of the participants in striking out on their own. Abhijeet Saungikar, Technical Vice President, 3M highlighted the importance of innovation in the market to succeed. Devashish Vaishnav, Founder of CoachEd and ex-President of ECell shared tips on resume building to convey one's strengths and achievements. Mekin Maheshwari, ex-CPO of Flipkart and founder of udhyam.org demonstrated how students can evaluate and make the most of the entrepreneurship opportunities. Workshop on creating a personal brand by Sezel Lalwani and Tharun Jagateri, co-founders of Fire.fly guided the students on introspecting to identify one's best abilities and highlighting them. Kalpana Ramesh, founder of Rainwater Project spoke on sustainability in entrepreneurship, sharing insights about the role social responsibility in business success. The panel discussion on impact of pandemic on startups in India brought forth how innovative thinking and empathy guides an entrepreneur to convert challenges into opportunity. Panelists, Saahil Kamath, Founder of Marsview.ai, Akarsh Shroff, Forbes India Teenpreneur 2020 and Founder, S.P.A.R.K and Suresh Narasimha, Venture Capitalist, shared insights drawn from their personal experiences as entrepreneurs and investors. The insightful interaction was moderated by Sathya Prasad. The participants got a glimpse of the nature of business competition in the games of Brand wars, Air crash, ad making, and shark tank. Midnight virtual event on crisis bidding got the participants bidding for assets on a dynamic site developed by a student team. E-summit aimed at fostering the spirit of entrepreneurship was organised by PES Entrepreneurship Cell in a virtual mode using Discord, Zoom and YouTube platforms on Nov 7-8, 2020.
Hogwarts, the two day Harry Potter theme based technical workshop covered the basics of two of the techniques ideal for rendering graphics in such films. The Image Processing track covered processes from access of webcam to contour identification. The projects taught were based on the Harry Potter theme like Polyjuice, which was about creating a fake background and The Elder Wand about Continuous detection of an object. The Robot Operating System track covered creation of node, ROS topic list, ROS topic echo, RQT graph, assigning publishers and subscribers and simulating bot moves by publishing linear and angular velocities. The workshop was organised by Rotaract Club of PES University, RR Campus on Nov 3 and 5, 2020.
The Thrift n’ Turn workshop conducted by Ms Amrita Ramesh, founder of moksha.blr, and a PES alumnus featured hands-on demos on up-cycling clothes. She outlined the environmental and socio-economic perils due to the fast fashion industry. The workshop recommended tips and tricks to maintain clothes, maximise their use and up-cycle existing clothes into new and fresh pieces. Methods to remove various stains were suggested. The importance and effectiveness of thrifting were also described at length. Up-cycling ideas like tie-dying, painting, cropping, hemming and bleach-dying were explained. This was followed by a hands-on demonstration of some popular styles of embroidery and patchwork. The Change Makers Society organised the Thrift n Turn workshop on Oct 30, 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.
University research has a valuable long-term impact on students. In the research talk held for students recently, Dr. Gowri Srinivasa shared insights about how to approach the field of research. She answered common queries of students looking to dive into the field of research. She touched upon literature survey, trending topics and areas of a researcher’s personal interest. Dr. Gowri shared her experience about the research projects undertaken in association with Narayana Nethralaya. Participants got to know more about Google Scholar and the general structure of a research paper. The talk was organised by members of ACM PES University EC Campus Student Chapter on March 12, 2020.
The participants got an opportunity to work on AWS in the hands on session and witnessed the power of cloud computing and how it helps make our daily life easier. The workshop covered concepts from servers, storage, databases, networking, software, analytics, to intelligence over the Internet. Mr. Ansari of Linsys Innovations conducted the workshop organised by the IEEE Student Branch of the university.
The first edition of the conference on Empowering Sustainability in hospitality, event and tourism brought together academicians, policy makers, students and practitioners to deliberate and discuss contemporary issues and opportunities for future sustainable development. Mr.Rohit Hangal, founder and Director of Sphere Travelmedia Exhibitions delivered the keynote address. Faculty Best paper was won by Dr. D P Sudagar and Students Best Paper was won by Adithya Jayprakash and Akhil Ajjar. Participants got an opportunity to write and present research papers, understand the impact of travel and tourism in the event industry. The conference conducted by Department of Hospitality and Event Management held on March 13, 2020.
Students of hospitality and event management program got an opportunity to know more about managing funds and investment approach for a successful future. Mr. Dipak Shodhan, an alumnus of PES and founder of Achievers Academy shared his insights about achieving financial success through proper investments at the right time. The event organised by Department of Hospitality and Event Management was held on Feb 28, 2020.
“Time and tide wait for none”, as the saying goes, the students of MCA decided to prove it wrong. It was a new activity on campus that invited students to capture the time and freeze it in the memory lanes of the Department of MCA.
As part of the Extended week day activity, the department had organized the Photography contest. A large number of students came up with their DSLR hanging around to participate. Many of them wanted to try with their mobile cameras. A few of them had even got additional lens to fit in to their mobile camera for the best possible shot.
The theme given to the students for the Photography contest was “The Beginning”. From the large number of photos received, a few were shortlisted. The best two photographs were selected for the top two positions. A consolation prize was also declared which had shared the same number of points.
Two day faculty enrichment program got underway to celebrate National Science Day to mark the discoveries of Indian physicist, Sir C V Raman. Dr. M R Doreswamy, Chancellor, suggested the importance of faculty enrichment programs and the need to learn new things, sharing knowledge and understanding the subject. Prof. K J Rao, Emeritus Professor, SSCU, IISc, shared insights about the Raman effect and the way science works. He spoke about the clusters of galaxies and was proud of India for its contribution to the theory of black hole, and the participation of Indians in Large Hadron Collider [LHC] and LIGO. Dr. C L Shylaja, Deputy Director, PU education, addressed the gathering. The event also witnessed the presence and participation of academicians and resource persons from various institutions. Dr. J Suryaprasad, Vice Chancellor, Prof M V Sathyanarayana, Director, HN campus Dr. A V Chandrashekar , Chairperson, Department of Commerce and Management, Dr. C Narayana Reddy, Principal, PES college graced the occasion. The two day faculty enrichment program was organised by the department of physics, PES institution at PES University, in association with the department of Pre University education on 28 February, 2020.
The students got an opportunity to develop a robotic arm based on Arduino microcontroller. The workshop covered all aspect of robot development from the basics to complex movements. Arduino IDE with servos and robotic arm components were used to develop the robot. The workshop was conducted in association with Vimana consortium, a community of dedicated students, industry professionals, amateur makers and innovators, on 5th Feb 2020 on EC campus of PES University.
The students got an opportunity to develop a game in 3D. The workshop focused on game development using Unity 3d platform. The prerequisites for the workshop were familiarity with Unity 3d and Visual Studio Code. The workshop covered all aspects from coding in C# to the exploration of Unity editor and asset stores. The Unity Workshop conducted by Sourabh Sood, Software Engineer at Moonfrog Labs on Feb 5, 2020.
Students got an opportunity to understand the safety and hygiene standards expected by the government for a well functioning industry. The training helped them know more about the best way to process food and raw materials in an industry kitchen. The training for students of hospitality and event management program was held on Feb 7, 2020
Om Malviya and Jignesh Vasoya of TEZOS India Foundation shared their insights about Blockchain. Tezos, a blockchain that can evolve through self-amendment, aims to drive social, political, and economic innovation on a global scale. The participants got hands-on experience on TEZOS tools. The workshop was organised by IEEE team on Feb 9, 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.
Central Library, PES University in association with IEEE organised IEEE Xplore new interface user awareness session. Mr.Subhash Reddy, Librarian introduced the resource person Dr. Dhanu Pattanashetti, IEEE Client Services Manager to the participants comprising students and faculty members. Dr. Dhanu presented the salient features of IEEE Xplore, upgraded version and demonstrated the methods to find relevant information for literature, project, placement support, and innovative ideas from IEEE papers and relevant publications. Dr.Dhanu Pattanashetti emphasised how students can derive benefits from IEEE networking and their association with subject matter experts. The PES University library plans to organise an IEEE technical writing session in the coming weeks. The program held on February 5, 2020 concluded with a quiz and distribution of exciting prizes from IEEE.
The Alcoding Coding challenge, a two-stage coding competition sponsored by Danske IT was inaugurated by the chairperson of department of CSE, Dr Shylaja SS, Prof. Channa Bankapur and Mr Tatha Desigan fo Danske IT. 410 teams with 900+ participants registered for the challenge. After three hours of intense coding the top three teams that stayed ahead and won prize money of 35,000 INR were: first place, Input_he_output of RV College of Engineering; second place, Chaiwaale of National Institute of Technology - Surathkal and third place, Zeta of B.M.S College of Engineering. The event was held on January 2 and 29, 2020.
Developer Student Club in PESU held a workshop on Google’s official program for Machine Learning. DSCs are university based community groups for students interested in Google developer technologies. Participants in the workshop engaged in a hands-on activity session that demonstrated the usage and application of ML, QuickDraw by Google. Ms Usha Rengaraju, subject matter expert, engaged the students in a hands-on session using Kaggle to experiment and play around with ML.
PESU I/O had their SME Alumni meet on Saturday, 1st February, 2020. PESU I/O is a peer-to-peer learning initiative in which Subject Matter Experts (Generally, students from senior years in college) teach courses to the juniors in a diverse spectrum of topics ranging from Course-Curriculars to Extracurriculars.
With over 4000 students, 200+ courses and 170+ SMEs, PESU I/O has conducted 9 slots so far. All the previous SMEs from our slots were addressed by the COO of PES Institutions, Prof. Ajoy Kumar at the prestigious faculty lounge on the 13th floor of Element block.
The event itself was an invaluable opportunity for our Subject Matter Experts to network and interact with each other, laying the foundation for a strong connect between PESU Alumnus in the future. Our "veteran" SMEs used this event as an opportunity to talk about their industrial experience as well as the new ventures they had embarked upon after passing out from college. This provided useful insights as well as inspiration to SMEs currently studying college.
With over 80 attendees from diverse segments of industry as well as students from university, this event was a remarkable success and we hope to have more such alumni meets in the future.
Students got an opportunity to know more about types of licenses, excise rules and regulations, fee structure for various business formats in the alcohol industry and rules related to starting a lounge hotel. Mr. Suresh shared practical insights with the students of hospitality and event management in the program on January 16, 2020.
National Tourism Day is observed on 25 January to highlight the importance of tourism for the economy of the country. Speaking on the occasion, Ms. Meenakshi Gupta believed that tourism in India has amazing potential it is the responsibility of hospitality and event management professionals to build it up to generate revenue. The celebrations at PES University were dedicated towards the 17 Sustainable development goals set by the UN. Vindu 2.0 – a Travelogue was launched in the event. The poster, painting and photography competitions which saw active participation was judged by Mr. Abhishek Dev Kumar an alumnus of 2014 batch. The winners were awarded prizes. The event was held on 24th January 2020.
Members of PES Team Aikya organised an interaction of students of the government school in Bhuvaneswari nagar, Binnypet with Mr Yashwanth, to mentally prepare them for the upcoming the Board exams. Mr. Yashwanth, the guest speaker, started with a small activity for the students telling the importance of concentration, presence of mind and living in the moment instead of worrying about the past and the future. He highlighted the importance of education and motivated them to dream big and work towards realising them. In a very engaging way he answered why, what, when and how of studying and taught simple methods of studying and concentrating more effectively. He also touched upon some vital life virtues and explained how valuable it is to keeping up the trust of the people in our lives. He concluded it with an advice about maintaining calm and facing the Board exams without panic. The students many of whom were nervous about the upcoming examination, found the interaction beneficial useful enjoyable. This was PES Team Aikya’s first event and the volunteers look forward to presenting more such socially useful events. The youth Initiative of The Akshaya Patra Foundation.
The Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship (CIE) at PES University, Bangalore completed 2years.
Coinciding with this, CIE in association with Dept of Management Studies is facilitating an experiential 5-day workshop for students – ‘Building from $0 to $20M Startup’ - by BV Jagadeesh (BVJ), Managing Director for KAAJ Venture and serial-entrepreneur from Silicon Valley.
BV Jagadeesh is a Silicon Valley legend - serial entrepreneur, VC, deep tech guru, philanthropist, educator all rolled into one. To list a few of his ventures: Exodus – first datacenter company to IPO in 1998, Netscaler (President/CEO) acquired by Citrix, Scaled Nutanix to $1.2B and took it public, took Yodlee public and more. He also shares his rich experience and knowledge at several prestigious universities: Wharton, Univ of Michigan, IIT and now at PES University!
This 5-day workshop was inaugurated on Jan 27th by PES University Pro-Chancellor Jawahar. This workshop will take the selected aspiring student entrepreneurs on a journey of converting an idea to a startup valued at $20M+ and cover various aspects of creating and running successful startups.
PES University conducted a 2-day workshop on the approaches to Engineering Research on January 4th & 5th, 2020. The workshop was conducted by Prof. Perumal Nithiarasu, the Director of Research at the College of Engineering, Swansea University, UK.
The workshop contained eight lectures spread across two days and included two tutorial sessions. It was attended by around 50 academicians consisting of PhD students and lecturers from various Engineering disciplines, and also included a few Under-Graduate and PostGraduate students.
The workshop started with a brief introduction by Dean of Research, Dr. Sudarshan T.S.B about the workshop, followed by an inaugural address of Registrar, Dr. V Krishnamurthy. Dr. Krishna V and Prof. K N Seetharamulu OF Dept. of Mechanical Engineering also were present on the occasion.
Day 1
The first day of the workshop focussed on challenges commonly faced by inexperienced research scholars. After an introduction to general terminologies in research and underlining the need for research that ultimately benefits society, Prof. Nithiarasu built a strong case for the importance of underpinning fundamental research, and highlighted the significance of high-risk-high-reward research. This was followed by examples of a few common pitfalls faced by new researchers and how to identify early symptoms of such pitfalls.
The next session discussed visionary vs incremental research, the importance of both, and how incremental research should be designed in order to make progress towards a larger, more ambitious goal i.e. the vision. The last lecture for the day gave several pointers on identifying rewarding research areas and prioritizing them. The first day concluded with a group activity, with each group identifying one example of visionary research, and two examples of incremental research, which were then presented to the audience. A total of five groups presented their ideas, and a good discussion of each idea followed, concluding with some excellent insight provided on each idea by distinguished guest attendee Dr. Ramachandra, Director at ADA (DRDO).
Day 2
The second day of the workshop built upon the foundations laid before, and progressed towards the importance of planning in research, and contained several examples of three and five year research plans, and how to break up the work into appropriate sized chunks. This was followed by a comprehensive discussion of dissemination in research, covering important topics like selecting the correct conference or journal, the relevance of conference papers in today’s world, identifying and avoiding predatory or fraudulent journals and some pointers on writing a good journal paper. The day ended the proceedings by discussing the importance of supervisors in the duration of PhD research, and finding the correct research group for postdocs and building connections with industry and organizations for collaborative research.
There were several mentions of general do’s and don’ts for research scholars who plan to pursue research as a career post conclusion of their doctoral studies.
Both days of the workshop were littered with examples from Prof. Nithiarasu’s past experiences which helped the audience relate better to the topics under consideration. The sessions was largely interactive with each lecture consisting of a Q&A session encouraging the audience to narrate relevant examples from their own research work.
The workshop was unique in that it contained a fine balance of both sides involved in research - student and supervisor, and enriched the audience with a holistic view of research in engineering domains.
Students of hospitality and event management program got an opportunity to know more about the role and functions of sales in hotels, increasing influence of digital marketing and the importance of interpersonal skills to succeed in services sector. Rohan Bagal, Sales Executive, Ibis City Centre, and alumnus of PESU, shared practical insights about the challenge faced by marketers to sell or communicate services to a customer and how the challenges are overcome.