July 2019 – The KGP Chronicle

Way to Zero Waste

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While passing through the newly developed, urban elite settlements, the dumpsites waiting treatment are becoming increasingly common. Municipal Solid Waste (MSW) in India continues to remain a neglected area with inefficient source segregation. Further, the moisture content in waste adds to India’s challenge in solid organic waste management because of our food habits and socio-cultural habits. This is leading to environmental hazards of pollution of air and nearby water bodies, surface and subsurface soil. Added to this, decomposing organic waste generates methane which is the single largest contributor to global greenhouse gas emissions. With the Prime Minister’s Swachh Bharat Abhiyan set for a new lease of life, a crucial avenue which is now being explored is efficient urban waste management.

A team of researchers led by Prof. Brajesh Kumar Dubey from the Department of Civil Engineering at IIT Kharagpur has adapted a process called Hydro Thermal Carbonization (HTC) for Indian conditions which can effectively manage mixed MSW with high moisture content.

Through the process, most of the mixed MSW can be converted into biofuel, soil amendment and absorbents.

The current waste incineration processes adopted from the developed nations are primarily focused on treating drier waste content. This requires high energy input to combust mixed MSW with high moisture content.

“India’s tropical weather, open collection systems and mixed waste make the output yield much less fuel-efficient. Only 20-30% of the organic fraction of municipal solid waste is being recycled to biofuel. Hence there is a need to develop treatment system which can address the challenge indigenously,” opines Prof. Dubey.

Here is the goal which has been scored by the research team. They have developed a technology to convert the organic fraction of MSW into ‘Hydrochar’ by using a batch reactor. The moisture in the waste is used to the advantage of the process which uses water for the reaction. The process has increased the resource recovery yield to 50-65% of urban organic waste.

“The process novelty lies in the use of water for the reaction thus the moisture in the MSW gets used during the recycling process without requiring any removal of moisture from the segregated waste or high energy intake. This is effective for mixed municipal solid waste management in India,” explained Hari Bhakta Sharma.

For example, 1gm yard waste and 4gm water are being used in the laboratory reactor. The waste output is 1gm of biofuel with a calorific value of upto 24.59 MJ/kg, while the water remains available for reuse.

The key to the success of the technology lies in designing a proper industrial-scale HTC reactor with improved heat integration system. The technology can be deployed by municipalities at various locations within a city thus ensuring easy management of logistics of waste.

Another novelty of this technology is the zero waste scale reached through this process.

“Once the yard waste is entered into the process, the outputs generated are all usable including the water which can either be reused in the processor can be converted to biogas or methane through anaerobic digestion,” explained another researcher Sagarika Panigrahi.

The biofuel generated as the recovered output is comparable to lignite coal which could significantly address the fossil fuel depletion issue and helping to curb air pollution issues, pointed out Prof. Dubey.

The product can further be used as an absorbent to manage soil contamination.

The calorific value or energy yield and quantity yield however are inversely correlated and depends on the end-use of the product.

“So if you are looking for biofuel, the temperature at which the reaction is conducted needs to be kept very high which will increase the calorific value of the fuel however decreasing quantity yield, while in the case of the soil contamination absorbent, the low temperature will increase the product quantity yield with low energy yield,” confirms Hari Bhakta Sharma.

“This could significantly help brownfield sites or contaminated industrial sites or landfills,” added Prof. Dubey.

According to the Ministry of New and Renewable Energy (MNRE) estimates, there exists a potential of about 1700 MW of energy from MSW and sewage. Of this, only about 24 MW have been exploited, according to MNRE. Thus, less than 1.5% of the total potential has been achieved. The waste to energy mandate of Govt. of India could also be met through this innovative process.

“As of July 2017, thermal-based Waste-to-Energy plants in India have a capacity to process 5,300 tons of garbage and produce 53.5 MW/day. There is a big market on waste treatment and this technology can serve well for the organic fraction of municipal solid waste,” hoped Prof. Dubey.

IIT Kharagpur Going Live with Young Innovators

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IIT Kharagpur undergraduate students have organized a live interactive session to mentor school students in classes VIII-X to participate in science and technology innovation competitions. This is an initiative under the IIT Kharagpur Young Innovators Program, a science and technology competition empowering students in classes VIII – X to solve real-life challenges through innovations.

Why YIP

At a time when the MHRD is making technological hackathons increasingly popular across colleges and several corporate houses too extending their support to similar hackathons on various domains, IIT Kharagpur envisioned promoting the practice of ideation and innovation for an even greener pasture i.e. schools.

“We wanted to create a platform which would give students the opportunity to tell a story in science classes even before they reach out for IITs or other colleges in STEM and medicine,” explained an organizing body member of the third edition of Young Innovators Program. “With the assistance of ICICI Bank and Indegene Inc., #YIP2019 is bound to stir much curiosity in the student community with keen interest in science discipline,” he added.

YIP Themes

‘Energy and Environment’, ‘Health & Cleanliness’, ‘Disaster Management’, ‘Hardware Modeling’, Financial Inclusion, and ‘Product Designing’. Winning the competition involves coming up with innovative eco-friendly solutions which are also commercially viable. This would give the ideas a chance to hit the mainstream market kick-starting their success.

Mentorship – Going Live

The organizing team will take live questions from this year’s participants as well as school students interested in similar science and technology competitions. The interactive session is scheduled on July 31 at 3.00 PM on the Facebook page of IIT Kharagpur Young Innovators Program. The students can post their queries and get them answered in real-time through Facebook Live. The webinar will address live FAQs related to preparing concept note, themes, model presentation among others.

About YIP

The competition which started in 2017 has received rave reviews including words of appreciation from the Honourable President of India and Ambassador of Israel in India. Last year, the reach was to 2000+ schools in India and abroad. The registrations for YIP2019 were opened for school students in India and abroad earlier this month. The competition which went international last year also received applications from UAE and ASEAN countries within the first week of its launch in addition to schools from various Indian states.

The third edition of the event was launched on July 18. The Round I registration will go on till August 9, 2019. Launch News

Teachers’ Speak on YIP Participation

“The event is about teamwork. We are thankful to IIT Kharagpur and developing scientific attitude among our students,” said Neelam Dwivedi, teacher at Kanger Valley, Raipur which got the top slot last year.

“The event helps reorient perspectives as the teams go back with innovative ideas of other participants, inputs of IIT faculty and the excellent attitude of undergraduate students at IIT Kharagpur,” pointed out Kesava Reddy MC, teacher at Crossword School, Guntur which was among the top 3 schools last year.

Calling Inbound

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IIT Kharagpur is offering a range of scholarships to boost the presence of foreign students in its campus. The Institute has set up various scholarship programs funded by its alumni in addition to scholarships offered by Indian Council for Cultural Relations and MHRD’s Study in India program. With this new emphasis on financial aid, the Institute received close to 220 applications from foreign students this year for various degree programs.

Countries from which students applied

The Institute received applications from SAARC countries including Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Nepal, Sri Lanka, two ASEAN countries, Vietnam, Laos, and two from Latin America – Colombia, Venezuela, a large number of African countries namely Madagascar, Kenya, Nigeria, Zimbabwe, Ethiopia, Rwanda, Angola, Sudan, the Central Asian country of Uzbekistan, the Pacific island of Fiji, Middle Eastern nations including Iran, Syria, Palestine and Saudi Arabia, and also from Russia and South Korea. The acceptance rate of the international students in various masters and doctoral degree programs amounts to about 8% of whom 11 students have joined the Institute for the academic year starting 2019.

Internationalization is a priority for our Institute, especially with the country making it a thrust area in the recently announced budget. Each international applicant goes through an extremely rigorous evaluation process and I am very pleased with the increasing number of excellent foreign students coming into IIT Kharagpur in recent years – Prof. Baidurya Bhattacharya, Dean, International Relations.

Top Choice for Academic Degree Programs

The MTech programs admitting foreign students this semester include Aerospace Engineering, Biotechnology, Chemical Engineering, Computer Science and Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Mechanical Engineering. The doctoral program in the School of Medical Science and Technology and the MBA program in the Vinod Gupta School of Management, each got one international admission in this semester.

The presence of international students in our Institute brings a fresh perspective to our classrooms and labs and enriches our campus life. This global perspective is only going to benefit India in the long-run, making our research output more relevant for a larger set of the public. In several countries, international students have to pay twice or higher the amount of domestic tuition fees for degree programs. At IIT Kharagpur however, the international fees for most graduate degree programs are nominal. In addition to ICCR and SII grants from Govt. of India, we have started offering our own scholarship programs – Prof. Baidurya Bhattacharya.

Financial Aid Programs

Earlier this year the Institute launched the Asoke Dey Sarkar International Program for providing funds to students from SAARC countries. The Institute’s flagship funding program for internationalization, Shri Gopal Rajgarhia International Program, entered its fourth year in 2019 and has made funding international masters and doctoral students its top priority. [Click here for more information on funding]

Non-Degree Programs

For non-degree programs in 2019 until now the Institute has received 50 applications from USA, Canada, UK, Germany, France, Norway, Spain, Japan, Rwanda, Iran. 13 students were accepted through various funding programs.

While we have seen international students enroll for studies at IIT Kharagpur in the past, the new policy of internationalization of the GoI, will boost our efforts and enable us to reach out to a larger number of international aspirants. It may be anticipated that the number of international students on campus will only increase in the coming years – Prof. Anandaroop Bhattacharya, Associate Dean, International Relations.

Last month the Institute also held a joint conclave with other IITs to increase international outreach and facilitate international students in admission, funding and stay.

Visit www.international.iitkgp.ac.in for learning more about the international program opportunities at IIT Kharagpur.

When one great is inspired by another

Can industry and academia work together to promote the overall competitiveness of a sector through exchange of ideas and innovation, through synthesis of organizational and academic practice and discipline? The jury may be out on that one, yet there is one example that not only tilts the scale heavily towards the potential of success of a collaborative engagement such as this, but also serves as a model par excellence on account of the precedence that it has set: The Warwick Manufacturing Group (WMG) founded by illustrious British-Indian engineer, academic, manufacturing expert and leading consultant for industry and governments — late Lord Sushanta Kumar Bhattacharyya.

Now, almost four decades later, inspired by Lord Bhattacharya’s accomplishment in driving innovation through the WMG, one of UK’s leading research centres, his alma mater IIT Kharagpur seeks to create a similar impact in Indian manufacturing through the institution of a Chair Professorship in his name. The ‘Lord Kumar Bhattacharyya Chair Professorship Award’ is envisioned and supported by yet another eminent alumnus and academician, Professor Tapan Bagchi, who has set up an endowment for an amount of ₹75, 00,000/- to cover the expenses of the award.

But what is his vision behind this?

Professor Bagchi rues the huge gaps in Indian manufacturing to this date. “70 years have passed since this country became independent, and yet today, most of its peer nations – large and small – have moved way ahead, whether in income per capita, productivity growth or human development index,” he says. “Throughout these years, the government has to an extent prioritised farm output and primary education, but in sharp contrast the typical Indian hand still lacks the skills needed to add meaningful value to the huge stock of resources—the economic factors of production—at its disposal. Even as we exhort industry to Make in India, our products and services don’t sell even domestically, because of serious deficiencies in quality and cost.”

This is precisely the scenario that he hopes will change through the efforts of the incumbent who will drive state-of-the-art teaching, research development and industrial collaboration at the Department of Mechanical Engineering. “I dream of making the Kumar Bhattacharyya Chair Professorship in Mechanical Engineering at IIT Kharagpur one of this Institute’s most prestigious academic appointments. This Chair should deliver a fraction of what Lord did in his sojourn,” says Dr Bagchi, referring to the establishment of the WMG at the University of Warwick and its role in reinvigorating the British manufacturing industry through knowledge transfer.

The WMG provides research, education and knowledge transfer in engineering, manufacturing and technology directly to manufacturing stalwarts of UK, including the producers of Jaguar. A faculty at the Centre is directly engaged in applied research, the goal being to innovate, patent and commercialize technologies that can impact product design. Each of them is an eminent scholar and possesses significant publication and teaching record as well.

It is expected that the Chair Professor at IIT Kharagpur will also lead a similar mission, leading to aggressive and game-changing strides in design and technology in every engineering field that the Institute may be engaged in. This will enable Indian manufacturers to substitute or displace their existing products, facilitate import substitution and make the quality of Indian products globally export-worthy.

Dr Bagchi notes that UK manufacturers value WMG so much that over thirty years they have continued to send their engineers, designers, technicians and others to WMG. “Even in the US and Germany, such single-handed reinvigoration of manufacturing through research and knowledge transfer is rare,” he says. That realisation is also where the inspiration, the thought of this Chair Professorship germinated. “Could we not someday replicate these in some bit in KGP for Indian manufacturers (what Lord and WMG had done for UK manufacturers)?”

Expectations

It is of course a tall task to live up to a legacy such as this. In Dr Bagchi’s own words, “The incumbent must be ambitious, striving to make India a force to reckon with in manufacturing in select sectors. He must be able to shape India’s manufacturing future by bringing the technological prowess of IIT Kharagpur to real products and manufacturing methods. He should be given to understand that this is an unconventional professorship that counts patents filed and conversions achieved, not papers published.”

The professor also refers to passion for hands-on engineering work, the initiative to reach out to Indian companies in manufacturing, and very importantly, the ability to convince the Indian government to vigorously expand vocational training programmes, allowing even graduate engineers to be trained as welders, robot assemblers and expert construction workers.

“This is selective skill development, a key human resource development strategy followed by China, learnt from the Germans. Some of you might know, interning technicians from China built the thermal 1.1 MW power plant at Bilaspur and bronze-cladded Sardar Patel’s statue. Indians were unavailable for these. Why should it be so?”

Memories of a legend

Professor Bagchi’s association with Lord Bhattacharya, also known as Baron Bhattacharya in his lifetime, goes back a long way. It was while he was planning a five-year B Tech/M Tech programme at IIT Kharagpur in 2012, focused on new product development, that he visited Coventry to see for himself how the WMG worked.

“Lord Bhattacharyya wholeheartedly supported this and hosted my visit, introducing me to WMG researchers, product designers, factory personnel and technology managers and spending quality time with me himself,” recalls Professor Bagchi. Much of what he learnt during that visit was built into the five-year UG/PG QEDM programme eventually launched at Kharagpur.

But it is not just his brilliance or his immense impact on British industry and economy that has left a mark. “Not only did he introduce me to WMG and participate in technical or constructive discussions, he and Mrs Bhattacharya, along with Dr Sujit Banerjee and family, also interacted with me personally and ensured that my stay was comfortable and I was well cared for. To this day, I remain deeply grateful for that and remember them fondly.”

Digital CHAVI for Cancer Cure

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IIT Kharagpur and Tata Medical Center have set up an open architecture image biobank to aid cancer research in the country. Named CompreHensive Digital ArchiVe of Cancer Imaging (CHAVI) it will address the emerging field of imaging-related research and will be India’s first step towards harnessing artificial intelligence and deep learning methods to answer medical questions of importance in the field of image banking.

IIT Kharagpur and Tata Medical Center have been jointly working on several novel educational and research programmes including Masters and Fellowship courses to enable this trans-disciplinary research that marries technology and medicine. The two institutions have joined hands in initiating a pilot project on developing an image data bank for cancer patients, in particular, the present focus is radio oncology. The project has been undertaken by IIT Kharagpur through the National Digital Library Initiative (NDLI) of MHRD. The overarching aim here is to build up a national bank of annotated images with a flexible query interface and link it with a pipeline of radiomic services for furthering radiomic research in large image datasets.

The CHAVI project is the first of its kind. The objective of the National Digital Library of India is to make accessible material for doing research that normally could not have been done in India. With the CHAVI project, as a beginning, we have chosen cancer imaging database along with Tata Medical Center because of their tremendous expertise. Cancer is one of the most dreaded diseases in our country. If we are able to create a very well defined, annotated database, it will help researchers as well as doctors to be able to do early, more accurate diagnosis and provide better treatment for our people which is a lot more cost effective – Prof. Partha Pratim Chakrabarti, Principal Investigator of NDLI.

As a pilot, radiation oncology related images are being banked within the NDLI CHAVI RO project. It is a prototype system which is under development addressing various such issues. It is also being developed considering multi-institutional participation in building a national image data bank.

Once the pilot project is successful, it can be scaled up to a larger set of medical images. Medical imagery can then be combined with AI to enable reach of treatment to more people as well as provide targeted therapy based on individual symptoms. This should enable doctors like never before, and revolutionize the way doctors interact with patients and systems.

AI for the medical vertical has three pillars. Descriptive analysis that will help education – students anywhere in the country can access the bank to look at the images and learn from there. Predictive Analysis will help doctors diagnose better. And then Prescriptive analysis that will help doctors reduce the scope of treatment based on past use cases.

We need more affordable solutions in India for cancer treatment, majority of our patients are middle class and lower middle class and cannot afford genomic analysis. Image banking combined with predictive/prescriptive AI can enable us to identify signatures as a much more cost effective alternative – Dr Sanjoy Chatterjee, Tata Medical Center.

While Tata Medical Center has created a large repository of medical data and images of cancer patients including outcomes of treatment in many cases, there are various challenges while building this system. The first and foremost is in preserving anonymity of patients as well as maintaining adequate referential integrity, a necessity for carrying out useful research.

To enhance the CHAVI project, the two institutions organized a workshop titled – “Structuring a Collaborative National Image Banking Program” on 26th July 2019 at Tata Medical Center, Kolkata, supported by MHRD through the NDLI project. The workshop which was coordinated by Dr. Sanjoy Chatterjee and Prof. Jayanta Mukhopadhyay from IIT Kharagpur involved presentations and panel discussions with experts in medical and Computer Science / AI domains. Several expert doctors from India, USA and UK and specialists in the area of Computer Science from India also took part in the daylong proceedings.

Who said what in the workshop

The scope of image banking is to enable cancer research and move it forward, to access data that is more diverse and come from different centres, different patients and different ethnic groups to help doctors make more informed decisions and deliver personalized treatments – Dr. Emiliano Spezi, Cardiff University, USA

For research, we need geographic distribution – which means we need to build national archives, be it central or distributed and then connect them globally to be truly able to sample the human population – Dr. Fred Prior, UAMS, USA

If you have an image bank where you can collaborate all your images, and then you look at certain features, you can probably come up with information which goes beyond the human eye. Imaging when combined with pathological information can then improve outcomes for our patients – Dr. Simon Pavamani, CMC Vellore

It is a kind of personalized medicine. Where a set of images of a particular kind is treated in a particular way which helps predict a specific treatment for each individual patients – Dr. Subhas Gupta, AIIMS, New Delhi

Be YOUrself

“So, how many of you are Harry Potter fans?” asked Prof. Sangeeta Das Bhattacharya (Professor, School of Medical Science and Technology). Around 70% of the entire class of about 100 students raised their hands to answer. Pat came the second question, which had everyone racking their brains – “What was it that Prof Albus Dumbledore told Harry Potter which made him take a second look at life?” Now this was a yorker. After quite a few tries, a newbie came up with the correct answer. She said, “Professor Dumbledore told Harry – It is our choices that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities.” The entire classroom broke into a thunderous applause. Prof. Sangeeta was precisely looking for this answer.

The admissions to IIT Kharagpur just got over in less than a week and it was time for the induction sessions – a unique program designed for all students to break their respective barriers and come together to learn lessons which were not confined to the four walls of the classrooms. These are what we call life skills.

This segment of Life Skills, conducted by Prof. Sangeeta Das Bhattacharya and Prof. Sayak Roychowdhury Professor at Industrial and Systems Engineering, was centered around ‘knowing and being yourself’. While Prof. Sangeeta explained how to retain one’s own identity while doing any job, she specifically made it a point to explain to students, how ‘Your job is to figure out how to be you’. The students were in rapt attention throughout the entire session. She concluded by pointing out that each individual is different, and it is this difference that makes each one of us unique. She signed off with one line on the greenboard – ‘My Life is My Message’

The second segment by Prof Sayak Roychowdhury started with a slice of mythology. Sthitapragya, he quoted from The Bhagvad Gita, was something he believed, he preached and he practiced. The Sanskrit word means ‘of steady intellect’ had Prof Roychowdhury explaining how staying calm and steady in every situation could lead to correct decision-making ability. Elaborating on the topic, he said, Life comes without a question paper and is never easy. Hence, one must be equipped to tackle it head-on with extreme calmness and composure. Only when one is able to identify one’s disabilities and shortcomings, will one be able to overcome them. He had a set of questionnaire that had behavioral questions which he distributed to all students which they had to answer. He said, collating the answers would make it easy for him to find out the common mindset of the youngsters and thus training those naïve minds would be easier. He concluded the session with just one advice – “Never ever lose your cool; ‘cause that will trigger you to lose focus”

Kgpians Who Steered India’s Moonshot

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It was a week of celebration with India’s moonshot Chandrayaan -2 being launched by Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) from the spaceport at Sriharikota at Andhra Pradesh. And this time too IIT Kharagpur has a reason to give its traditional tempo shout. Three Kgpians were among the noted scientists who played a key role in the successful launch of GSLV MkIII – M1/Chandrayaan -2.

Alumnus Dr V Narayanan, an expert in cryogenic rocket propulsion technology, was responsible for the manufacture of GSLV rocket’s cryogenic and liquid engines. He did his MTech in Cryogenic Engineering in 1990 and PhD in Aerospace Engineering in 2001 from IIT Kharagpur. Dr Narayanan joined ISRO in 1984 and has held various positions during the last 34 years. Currently, he is Outstanding Scientist and Director at the Liquid Propulsion System Centre (LPSC), ISRO, Thiruvananthapuram. LPSC is the lead centre of ISRO and is responsible for the development of liquid propulsion systems for satellite launch vehicles and spacecraft. Dr Narayanan was conferred with the Distinguished Alumnus Award by IIT Kharagpur in 2018.

And then there is K.C. Raghunatha Pillai, a rocket specialist who did MTech in Cryogenic Engineering in 1986 from IIT Kharagpur. On July 15, the initially scheduled Chandrayaan-2 mission was suddenly halted. After loading the cryogenic fuel into the rocket, the team of rocket specialists observed a technical issue. Pillai played a crucial role in averting this disaster. He is the Vehicle Director of Chandrayaan-2. He started his career as a project engineer in INSAT-2A programme at the Space Applications Centre, Ahmedabad.

As per a recent update another IIT Kharagpur alumnus, Shyamal Kumar Kanungo is a senior member of the Control Team of Chandrayaan-2 mission. He was also part of the Mangalyan team. Kanungo did MTech from IIT Kharagpur.

Chandrayaan-2 is being hailed as the most complex and prestigious mission ever undertaken by the ISRO since its inception in 1969. Chandrayaan-2 has set the course to the moon’s south polar region which remains unexplored till date.

Sights and sounds

India Education Diary

Medical imaging is a multi-billion-dollar industry today and is expected to grow at a CAGR of 5.7% by 2025. Both India and China are expected to majorly contribute to this growth. A rapid advancement in medical and diagnostic imaging devices has enhanced the diagnosis and treatment of several diseases, including cardiovascular diseases and cancer.

In addition, medical imaging and image guided therapy are important sources of employment, with a large number of electrical, computer, and biomedical engineers being employed in both the public and private sectors. However, today there are only a handful of academic programs (mostly in medical imaging or medical physics) that focus on training students to enter these fields.

An ongoing short term course at IIT Kharagpur addresses this problem by not only trying to keep students abreast of the latest trends in the imaging sciences but also in helping generate an interest in this particular field. Dr. Soumyajit Mandal, T. and A. Schroeder Assistant Professor from the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science of Case Western Reserve University , is currently taking the week-long course on “Instrumentation and algorithms for biomedical imaging: MRI and Ultrasound”. The course is aligned towards instrumentation and signal processing algorithms (or strategies) while focusing on physics and engineering of the applicable methods.

Dr Mandal said at the inaugural lecture, “The typical course on imaging methods deals either with the physics of the problem (how images are created or what is the physical phenomenon involved) or the clinical aspects. I will talk about the engineering of the system, say what sort of circuits are used, and such like.”

Dr Mandal is a recognized expert in the area of bioinspired electronic circuits and medical imaging. He is an alumnus of IIT Kharagpur, and won the President’s Gold Medal when he graduated in 2002. His doctoral thesis at MIT won him the MTL Doctoral Dissertation Award in 2009. Last year, he was awarded the Young Achiever Alumni Award by his alma mater.

The course is being hosted under the Institute’s SGR International faculty/expert outreach program that funds distinguished researchers or faculty members of highly-ranked international universities to teach and do collaborative research in IIT Kharagpur. Since its launch in 2015, SGRIP (Shri Gopal Rajgarhia International Programme) has facilitated the visits of more than 40 international faculty and led to about 25 collaborative short courses and workshops at IIT Kharagpur.

Prof. Anandaroop Bhattacharya, Associate Dean, International Relations, said, ““The SGRIP program, set up with the generous funding received from our Distinguished Alumnus, Mr. Shri Gopal Rajgarhia, aims at bringing eminent researchers across the world to IIT Kharagpur to share their research work with our students and faculty. The initiative goes a long way in stimulating the learning environment and promoting collaborative research. This particular course work exposes our students to cutting-edge research in one of the emerging fields of science.”

Prof. Sudip Nag of the Department of Electronics and Electrical Communications Engineering, who facilitated the course being taken by Dr Mandal, pointed out, “This course is an awesome platform to learn about basic medical imaging physics, smart circuit design approaches, and futuristic signal processing strategies. This course has been expanded through magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and ultrasound imaging as the prime thematic areas, while simultaneously dealing with the latest and upcoming trends in portable healthcare image acquisition, reconstruction methods, and machine learning integration in healthcare. The course will certainly and immensely benefit students, researchers, and faculties at IIT Kharagpur who are directly or partially engaged in related areas of research.”

The course is being attended mostly by senior students doing their MTech or PhD. Baisakhee Saha, a woman scientist associated with the Institute’s School of Medical Science and Technology, who is attending the course said, “I am interested in micro-CT imagery and keen to know about the advance of cellular imagery. I am looking forward to the course for new directions.”

Getting together

In the course of just one week, first year MBA students of the 2019-21 batch at IIT Kharagpur’s iconic management school, Vinod Gupta School of Management, not only interacted with industry experts, but also picked up cues from business areas – such as the print industry – and made field visits. For example, a visit to the Kharagpur railway workshop, the largest maintenance workshop of the Indian Railways, to understand the production processes.

The thrust of the orientation process was to make students aware of the uniqueness of the management school. As Prof. Prabina Rajib, Dean, VGSoM, put it, “At VGSoM, which is not a stand-alone Business School, students are part of a bigger system. The purpose of the program is to get the students acclimatized to the greater IIT Kharagpur community.”

Not surprisingly, faculty from the different Schools and Centers of IIT Kharagpur were part of the orientation process. Unlike many other management schools, VGSoM, given that it is part of the IIT Kharagpur ecosystem, has the option of giving its students exposure to various emerging fields of study.

Prof. Surojit Mookherjee of VGSoM explained, “The future is very uncertain in terms of technological changes, advent of AI, ubiquitousness of social media, disruptions in technical, social and political ecosystems and it is in this scenario that today’s youth will have to struggle, fight and take this country forward.”

Prof. Prabina Rajib with Mr. Indranil Das (extreme left) and Dean PG, Prof. P.K. Das

VGSoM offers students the unique opportunity to have an integrated approach to technology and various other challenging fields of study under one roof. Students can choose electives in topics such as Artificial Intelligence, which they learn from top experts in the field associated with IIT Kharagpur Centre of Excellence for Artificial Intelligence. Again, since IIT Kharagpur has its own law school –Rajiv Gandhi School of Intellectual Property Law – students of VGSoM have the option of picking IPR as their elective and have the course work taught by IPR experts.

Besides, VGSoM has emerged a top option for students in new electives such as Business Analytics, Internet of Things, Cyber Security and so on. Shubham Paul, a new entrant, put things in perspective when he said, “I was always interested in techno-management and given that VGSoM has made quite a name for its Business Analytics, I opted to be here.”

VGSOM, which has moved to the 6th position in the 2019 QS World University Rankings of Indian Business & Management Studies universities, and was also adjudged the 6th best management institute in India under the 2019 NIRF Rankings, has admitted a total of 114 students this year. Students from SAARC nations have also been admitted in the MBA program this year.

The number of female students – 21 this year – has seen a significant rise from the previous academic year. Most of the students have good exposure to the corporate world, as their average work experience is 20 months. Asked why she had opted for VGSoM, Devanshi Ahuja, an electrical engineering student, said, “I am from the engineering background and VGSoM offered the best environment for engineers. Besides, I had always wanted to come to IIT Kharagpur and had missed coming here for my BTech.

Prof. Rudra Prakash Pradhan of VGSoM said, “The orientation programme seeks to create a collegial environment among students coming from different socio-economic, regional and academic backgrounds. One of the key agenda is to instil a managerial education orientation among students, promote interpersonal interaction and sow the seed of holistic self- development.”

The sessions on Team Building and Academic Integrity were aimed at nurturing a positive attitude among students, and those on business etiquette were meant to orient students to rethink business manners, dress code, verbal and non-verbal cues – all necessary for future managers in the corporate world. Similarly, the sessions on banking essentials, learning business from cases and learning business from newspapers were the key sessions which will provide a platform for students to understand different business situations and help them comprehend and make constructive managerial decisions.

The program kicked off on July 12 with a lecture by Mr. Indranil Das, Head-Middle East, Ericsson, who shared with students his deep insight into what the future holds for them and how they will gain from the technology revolution awaiting us.

We Care4U

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For a nation with as many as 112 million elderly people, geriatric care is fast emerging as a major worry for India. Apart from a range of health problems, the elderly face loneliness, abuse, or plain neglect. Even if willing, the caregiver at times finds it inordinately difficult to reach out to the aged at the right time.

A solution might be close at hand. An interdisciplinary team of 2^nd year B.Tech students of IIT Kharagpur have built two interconnected android smartphone apps under the name ‘CARE4U’ that connects the caregiver to the elderly. One of these apps can be installed on the phone of the elderly, the other on the smartphone of the caregiver.

The neural network-based fall detection algorithm in the app installed on the phone of the elderly can detect whether the elderly has fallen down. If there is a fall, it automatically calls the caregiver and emergency services with the location of the elderly person. Even if there is no internet connection, the fall detection will work.

CARE4U also has a ‘Medicine Reminder’ feature to remind both the elderly as well as the caregiver that it is time for the former to take medicine. To make a list of the medicine, all one has to do is take a photo of the medicine. The image-to-text recognition algorithm of CARE4U automatically detects the name of the medicine and adds it to the list. The user then just needs to set the time at which the medicine has to be consumed.

The android-based CARE4U app recently won the IIT Kharagpur team, Data_X, the first runners-up position at a nationwide hackathon called ‘vesAIthon’19’ sponsered by Capgemini and LeadingIndia.AI. The 24-hour AI coding event, hosted by VESIT (Vivekanand Education Society’s Institute of Technology), proposed to make an impact on the community by building a workable AI solution for the most pressing social challenges faced by senior citizens, the differently-abled and children. The final judging was done by the end users and experts.

As to why the team chose to work on elderly, Aniruddha Chattopadhyay, a 2^nd year student of the Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering said, “We strongly feel that AI should impact and improve everyone’s life. Since not much has been done using AI for old people, we decided to give it a try.” Apart from Aniruddha, the team comprised Aadi Swadipto Mondal and Kanishka Halder of Electronics and Electrical Communication Engineering and Partha Sarathi Roy from the Department of Geology and Geophysics.

CARE4U can also detect emotion. Whenever the elderly opens the app, the phone takes his picture and a mood index is calculated. This detects whether the person is sad or not and automatically updates the caregiver with the timestamp. The caregiver can check what mood the senior citizen has been through in the day and perhaps talk about it.

The app also has a cognitive Intelligent chatbot for the elderly person to engage with. Kanishka Haldar says, “We customized it to recognize the current mood of the person and, accordingly, fine tune its conversations with that of the person. For example, the chatbot can recommend a motivational quote or an old song when the person is sad.”

Aadi Swadipto Mondal of the team says, “The best thing about our app is that except for the chatbot, all other Machine Learning models run on the mobile itself, so no cloud service is needed. Even if there is no internet connection, all other features such as fall detection, emotion detection will work.”

Partha Sarathi Roy adds, “CARE4U can also do a plethora of other day-to-day life activities like make a call, send a text, book a cab and so on.” The app also has a record of medical histories, allergies’ account, an SOS button, real time location tracking and so on.

Aniruddha says, “Another feature of our app is that in case we want to upgrade the tensorflow based Neural Net model, we just have to upload a tensorflow lite model in firebase from our end whenever there is a net connection. The app will then automatically sync with firebase. No hefty updates from Google Play are needed.”

Team Data_X won INR 30,000 prize money. Around 30 teams were shortlisted for the finals on June 28-29 for the hackathon finals in Mumbai.