Prof. Amit Patra is appointed the new Director of IIT BHU (Varanasi) by Ministry of Education

If your  actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more and become more, you are a leader. A successful leadership is about making others better as a result of your presence and making sure that the impact lasts in your absence by unlocking people’s potential to become better. A greatest leader is not necessarily the one who does the great things, he is the one that gets the people to do the great things.  Today, IIT Kharagpur celebrates one such leader that the institute is proud of. Prof. Amit Patra, Deputy Director of IIT Kharagpur has recently been appointed as the Director, IIT BHU (Varanasi) by the Ministry of Education. An Electrical Engineer with an academic career spanning over 35 years, his soulful voice echoes at every joyous and momentous occasions in the institute as an ardent music lover.

Prof. Amit Patra  received his B.Tech, M. Tech. and PhD degrees from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur in 1984, 1986 and 1990 respectively. During 1992-93 and in 2000, he visited the Ruhr-University, Bochum, Germany as a Post-Doctoral Fellow of the Alexander Von Humboldt Foundation. He joined the Department of Electrical Engineering, IIT Kharagpur in 1987 as a faculty member. During 2018-19 he visited the University of Maryland, Baltimore County as a Senior Visiting Research Scientist and has been serving as an Honorary Adjunct Professor. He also served many administrative positions as the Dean of Alumni Affairs and International Relations between 2007 and 2013 and was the Professor-In-Charge, Advanced VLSI Design Lab at IIT Kharagpur during 2004-07.

His current research interests include power management circuits, mixed-signal VLSI design, battery management systems, diagnostics and prognostics in industrial and biomedical systems. As the Professor-In-Charge of the Advanced VLSI Design Laboratory he was instrumental in expanding the chip design activity of the laboratory and also setting up an advanced test facility. During his tenure, the laboratory received a funding of about USD 1 Million from major multinational corporations like National Semiconductor, Intel, Synopsys etc. He took a major initiative to create a consortium of leading VLSI companies to support the chip design and CAD activity of the laboratory. More than a dozen companies including National Semiconductor, Texas Instruments, Agilent Technologies, Sun Microsystems, Cadence Design Systems, Synopsys Inc., Infineon Technologies, etc. joined this consortium. He has filed about a dozen patents and has a granted patent in his name and has carried out more than 45 sponsored projects mostly in the areas of VLSI and power management circuits and control systems. He has collaborated with National Semiconductor Corporation, Infineon Technologies, Freescale Semiconductor, Maxim Corporation, NXP Semiconductor and a few start-up companies in the Power Management area. In the area of control systems he has worked with ISRO, DRDO, ADE, ADA, General Motors and Tata Motors.

Prof. Patra received the Young Engineer Award of the Indian National Academy of Engineering in 1996 and the Young Teachers Career Award from the All India Council for Technical Education in 1995 along with the Samsung Innovation Award. A Young Associate of the Indian Academy of Sciences during 1992-97, he is a member of IEEE (USA), Institution of Engineers (India) and a life member of the Systems Society of India. Prof. Patra has recently been listed as one the top contributors of engineering publications in the country by a DST-conducted survey spanning the period 2002-2014.


B
y: Poulami Mondal, Digital & Creative Media Executive (Creative Writer)
Email: poulami.mondal@iitkgp.ac.in, media@iitkgp.ac.in, Ph. No.: +91-3222-282007

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Robotics and Artificial Intelligence for the School Children in Regional Language

Following the mandate of National Education Policy 2020 (NEP 2020), Prof. Dilip Kumar Pratihar, Institute Chair Professor, Mechanical Engineering Department, IIT Kharagpur, has developed one new course on “Robotics and Artificial Intelligence” of 11 hours duration in Regional Language (Bengali) for the School Children starting from Class-9 to Class-12, with the initiative of Ramakrishna Mission Vivekananda Educational and Research Institute (RKMVERI), Belur Math.

Recently awarded the Fellowship of the Indian National Academy of Engineering (FNAE) and presented the Fellowship Certificate in the Induction Ceremony held as a part of the Annual General Meeting of Fellows on 11th December 2023 at SOA University, Bhubaneswar, Dr. Pratihar developed this online course on Robotics & Artificial Intelligence for School Children in Regional Language i.e. Bengali  with the initiative of  Vivekdisha , an ICT-based Network of  Ramakrishna Mission Vivekananda Educational and Research Institute (RKMVERI), Belur Math. In future, initiatives will be taken by the RKMVERI, Belur Math, to translate this course to various Regional Languages across the country.

Watch the course live on YouTube:

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLiuTvXtM4PTZ0MnbdgqZ0q3XXKCryibsJ

Prof. D K Pratihaar remarked, “This innovative course has already been started, and the students are enjoying and learning from it. With the recent advancements in technological transformations, we cannot only rely on what was once taught to us in terms of science education. Today the students need to be updated with the emerging technology that changes the way we have addressed the rising challenges of the world. The scope for Artificial Intelligence is vast in this technology driven world and the expertise of knowing its applications will be up for grabs in the recent future.”

VASVIK Award 2022 in Mechanical & Structural Sciences & Technology

Prof. Dilip Kumar Pratihar, has received the prestigious Vividhlaxi Audyogik Samshodhan Vikas Kendra (VASVIK) Award 2022, for his notable contributions in Industrial Research, in the field of Mechanical & Structural Sciences & Technology, during its 50th year of celebration held on 19th January 2024 in Mumbai. His significant contributions in Industrial Research include Root causes of failure analysis of Gas Turbine Unit, Pigtail Analysis, Optimal design of Leaf Spring for the heavy vehicles, Root causes of failure analysis of multi-stage Centrifugal Pump, and others, in which the fundamentals of Solid Mechanics, Fluid Mechanics, Combustion, Principle of Gas Turbine, Gas Dynamics, Heat Transfer, Machine Design, and others have been used. He also carries out fundamental research on Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, and others, extensively.

This Award is generally given to one person in one year from each of the 10 fields. This time, the VASVIK Award was presented by Dr. R. A. Mashelkar; Prof. M.M. Sharma; Dr. Mohan I. Patel, the Founder of this Award; Mr. Nayan Patel, Director, VASVIK, Prof. A. Pandit, and others.

The Video of the Award Ceremony is available in the You-tube Link: https://youtu.be/YWEcdTbCQNQ

 

Prof. Dilip Kumar Pratihar, Department of Mechanical Engineering, IIT Kharagpur 

He has been awarded the “Technologist of the Year,” one of the most prestigious IEEE India Council Award, for his pioneering contributions to the fundamentals and applications of Artificial Intelligence (AI). Prof. Pratihar made significant contributions in design and development of intelligent autonomous systems in various fields of Engineering Science namely robotics, manufacturing science and others. He has proposed adaptive motion planning schemes for intelligent robots using the principle of soft computing, whose performances have been tested on real robots. In relation to automation in manufacturing processes, he has developed expert systems using soft computing to establish their input-output relationships both in forward and reverse directions. He is also the founder of Soft Computing Lab in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, and Centre for Excellence in Robotics.

Inputs by: Prof. D K Pratihar, Department of Mechanical Engineering, IIT Kharagpur
Email: dkpra@mech.iitkgp.ac.in

By: Poulami Mondal, Digital & Creative Media Executive (Creative Writer)
Email: poulami.mondal@iitkgp.ac.in, media@iitkgp.ac.in, Ph. No.: +91-3222-282007

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Bonobo’s several interesting facts have paved the way to the solution of the optimization problem

Prof. Dilip Kumar Pratihar along with his student Mr. Amit Kumar Das from the Department of Mechanical Engineering of IIT Kharagpur has proposed an intelligent and adaptive metaheuristic optimization algorithm, namely “BONOBO OPTIMIZER (BO)” to solve the complex optimization problems, being inspired from the social behavior and reproductive strategies of bonobos.

BO uses a unique and adaptive selection scheme, namely fission-fusion technique for selecting the mating bonobo, which has made the algorithm intelligent, robust and good performer. It is an intelligent and adaptive heuristic with self-adjusting controlling parameters. It is able to maintain a good balance between exploration and exploitation phenomena. In addition, BO is found to be computationally less expensive compared to the other popular metaheuristic techniques available in the literature

“These features of BO attract the researchers to use BO instead of the state-of-the-art algorithms. Further, the researchers from our institute and other institutes in India as well as abroad, have already started using BO, after its computer codes are made public by us for its single-objective and multi-objective optimization versions. BO has been designed in such a manner that it is capable of handling a variety of objective functions efficiently”, said Prof. Dilip Kumar Pratihar, one of the authors of the study.

The natured-inspired algorithm is also applicable to solve a variety of problems related to Engineering Science, General Science as well as Arts. The study has been published by IEEE and Springer. Recently, the optimization tool has been registered for copyright protection.

“Our researchers have examined the performance of proposed BO on a set of twenty optimization problems with varying attributes and the outcome of the experiment clearly proves that BO holds superior performances compared to other commonly used metaheuristics, such as Genetic Algorithms (GA) and Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO), reported in the literature.”, said Prof. Virendra Kumar Tewari, the Director of IIT Kharagpur.

Media Contact: Prof Dilip Kumar Pratihar, Professor, Email: dkpra@mech.iitkgp.ac.in, +91-3222-282992

Contact: Paramita Dey, Junior Assistant

Email: media@iitkgp.ac.in, Ph. No.: +91-3222-282004