Date: December 6, 2017
Pennsylvania, USA
Next Tech Lab from SRM University, Andhra Pradesh, won big at the Reimagine education awards 2018 organised by Quacquarelli Symonds and Wharton School of Business, University of Pennsylvania. The conference and awards took place at the Philadelphia Marriott Downtown in Pennsylvania, USA and the biggest names in education were in attendance. Quacquarelli Symonds, better known as QSis famous for its annual publication of international university rankings. SRM University (Now SRM Institute of Science and Technology) currently holds a 4 star rating from QS.
Next Tech Lab was awarded the Silver prize in student-led innovation for spearheading student-ledcross-disciplinary research in India. Nominees for the awards included Massachusetts Institute ofTechnology, National University of Singapore, Imperial College London and other renowneduniversities. The final nominees were selected from thousands of entries worldwide and invited totake part in the showcase pitch conducted at the conference.Next Tech Lab was founded by Anshuman Pandey and Aditthya Ramakrishnan who spent asemester at MIT, Cambridge on a scholarship. Intrigued by the anti-disciplinary research culture of the MIT Media Lab, they decided to start a lab at their own university. While Next Tech doesn’t just ape the Media Lab framework like in Richard Feynman’s anecdotes about “Cargo-Cult Science”, itspolicies are built to foster innovation and disruptive thinking. Researchers work on Deep Learning
Artificial Intelligence, Computational Biology, Electrical Systems, Mixed Reality, Blockchains/Decentralisation & Internet of Things. The lab has advisors from MIT, CMU, CambridgeUniversity and silicon-valley start-ups. Members of the lab bag top research and industryinternships, win international Hackathons and present their research at prestigious conferences.
Next Tech Lab has locations in Kattankulathur, Tamil Nadu and Amaravati, Andhra Pradesh. NextTech Lab AP recently finished a project using Augmented Reality to redefine the learning paradigmfor elementary school children. The apps are being deployed in schools to supplement regularclasses.The conference was sponsored by Google, Microsoft, IBM, Amazon among other tech giantsheavily invested in the education industry. The judging panel included executives/CEOs and professors/chancellors from Amazon, IBM, Wharton, QS, MIT, Columbia, and LSE.