All Management News

The Directorate of Entrepreneurship and Innovation is organising its first start-up visit to Fopple Drone Tech Pvt Ltd, a revolutionary agricultural machinery manufacturer in Andhra Pradesh. The programme is scheduled on September 20, 2022, under the leadership of the student community – Industree Owl. The visit will be flagged off by the honourable registrar Dr R Premkumar.

Industrial visit is an integral component of the active learning pedagogy offering students practical exposure in their field of studies. Observing the working culture of an industry from close quarters will help students keep abreast of the latest technologies, corporate strategies, and current trends, being followed in leading companies.

Fopple Drone Technologies, founded by Mr Ambula Gopi Raja, gave rise to the nation’s first agriculture drone. These drones spray fertilizers in a perfect manner as designed by the innovator. They can cover up to fifty acres of land in a single day. With a smaller number of farming labour available in the rural areas, such innovative accessories play a vital role in the sustenance of this dwindling tribe of farmers. In addition, they also save time and spray uniformly unlike humans. The business model of this start-up is unique.

The Directorate of Entrepreneurship and Innovation spares no effort in connecting students with industrial networks. Industrial visits are excellent opportunities to interact with business professionals and experts that may help them in building necessary leadership qualities and management skills.

Industree Owl is one of the student communities operating as part of the Home of Leaders, managed by the Entrepreneurship directorate. The community works with corporates and provides a platform to check the industry readiness of students via events like competitions, conferences, and hackathons. The tentative outcomes of the scheduled industrial visit are as follows.

• Practical exposure to a startup and the challenges – narration from the founder.
• Meeting the founder, his team and learning more about the assembling unit and the research lab.
• Experience the latest drone technology and the various applications in the industry.
• Opportunity to start a Drone Centre of Excellence at SRMAP
• Experience the real customers and the scope of the technology in India in the next 3-5 years
• Meeting the farmers on the field and understanding the true meaning of a “problem statement”.
• Design a solution and inspiration to start a project/ venture in the same domain.

The Department of Computer Science and Engineering in association with the SRM AP Hackathon club is organising a webinar titled Introduction to Hackathon: Best Practices from 9 am to 10 am, followed by a 24-hour internal hackathon C2Hack at 10 am on September 24, 2022.

A hackathon is a social coding event bringing together computer programmers and other technology enthusiasts together to conceive a new software programme or redesign an existing programme to enhance its performance. Hackathons present a constructive platform for developing prototypes for various applications and programming languages or for providing solutions to real-life challenges ranging from educational technology to disaster management.

Hackathons are thus classified into different types based on their objectives and themes. Having a well-defined set of rules is a necessity while organising a hackathon. The webinar intends to introduce students to the fundamentals of hackathon and some of the effective practices one may follow while participating in a hackathon. Students will also be given the opportunity to test their hacking skills in an internal hackathon C2Hack following the session.

Join the webinar and learn how to use your tech genius to find solutions to the greatest of real-life challenges. Every hackathon is a smart route to actualise your ideas into innovations.

SRM University-AP is excitedly looking forward to the arrival of the new batch of the year 2022 on September 21, 2022. The inaugural ceremony of the freshers’ day orientation programme is scheduled on the day at 2.30 pm in the august presence of the university dignitaries; Honourable President Dr P Sathyanarayanan, Vice-Chancellor Prof Manoj K Arora and Pro Vice-Chancellor Prof D Narayana Rao.

An array of distinguished talks and motivational sessions has been arranged during the two-week-long programme to gear up the students as they are all set to embark on a new phase of their academic life at the university. Students will also be acquainted with the unique culture of the research-intensive campus, an overview of their university life, and the infrastructure and facilities available at the university.

There will be introductory sessions on various university departments such as Examination, Student Affairs, Information Technology & Knowledge Management and Corporate Communication, Academic Affairs, NSS, Campus Life, Centre for Skill Development, Student Counselling, and so on to help students understand how each department works. Deans and faculty from the departments will also speak to students to provide an overview of the department, its scope, and opportunities.

Recreational sessions in collaboration with Heartfulness Institute have also been scheduled as part of the orientation programme.Leading heartfulness practioners; Mr Ramesh Krishnan, Mr V V S Prasad and Mr Sathish Desai will address the students on the significance of peace and mental health in academic life

During the interactive sessions the following speakers will address the students on various topics of interest:

• Mr Kundana Kumar Lal, President VITTI, Research Foundation
• Dr Jaya Prakash Narayan, IAS, Retd.
• Ms KGV Saritha IPS
• Shri V V Lakshminarayana, IPS, Retd
• Mr Prabhu Bala Srinivasan, Vice President – Flipkart
• Prof P K Singh, Director – IIM Tiruchirappalli

Programme Schedule: Schedule for Freshmen Orientation Programme-2022

Link to Join: https://bit.ly/orientation-programme-2022

The concept of vector spaces and linear maps between vector spaces are used in all branches of mathematics. The Department of Mathematics is organising the sixth distinguished lecture Vector Bundles in affiliation with the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research, Tirupati, India. Renowned Indian Mathematician Prof D S Nagaraj is the keynote speaker of the lecture.

Date: September 21, 2022

Time: 3.30 PM

Venue: Tiered classroom, Level 5

The talk will explain the concept of vector bundles and mapping between vector bundles, a natural generalisation of vector spaces, and linear mapping between vector spaces. The concept of vector bundles and mapping between them is helpful in several advanced branches of mathematics.

About the speaker

Prof D S Nagaraj did his PhD from the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR), Mumbai. He was a professor at the Institute of Mathematical Science (IMSc), Chennai, one of the premier research institutes in India. After his retirement in 2018 from IMSc, he joined as a professor at IISER, Tirupati, and currently is the head of the Mathematics Department there. A conference on the occasion of his sixtieth birthday was held at IMSc in 2018 to celebrate his works. His areas of interest include Algebraic Geometry, Commutative Algebra, and Number Theory. His profound scholarship on the subject influenced many young scholars who later became well-established mathematicians. He is exceptionally generous and approachable to young students who would try to learn algebraic geometry for the first time. He has significantly impacted a generation of mathematicians as a researcher and a great teacher. He was elected as a fellow of the Indian academy of sciences in 2010 and 2017.

Join the lecture through the zoom link!

The Department of Student Affairs brings to you another segment of The Newsmakers session with Ms Pragya Gupta. Ms Pragya was one among the two students from the Department of Computer Science and Engineering who secured the coveted Mitacs Global Link Research Internship. She will deliberate on the topic “Guidelines for the application process of Mitacs”

Date: September 18, 2022

Time: 06.00 pm to 07.00 pm

Mitacs Globalink Research Internship is a highly competitive programme that pairs top-ranked international students having specific research expertise from 15 countries worldwide with faculty at top Canadian academic institutions. This is a twelve (12) week research project of mutual interest between May and October 2022.

As a fully funded programme, Mitacs and AICTE will administer the grant. Students can choose from about 14k+ projects in disciplines like Engineering, Life Sciences, Mathematics, Natural Sciences, Social Sciences, and the Humanities.

Ms Pragya got hold of the opportunity to spend three months at Athabasca University – Edmonton, Canada, as a research intern to work on the project titled “Blockchains for Data Storage and Mining in Learning Analytics”.

Join the webinar with Ms Pragya Gupta to know everything about the Mitacs Globalink Research Internship.

The Department of Environmental Science is glad to announce that Assistant Professor Dr Pankaj Pathak and her PhD Scholar Mr Gopa Nandikesh have published an article titled “Occurrence, environmental risks and biological remediation mechanisms of Triclosan in wastewaters: Challenges and perspectives” in the Journal of Water Process Engineering having an Impact Factor 7.34. The paper was published in collaboration with Dr Lakhveer Singh, Sardar Patel University, Himachal Pradesh.

The paper makes a comprehensive understanding of the disadvantages and consequences associated with the excessive use of Triclosan (TCS), an anti-microbial agent widely used in pharmaceutical and personal care products (PPCPs). The article also suggests various ways to achieve the bioremediation of Triclosan using microbial degraders and the different challenges associated with such practices.

The extensive use of TCS in PPCPs has increased over the past few decades, and its sizeable production and consumption are causing adverse effects on the environment and humans. TCS has been made into the list of emerging micropollutants (EMPs) due to its omnipresence in water resources and even in biological samples such as urine and breast milk. Therefore, it is imperative not only to understand the current status of TCS pollution but their occurrence, exposure routes, and environmental risks to identify remediation technologies for mitigating TCS.

Their research targets to provide cumulative data on the abundance of emerging TCS in water resources and its associated health burdens simultaneously. It is identified that TCS remediation can be achieved through advanced physical and chemical methods such as enzyme oxidation and ozonation. However, there are drawbacks such as high energy consumption and the formation of toxic by-products.

The article endeavours to provide an in-depth understanding of the biological remediation of TCS by microbial degraders as well as its superiority over other remediation techniques. Insights into the various microbial communities such as bacteria, algae, and fungi and their unique bioremediation mechanisms are comprehensively summarised. Moreover, challenges associated with existing bioremediation methods and future perspectives are also discussed in the present work.

To be a leader, you must act like one and be among leaders, as that is what is demanded by the competitive and dynamic world. The Home of Leaders is a platform designed by students for students to explore beyond the boundaries of the university. It reaches out to corporate and everyday life outside the curriculum.

A fun and knowledge session on Turning fear into power was conducted by Explorer Hive of the Department of Entrepreneurship and Innovation on September 15, 2022, to channel the energy of students into indispensable power. The session was based on the idea to confront anxiety and figuring out the route to a confident self. The session covered topics like the 333 rule, cognitive behavioral therapy, exposure therapy, art therapy, and many more.

Energy flows wherever one’s focus goes. Thus, the concept of the programme was to retain the spotlight on focus-oriented energy utilisation. On a scale of 0 to 10, 0 represents total calmness and 10 represents an utterly disturbed mind. The session featured techniques that can bring anxiety levels from 8 to 3 or even less within a span of 5 to 10 minutes.

The Department of Computer Science and Engineering is glad to announce that Assistant Professor Dr Saleti Sumalatha and her students got two of their patent applications published in a row. The patent titled “System and method for mining of constraint based high utility time interval sequential patterns” (Application number: 202241044001) was published in collaboration with the BTech students; K Rasagna, N Naga Sahithya, K Hemalatha, B Sai Charan, and Upendra Karthik.

The main intention of the proposed system is to discover the sequences that include the time period between the purchases of each item. For example, if we consider a shop which sells some groceries like Grains, Milk, Yogurt, Bread and Eggs as the set of items in the database. Now, the main aim is to find the time period between the purchases of particular items that are being sold. From this, the shop owner can easily maintain the stock of completed items according to the time period.

For example, an output sequential pattern including time intervals of the form indicates that a customer who purchased item x also bought item y after three months and visited the store again after five months to buy item z. It considers the same utility threshold for each of the items in the database, which shows that each item is assumed to have the same unit profit. This is not convincing as each item is different in real-time applications and should not be treated equally. For example, the sales of” Gold bangles” will produce more profit than the sales of” Cotton Jeans”. In view of this, the research proposes UIPrefixSpan-MMU.

The other patent titled “A system and a method for automatic essay grading” (Application number: 202241043045) was published in collaboration with M Purnima, G Haveela, K U Meghana, and S Deepthi Reddy. Essay grading systems are being adopted by different organisations to reduce the hectic workload from a teacher’s point of view. They made a model which is trained with datasets containing different essay topics and numerous essays with scores varying in a wide range.

Essay grading systems will not only save the time for evaluation but also give accurate results. The output of the system will be quick such that it could evaluate many essays and get trained. This system benefits both the student and the teacher as well. Their model predicts the scores of the essay by comparing them with the features extracted from the trained data. This model can be used to reduce the effort of teachers to grade many essays in a limited time. The work of grading will be fastened and accurate.

The Department of Electronics and Communication Engineering is hosting a seminar on September 16, 2022, at 4.00 pm as part of the Guest Lecture Series. Dr Anurag Singh, Associate Professor and Dean of Research and Consultancy, NIT Delhi, will deliver a talk on the topic “Federated Learning”.

Abstract of the talk

The most crucial resource for any business, individual, or person in the world is data. Everyone, whether an individual or an institution, wants to prevent a data breach. High-quality data must be subjected to machine learning algorithms. The model is trained using traditional machine learning techniques, which save data to one server. There is a chance that this method will expose personal information. A machine learning technique called federated learning (FL) enables machine learning models to train on various datasets located on various sites without sharing data. Without putting training data in a centralised location, it enables the development of a common global model. Additionally, it permits personal information to stay in local places, lowering the risk.

A new area of machine learning called federated learning already offers greater advantages than conventional machine learning techniques.

Data Security: Training data is kept locally on the devices, negating the need for a data pool.

Data variety: Heterogeneous data since it incorporates information from various users.

Real-time continuous learning: Client data is used to enhance models continuously.

Federated Learning is applied in the field of IoT, Healthcare, smartphones, Advertising, Autonomous Vehicles etc.

Speaker’s Profile

Dr Anurag Singh is currently working as the Associate Professor and Dean of Research and Consultancy at NIT Delhi. He received his PhD from the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur. His research areas are Network Theory, Dynamics on/of Networks, Opinion Dynamics, Epidemic Modeling, Intelligent transportation system etc. Dr Anurag Singh has teaching experience at both undergraduate and graduate levels. He has taught courses ranging from the introductory level to specialized courses in Computer Science and Engineering, and Mathematics. Currently, he is mentoring students at graduate and undergraduate levels at the National Institute of Technology Delhi, India. In addition, he has also been supervising PhD students. He has around 70 publications featured across various leading journals and three DST-funded projects to his credit.

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