Prof. Suresh Ramaswamy Memorial Award Winners 2012-’13

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Background and Vision
Students in BITS Pilani are the cream of India, chosen on merit by a very selective process. Once in BITS, these students express their creativity and innovation by working on projects, both as hobbies and/or as part of the curriculum. However, several students find many hurdles (especially financial constraints) that cause them to never have an opportunity to take their ideas/projects to fruition.

Prof. Ramaswamy always believed that every student, when trusted and given the right encouragement can be successful in any venture of his/her choice. A group of students who were very close to Prof.Ramaswamy realized that the best way to honor him and continue his legacy is to initiate an award that encapsulates his vision, and remove all barriers that impede the progress of student projects in BITS.

Award Summary
A prize of Rs. 40,000 will be awarded every year to a team of students (max. 6 students) in order to encourage and nurture them to work on a student project. The prize will be open to any student in any department of the Goa campus (for now). The recipients of the award will be chosen by a competitive peer-review process in the previous semester to the award. Interested students should apply to the award with a sound proposal of the project. Project ideas may come from student(s) with or without inputs from faculty, other alumni and industry experts. For the first year (2013-14), proposals will be restricted to science and engineering. They will be judged on their innovation and feasibility (more details below). The awardees will choose a faculty mentor who will have oversight of their project. The award money could be spent on anything (equipment, training, software, advertisement, travel etc) that directly helps in the success of their project.

Award Panel 2012-’13
Prof. P. Nandakumar , HOD, Physics Dept, Goa (Chair)
Prof. Raghunath Ratabole, Physics Dept, Goa
Prof. Gaurav Dar, Physics Dept, Goa
Prof. Toby Joseph, Physics Dept, Goa
Prof. Saby John, Faculty In Charge, Alumni Affairs Division, Goa

Winners 2012-’13

Project Name
Furniture-Integrated Workspace Cooling System

Project Brief
The project aims to develop a compact heat exchanger for front-end, furniture integrated desktop cooling system for workstations. The current cooling solutions involve centralized cooling with complex air-ducts, incurring major energy losses. Further, a lot of energy is wasted in cooling miscellaneous office fixtures. A desktop cooling system at a low cost of operation would provide the user with personalized-comfort cooling which centralized systems do not. As is the human psychology, a cooler torso gives a better feeling of comfort. This cooling system can be efficiently used in cyber cafes, laptop stations at airports etc.

Another application for this cooling system is possible in the field of electronic devices. Successful development of this heat exchanger at an even more compact scale can have far reaching impact in the IT sector from the standpoint of solving the ‘Thermal Brick Wall’ problem (which currently limits CPU clocks to ~ 3 GHz), an increasing concern about the electrical power consumption of IT infrastructure.

Team Members
Geetansh Gupta (ID No. 2010A1PS022G)
Aaditya Shah (ID No. 2010A1PS200G)

Geetansh Gupta is a Chemical Engineering student from the Goa campus. He has worked on projects in heat exchangers, LDPE pyrolysis and Stretford Process, using simulation software like COMSOL & ChemCAD. He has done internships with IFFCO Kandla and Rourkela Steel Plant, SAIL. He was an exchange student to Raffles Institution, Singapore. He was a StartingBloc fellow in 2012. He has worked as the Business Development Manager at TopTalent.in, a BITSian startup. At the college level, he was a core-member in Center for Entrepreneurial Leadership (CEL), Goa chapter, and has worked as Social Media & Logistics Co-ordinator for CEL events.With his interest and admiration for entrepreneurship, he aims to work at the intersection of chemical engineering and entrepreneurship.

Aaditya Shah is a student of Chemical Engineering from the Goa campus. He has worked on projects like LDPE pyrolysis, industrial sedimentation tanks, compact heat exchangers, rural water desalination and IS 7310 welding standards. He is interested in aircraft cooling systems and seawater purification. He worked as an intern at Wagon Repair Workshop, Jhansi.He served as the Secretary and Co-ordinator of chemical engineering students association, Alchemista. He is also a member of Kala, the fine arts club. His hobbies are automotive concept sketching, modern architecture and reading.

“We strongly believe that this recognition is the first step towards the success of our project. This award and the funding will help us skip the hurdles to build the first prototype of the proposed design and conduct thorough analysis under various circumstances of our prototype. With this we can incorporate the required modifications to the prototype, thus rendering us closer to our goal of a commercial pitch. ”                                                     – Geetansh & Aaditya

 The entire BITSAA community congratulates you on your achievement and wishes you continued success.

For starting a new scholarship or award, please write to scholarships@bitsaa.org.

KYU Series Panel 3 – University of California – Berkeley, Los Angeles and San Diego

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BITS2MSPhD and Embryo are excited to announce the newest Know Your University (KYU) panel discussion scheduled on 14th April, 2013 at 10:30 AM IST. The KYU series aims to give students a glimpse of life at top graduate schools across the world. The current panel, which will be third in this series, will focus on three universities in the University of California system – Berkeley, Los Angeles, and San Diego. This follows an earlier panel discussion by graduate students from MIT on 16th February, 2013 and another panel by Harvard and Cornell graduate students on 17th February, 2013.

In our panel, we have:

SATISH POLISETTI (MS, UC Berkeley)
Satish Polisetti currently runs a company that builds technology to enable native advertising for the entire web/mobile world, funded by Sequoia Capital and other prominent angel investors in the Silicon Valley. He graduated with a dual degree in Mechanical & Electrical Engineering (A4A3) from the Pilani campus in 2007. Satish’s focus at UC Berkeley was entrepreneurship & product management. He was selected as Mayfield Fund (top VC firm) fellow in 2010. He won Oxford Youth Business Development Competition, UC Berkeley Startup Competition and finalist at Global Social Venture Competition. He served as Vice President to organize the first BITSAA Global Meet in 2011 and was recently recognized with ‘BITSAA 30Under30′ award. Satish interned at Indian Space Research Organization (PS-1), Qualcomm (PS-2) and Cypress USA (PS-2). Satish was selected from Asia-Pacific for Infineon Technologies International Graduate Program and worked in Singapore before joining UC Berkeley to pursue his MS in Information Systems. He won scholarships from Narotam Sekhsaria Foundation, KC Mahindra Education Trust in 2009.

GAELEN PEREIRA (MS, UCLA)
Gaelen graduated with an MS in Electrical Engineering from UCLA in 2012. His focus at UCLA was on Wireless Communication. Prior to this, he completed his Bachelors in Electrical and Electronics Engineering from the Pilani campus in 2010. Gaelen is currently working as a Systems Engineer at Silvus Technologies, a small business focusing on R&D and Product Development in the Wireless industry. He has previously interned with Qualcomm and Bharti Airtel in India.

SIDDHARTHA NATH (Ph.D., UCSD)
Siddhartha is currently pursuing his Ph.D in Computer Science from UC San Diego under supervision of Prof. Andrew B. Kahng. His specialization is in machine learning in CAD, physical reliability and their impacts on computer architecture and Network-on-Chip (NoC) router estimation. His paper on NoC router estimation got nominated for the best paper award in Design Automation Conference-2012. Siddhartha completed his Bachelors in Electrical and Electronics from the Pilani campus in 2003 with a silver medal from his batch. Thereafter, he worked at Intel Technology India Pvt. Ltd. for seven years on low-power graphics architectures and has six patents on his work on Switchable Graphics, Self Refresh Displays and Dual Display Clone. Siddhartha actively pursues Indian classical music (Hindustani vocal). He regularly performs in different cities across the US and has been training six students over the last few years at UCSD.

Celebrations Galore!

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The news about the launch of BITSConnect 2.0 is all over the place. It was an apt moment to get together and celebrate. The first of the celebrations happened at Fremont, California hosted by none other than the chairman of BITSAA Mr. Raju Reddy at his residence. The event, not surprisingly, witnessed BITSian enthusiasm with BITSians like Sarath Kolla flying in from the east coast or Ravi Varanasi making it to the event straight from the airport after a business trip in London, just to mention a few. Also the participants included BITSians from batches spreading over three decades from a variety of professional backgrounds like engineers, entrepreneurs, academicians and venture capitalists bringing together a degree of diversity that BITS campuses are known for. Also present were non-BITSians who enthusiastically contributed to the project like Mr. Kanwal Rekhi and Mr. Srini Madala. With awesome dinner coupled with drinks and to top it off wonderful conversations about a variety of topics made the evening an unforgettable one.


Mr. Raju Reddy thanking the guests. Also seen is Mr. Kanwal Rekhi

Raju Reddy, the host thanked the participants and donors and a special mention was made about the champions of the project – Prem Jain, Sarath Kolla and Shashikant Khandelwal. Each of the champions shared their experience and encouraged others to show the same amount of enthusiasm for future projects. BITS alumnus and NYU professor Nasir Memon, who also delivered the very first lecture for the Embryo project thereby sowing the seeds for what we see today, shared his thoughts. Sarath is already preparing for the next BGM enthusiastically, while Shashikant is coming up with interesting ways to use the BITSConnect 2.0 facility truly testing the limits of its potential. The guests applauded the efforts of these gentlemen and we look forward to a stronger participation from the alumni in getting the best out of this facility. Along with the drinks and the dessert many potential opportunities for collaboration were also chatted about.

The champions of BITSConnect 2.0 – Sarath Kolla and Shashikant Khandelwal

The evening ended as happily as it began with people parting with excitement and hopefully pondering about lots of ideas that we will see pouring out in the days to come. The first milestone has been achieved but the journey is still on and its imperative that each BITSian has a role to play, and together we can achieve greater heights. And also pose for a nice photograph!

Know Your University: Harvard and Cornell

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As part of the opening weekend kickoff of the Know Your University series of talks, BITS2MSPhD and Embryo have invited graduate students from Harvard University and Cornell University to speak about their graduate school experiences. The talk is scheduled at 8 pm IST on 17 February, and will be conducted across the Pilani, Hyderabad and Dubai campuses. Here is an introduction to our speakers.

Prahar Mitra (2006B5A3234P) is currently a Ph.D. student at the Harvard University Physics department. His research interests include Theoretical High Energy Physics, especially String theory. Prahar’s prior research experience also includes a one-year stint for his Masters thesis at Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR), Mumbai, where he worked under Dr Shiraz Minwalla in the Department of Theoretical Physics.

Ajay K Bhat (2006B5A3414P) is a Ph.D. student in the Cornell University Physics department, where he works with Prof Sunil Bhave in the OxideMEMS Lab. Ajay’s current research is the field of interaction between MEMS and cold atoms. Prior to joining Cornell, Ajay spent a year at TIFR, Mumbai working on his Masters thesis under the guidance of Dr Mandar Deshmukh.

Know Your University: A BITS2MSPhD and Embryo Initiative

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BITS2MSPhD and Embryo are proud to announce the launch of our newest initiative – Know Your University, a cross-campus lecture series aimed at giving BITSians a glimpse of graduate school life at top research universities across the world. The series kicks off with a panel discussion by three graduate students at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) on 16 February at 8 PM IST.

The panel will be moderated by Yash Gandhi, Team Leader, BITS2MSPhD. Here is a brief introduction to our panelists for this talk.

Andrea Colaço (2003A3PS007P) is a Ph.D. student at the MIT Media Lab and an affiliate with the Research Laboratory of Electronics at MIT. Her research interests include statistical signal processing and optimization with applications to 3D sensing. Among her achievements at MIT are the award of LG Electronics Fellow (2009), winning the MIT $100k Entrepreneurship Competition’s Pitch Contest (2012), and twice winning Qualcomm Innovation Research Fellowship (2011, 2012).

Ashok Ajoy graduated from BITS Pilani, K K Birla Goa Campus with a dual degree in Physics and EEE. He joined MIT’s Research Lab of Electronics as a Ph.D. student in September 2010, and currently works on exploiting spin defects for quantum computation. His past research experience includes stints at Indian Institute of Science (IISc) and University of Dortmund at Germany.

Subramanian Sundaram (2005A3A4550P) joined MIT as an ABB-MIT Energy Fellow in 2011. He currently works in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science department at MIT, where he builds MEMS oscillators. Earlier, Subra worked on tunable MEMS gratings at EPFL, Switzerland, and on carbon nanotube based bio-sensors at the Max Planck Institute for Solid State Research in Germany. During his free time, Subra enjoys photography, coding, biking, running, sailing and ice skating.