Chitkara University in Collaboration with Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), India Organized COMPUTE 2018
New Delhi: COMPUTE 2018, An International Symposium was organized by ACM India from October 12 to 14, 2018, in collaboration with Chitkara University, Punjab.
The three-day conference was inaugurated by Dr. Anil. D. Sahasrabudhe – Chairman, All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE), along with Dr. Ashok Chitkara – Chancellor, Chitkara University and Dr. Madhu Chitkara – Vice Chancellor, Chitkara University. The conference was attended by over 350 delegates comprising of ACM India Council Members, ACM India chapter representatives, and students & faculty of many institutions.
During the conference, Dr. Anil D. Sahasrabudhe, Chairman, All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE), talked about how Engineering Education can be improved in India and the specific measures AICTE is taking in that direction. He appreciated Chitkara University for establishing a well-rounded innovation ecosystem at the University. Keynote addresses were delivered by the President of ACM India Dr. Abhiram Ranade, Professor (CSE), IIT Bombay, and Dr. Pankaj Jalote – Professor (CSE), IIIT Delhi.
COMPUTE 2018 focused on two theme areas. The first part focused on improving the quality of Computer Science Engineering education (including curriculum, pedagogy and assessment) in Indian undergraduate programs. It featured talks by experts from premier institutions on topics like Computer Science Curriculum Design including Curriculum Pedagogy and Assessments. The speakers included Dr. Alison Clear from Eastern Institute of Technology, New Zealand, who talked about Computing Curriculum – CC2020 a global vision on Computing led by ACM; Dr. Manpreet Singh Manna (former Director, AICTE) who talked about SWAYAM Program – a self-learning platform from AICTE; Dr. Madhavan Mukund (CMI, Chennai); Dr. R. Venkatesh (TCS, Research); Mr. N S Kumar (PES University, Bangalore), also shared their views. Hands-on sessions and tutorials to familiarize faculty with emerging educational tools and resources (including 3-D printing and Augmented Reality), were also conducted.
The second part of the conference was directed toward students, research scholars, academicians who wish to present solutions to solve India specific problems, with a poster presentation competition organized on the theme, COMUTING FOR BETTER BHARAT. Around 23 students’ teams from engineering institutions all over the country participated to show how computation can be used to solve India specific problems. The team from UIET, Panjab University, bagged the first prize worth Rs. 25000 for their poster titled, ‘Automatic Triggering of Acoustic Sensing by Human Activity Recognition using Accelerometer’. Federal Institute of Science and Technology, Kerala, won the second prize worth Rs 15,000 for their poster titled, ‘SignDict – Mobile based ISL learning tool’. Third prize worth Rs 10,000 was awarded for poster titled,
‘Classification of Pluripotent Genes using Machine Learning Techniques’ submitted jointly by IIIT Bhubaneswar and NIT Rourkela.
COMPUTE 2018 also featured two tutorials one each for students and faculty. Tutorial on Blockchain Technology was organized by Mr. Amit Vats and Mr. Vivek Rastogi (Infosys, Chandigarh) for the students, and a tutorial on how to teach IoT system design was conducted for faculty by Mr. Amit Kumar Gupta (GT Silicon Pvt. Ltd). A panel discussion session was also organized during on “How programming is evolving as a profession and how it should be taught”.
Speaking at COMPUTE 2018, Dr. Madhu Chitkara, Vice-Chancellor of Chitkara University, said, “We are excited to have Dr. Anil. D. Sahasrabudhe (Chairman – AICTE) at our campus and are thankful for his kind appreciation towards innovation at Chitkara University. Computation can have many positive influences on modern life, but these benefits are unevenly distributed, particularly in our country. It was nice to see the subject being discussed at length between professors, students and IT professionals from the industry, to address the problem areas in our country. The International Symposium, Compute 2018, has set the right tone for a ‘Better Bharat’.”