IIIT Hyderabad’s 16TH edition of Annual Flagship Event R&D Showcase 2017 kicked off
Hyderabad: The International Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad (IIIT-H), one of India’s top research institutes, is organizing the 16th edition of its annual flagship event, R&D Showcase 2017 on Feb 18th and 19th in the Gachibowli campus. The event was formally inaugurated on Saturday morning. The primary focus of the event is adopting research by industry and startups. The two-day program is showcase 350 exhibits from from 20 various research centers of the institute.
Speaking about the event, Prof. PJ Narayanan, Director of IIIT Hyderabad said, “Our decade –long work at IIIT-Hyderabad was shown how an academic institute can build large research groups to carry out large cutting edge research to make deep academic impact, and use it to solve real-life industrial and societal problems”.
A special session on Data Journalism held as part of the event, where, Chitti Panthulu, Editor in Chief of Veooz spoke on “Media at the crossroads” New Realities for a New Course. Founder Gramener, Ganes Kesari spoke about New Age data Visualization tools. Prof. Vasudeva Verma, Dean-R&D at IIIT Hyderabad spoke on Research & Technology trends for data Journalism. He spoke about leveraging natural language processing, information extraction, machine learning and artificial learning etc.
Data Visualization is a transversal discipline which harnesses the immense power of visual communication in order to easily make sense of data informed Ganes Kesari. Applying Data Visualization for journalism, Visual Data Journalism can help a journalist simpify & tell a complex story through engaging info graphics. Data-driven journalism is the future to communicate effectively and in a concise manner, he added.
There are several powerful public tools to aid with the process workflow of: data sourcing – curation – structuring – analysis – visualisation – story telling. And he suggested a useful list to start with.
Some of the tools he suggested were
Sourcing data: Scraperwiki, Public APIs of sites (ex. Twitter, Facebook, Google)
Cleaning data: Open refine, Tabula
Analysis: MS Excel, RVisualisation: D3.js, Google charts
During the R&D Showcase 2017, , prominent research and projects belonging to a wide range of domains such as Visual Information Technologies, Human Language Technologies, Data Engineering, VLSI and Embedded Systems, Computer Architecture, Wireless Communications, Algorithms and Information Security, Robotics, Building Science, Earthquake Engineering, Computational Natural Sciences and Bioinformatics, Education Technologies, Power Systems, IT in Agriculture, e-Governance, etc. will be exhibited.
At IIIT Hyderabad, we have a research-oriented approach towards education and the transformation of industry and society. A large number of our B.Tech students, in addition to our MS and PhD students participate in research; publish papers in truly reputed forums and travel to conferences all over the world. The R&D Showcase is the forum to showcase small and large projects from the institute community. Last year more than 300 projects were showcased and we received an overwhelming response from both the industry and the academic fraternity.”
Curated forums for industry, media and startup investors
This year, in addition to the exhibits, the institute is organizing three additional sessions for the industry, investors and media experts.
‣ Industry round table on Feb 18th will be used as a dais to deliberate on the trajectories of various technological advancements and the role these will play in the future. This session,starting at 5.00pm, will be used to share ideas, challenges, and problem statements with invited industry representatives.
‣ Technology for the new age media is asession planned for media professionals and is scheduled on Feb 19th afternoon from 2.00pm to 5.00pm. The discussion will focus on data visualization, information extraction and other technologies and tools relevant to the media and journalists.
‣ Deep Tech Startup Demo: IIIT Hyderabad had recently selected 5 start-ups for the third batch of its deep tech accelerator (Avishkar) program. These, and the graduated start-ups from the previous batches will demo their product to an audience of investors and mentors on Saturday Feb 18th at 11.00am.
Talks on Current State of the Research
Two session of talks on ‘research trends in artificial intelligence and machine learning’ and ‘contemporary research in computational natural sciences’ will be held on Sunday and are open to everyone.
“To make a real impact on the industry and society, it’s important to work with cuttind edge technology and engage in futuristic research which will solve relevant problems. One of the key metrics for success of a research activity is its adoption by the industry’ said Prof. Vasudeva Verma, Dean-R&D at IIIT Hyderaad.