THE INNOVATOR’S LOGSeptember 2019- January 2020

THE NEWSLETTER OF THE CENTRE FOR INNOVATION, IIT MADRAS

Inside this EditionVisits

Club Sessions

Open House

Achievements

Human Centric Design Workshop

Formula Bharat Workshop

Alumni Reunion

CFI in Shaastra

Envisage

Coming up

The period between September 2019 to January 2020 has been remarkable for CFI with many innovative events and achievements. CFI Clubs and Competition Teams piqued the interests of the freshmen with their amazing introductory sessions and helped them take their first step of fulfilling their dreams of becoming the fully fledged innovators .

The Alumni Reunion Day celebrations took place where proud alumni from different parts of the world gathered together to reminiscence their good old insti days. The The Human Centric Design Session conducted by CFI and Nirmaan stood out as a new initiative.

Our contingent showed an amazing performance, securing an overall fifth place at this year’s 8th Inter IIT Tech Meet, at IIT Roorkee. CFI’s flagship event, Open House 2019 that was held in the month of December was a grand success with a turnover of more than 2000 people. The event was a first of its kind, with CFI being relocated to the New Academic Complex (NAC) and had the most number of working prototypes till date. The event also drew tremendous attention from leading investors and industrialists across the nation and helped us to end the year on a high.

ButterflyThe director of Butterfly kitchen appliances visited the Campus in October. This was to demonstrate the working of their new Automatic food cooking machine. The gathering had participation from about forty and opened up discussions about the aim and future of this product. The director of Butterfly wanted the students to brainstorm and improve upon the design of the machine and help in developing this revolutionary product.

After the introductory visit, 16 students chosen from the

KAIST(Korean Advanced Institute of Science and

Technology), institute collaborated with 16 students

from IIT Madras on the KAIST-IITM Joint Contextual

Research event. The four days spanning workshop

commenced on 4th January. The students, after being

clubbed into 8 groups of four in each team, were

elaborated on the meaning and aspects of contextual

research. Their research was aimed at solving problems

in our institute. After multiple brainstorming sessions

discussions and field visits on the initial days, the teams

were given a chance to present their ideas on the final

day. The event also included refreshing outdoor visits to

places in Chennai where the students socialized better

and were acquainted with different cultures. The event

,headed by professors Satya Narayanan Sheshadri,

Shiva Subramaniam and two other professors from

KAIST institute, ended with cash prize commendations

for three winning teams.

KAIST

VISITS

The sessions started off with the Co-curricular sphere orientation. The introductory sessions of various clubs followed up. Beginning with the introductory session of aero club, coupled up with drone flying session, it beckoned many aero-enthusiasts. On the trail, Horizon, Physics and Astronomy club had its “Quarks to Quasars” filled with fun quizzes was a good start . This was followed up by the iBot club’s introductory session, exhibiting its prodigious projects, such as hexapod & Bluetooth controlled mini robot. Next, the session of Programming club gathered almost 150 freshmen, elucidating competitive programming. The inaugural session of Analytics club grabbed the attention of freshmen, introducing AI and Data science to forums. The Computer vision and intelligence club amazed the code-freaks with its algorithm for creation of panorama and detection of images of animals in its first orientation session. This was followed up by the Astro week, that was fun-filled for Astro Enthusiasts, filled with lectures on dark matter and cosmology, observatory sessions for looking at maneuvers of Saturn, Jupiter and moon and ended with affable discussions on various stars. Next in series, the orientation session of 3D printing club, amazed the crowd by demonstrating their projects and the amazing 3D printer. The combined session of Electronics and ibot club took place, explaining freshmen the topic of microcontrollers, focusing on Arduino and Arduino IDE, followed by Bluetooth and motor drivers. The joint session of Programming club, CVIG and Analytics club, lead the crowd towards Python programming, including some of the useful libraries. Team Envisage’s game development session introduced unity software to the freshmen, developing a block jumping game.

Club Sessions

Next in line, Sahaay had it's hands-on session, filled the forum with various social challenges, intriguing the crowd of freshman to approach it with technology.Horizon had its session entailing the details of the evolution of astronomy, coordinate systems, perturbations and photometric concepts to the freshmen gathered. The year progressed with mind-boggling sessions of various clubs, thus forming a new team with freshmen.

Open House 2019, our flagship event, a display of all the recent work and achievements of our in-house teams and project members was a grand success with a turnover of more than 2000 people. The event was a first of its kind, with CFI being relocated to the New Academic Complex (NAC), had the most number of working prototypes till date and also drew tremendous attention from leading investors and industrialists across the nation. The CFI community had pulled tremendous effort to showcase the event despite the challenges they faced in the relocation. This marks a new phase for the CFI with a newer face, new ideas and bigger projects. We also extend our sincere appreciation to all the professors, institute students, alumni, industry experts, the media and the citizens of Chennai for making the event what it was. The event has given us much needed criticism, motivation and a heightened sense of satisfaction seeing the efforts throughout the year congregate and come to fulfilment. Keep an eye for the next big thing in the world of innovation and stay connected with us.

Open House 2019

Inter IIT Tech MeetThe 8th Inter IIT Tech Meet, at IIT Roorkee, conducted from 20-22 December 2019 recently drew to a close. Our contingent from IIT Madras returned with an impressive tally of three gold medals, two silver and two bronze medals respectively, securing an overall fifth place.

Our highlights from the meet are summarized as below:

Coding Hackathon - Gold

The problem statement was to develop a system which can simplify the road leasing and maintenance operation through crowdsourcing

NeenOpal's Case Study Competition - Gold

Our Team came up with a Go-to-Market-Strategy for launching a brand and it was expected to capture the consumer emotions and understand the entire buying behaviour.

BARC India TV Audience Challenge - Gold

The participants were supposed to arrive at a technology idea by which the audience's psychographic profile can be captured, without infringing into his/her privacy. The solution is expected to change the future of Television Audience Measurement in India

DIC’s Terrace Farming Robot for Hilly Areas - Silver

The team was required to develop a lightweight robot that can do the work of ploughing, seeding, watering, or harvesting considering the various challenges for terrace farming, as well as demonstrate a working prototype.

BOSCH's Route Optimization Algorithm - Silver

Our team developed a route optimization algorithm that caters to the real-time changing demand of customers to determine the route and schedule of buses depending on the constraints.

ACHIEVEMENTS

Payatu's Infosec Information Security Challenge - Bronze

The team solved a set of given tasks based on reverse engineering, web application exploitation,

cryptography and other categories of information security.

Ashoka's Tech for change, Social Entrepreneurship challenge - Bronze

With the vision, “Technology is not an end in itself, it’s a means to an end”, participants were

supposed to develop a product using technology to solve an existing societal problem.

Unfortunately, due to unfair means employed by other IITs, the BITGRIT'S Data Science

competition was not included in the points tally but the participants were recognised and our

team won the silver medal.

This year's Tech Meet was fuelled by a spirit of innovation with the exchange of ideas and

interesting challenges. It was widely acknowledged as a unique platform for technical

collaboration and peer learning between between 23 IITs.

Yet Another HackathonTeam Blackbuck were runners-up in the Yet Another Hackathon conducted this year, and won a cash prize of Rupees 10,000. Yet Another Hackathon is an annual Tech-competition which provides a platform for hundreds of participants across the city to showcase their technical know-how by identifying and addressing a particular social issue.

Team Blackbuck from IIT-M created a ‘Sign Language to Text Translator’, which assists deaf and dumb people in enhanced

CFI has always strived to make innovative projects for social causes, be it aiding environment, or the humans. Adding to the endeavours is the Text to braille converter from team Blink CFI. This project was aimed at providing a portable device that converts normal text into braille language. This would serve blind people to instantaneously read text available around them.With it's innovative

communication. The Translator is an application that can be downloaded on one’s phone. It deciphers and translates sign language gestures. When the camera of the phone is kept facing the speaker, it translates their hand movements into letters. Programs that convert written text to sign language already exist. The present application enables the reverse, thus simplifying communication. The time limit assigned for the teams was 24 hours. Several major companies like Wipro were present at the competition.

Team Blink

design and strategic planning, the project has won, not only the hearts of a lot of professionals but also many tech competitions.Winning first at the Bootcamp event at E-summit-2020 and the second runner-up at the Tech and Innovation Fair at Shaastra2020, the team has star shined with their long time hard work and dedication.

Human Centric Design workshopCFI and Nirmaan conducted the "Human-Centric Design Workshop"under the aegis of Prof. Blair

Kuys, director of the Centre for Design Innovation.Centre for Design Innovation, a lab in

Swinburne University of Technology’s Hawthorn Campus builds upon existing research strengths

to enable human scale, user focused, design led innovation. The event was attended by a

selected group of 30 students, scholars, professors etc. and the event focussed extensively on

case studies and out of the box solutions.

Each of the session was handled by dividing the attendees into groups of three for better coordination. The first session was about industries and their needs for accurate designs of the products. James Tyson himself has designed around 5000 prototypes in his career and talked in length for the need of iterations of successive designs to reach the suitable target.

The talk also focused on how simple designs can be successful due to 'human factor' alone without cutting edge technology involved.The second session involved a hands-on approach to the various transportation issues faced by the students especially inside the campus. An analysis was done to break down the problem and an ideal prototype was designed. Next an interactive approach was done to design a gift suitable for corporate offices, taking into account the intrinsic value of the object as well as a method to pitch the product.The attendees learned quite a lot with how products ought to be designed from the users point of view with a varied array of real life examples.

Formula Bharat Workshop Formula Bharat Academy conducted a workshop at IIT Madras during the month of September.

The event had an attendance of 248 students and turned out to be a grand success.The

workshop was aimed at empowering participants to perform their best at Formula student

events which is an engineering design competition in which students from colleges and

universities all over the country compete with a life-size Formula-style vehicle in areas of

engineering design, overall cost, marketability and dynamic performance.

Alumni ReunionThe Alumni Reunion Day celebrations were held on the 27th of December. Hundreds of alumni joined together to reminiscence their good old insti days. CFI had put up various stalls exhibiting their innovative projects. The competition teams also portrayed their models at the occasion. The alumni were fascinated by the various projects put together by the students. They appreciated the students’ innovations and assured them of their continued support. The community received an amazing opportunity to interact with the alumni and learn from their thoughtful insights.

CFI in ShaastraThe Analytics Club conducted two workshop sessions for Shaastra on the 4th and 5th of January, each for a duration of 3.5 hours. The workshops focussed on Machine learning, and was targeted towards Data Science Enthusiasts who had some prior knowledge of linear algebra, probability, and elementary calculus, and preferably some experience with Python. The first part of the first session was an Introduction to Machine Learning. This was aimed at understanding ML basics, algorithms and project pipelines, and for attaining a thorough understanding of Logistic Regression. It also involved a hands-on task with ML libraries for detecting credit fraud. The second part of the session was about Exploratory Data Analysis. The second session started with Text Analysis, and involved learning how to preprocess text data using Gensim and NLTK libraries, Text to numeric transformation methods for model building, and understanding word embedding architectures. The session ended with a Spam classifier model. Participants were asked to build an end to end model for spam message classification, and implementing Word2Vec embedding methods in Gensim.Around 90 participants turned up for the workshop. A sum of Rs. 750 was charged for each person for both sessions together.

The CVI Club conducted a workshop on Deep Learning for Computer Vision on the 3rd of January. Topics covered included motivating neural networks, Multilayer perceptrons, Motivating CNNs, Tensorflow 2.0, and a hands-on task about tf 2.0. The turnout for the workshop came to 150 participants.

The Electronics club conducted a workshop touching on the history of electronics and computers. RPI was put in focus. The session started with an introduction to RPI, and went on to discuss video transmission using RPI. The session then progressed to GPIO pins, and the basics of IMU and how it could be used with RPI. The workshop was conducted on the 6th of Jan, from 9am to 6pm at RMN 301. There were 4 groups of 15 students. The groups were charged a sum of Rs.6500 each.The workshop conducted by the iBot club was aimed at building a smartphone controlled

4-legged robot - a tetrapod. In the process, participants were expected to learn how to work with

a nodemcu (ESP8266 WiFi Module which can be used for IOT applications), C based coding in

Arduino IDE, and fundamentals of mechanical stability in n-legged robots. The workshop had 13

teams from various colleges across India, and the number of participants ran into 50.

The 3D Printing Club conducted a workshop on various 3D printing techniques and their

importance in Industrial Revolution 4.0. Participants learnt the basis of product design and the

design aspects of 3D printing. They got acquainted with using software like Autodesk Fusion 360,

and performed different types of analyses on the designed models to test performance of the

parts. They were taught to use their own G-code file and to use a 3D printer. Other aspects

focussed on were choosing the best parameters to print models, and 3D scanning methods to

generate a model when it is too complex for modelling. The participants were shown a live demo

of a 3D scanner and printer. As a token, 3D printed keychains were distributed to the

participants.

The Astronomy club conducted an ‘Astronomy Computational Workshop’. This was an

introduction to handling FITS images and the basics of SAOImage DS9 software. Participants

were taught to use DS9 to process astronomical data, x-ray data in particular, obtained from

Chandra telescope by NASA.

The Astronomy Club also conducted an Observational Astronomy Workshop. It was conducted

on the 6th of January from 7:30 pm to 12:00 midnight. Participants were given a basic

introduction to the nature of the night sky and celestial bodies, as well as about coordinate

systems used. This was followed by a demonstration of the working of the telescope. The three

telescopes of CFI were used in the workshop. The moon was focussed on, as well as the Orion

nebula. The participants were taught to identify different star types, and an introduction to

spectroscopy was also given, and the spectra of stars were taken using the available grating.

These spectra were analysed using the Rspec software. Participants were given a free hand to

use the telescopes. The turnout for this workshop was around 18. Each participant was charged

a sum of Rs. 1500.

The workshop conducted by the iBot club was aimed at building a smartphone controlled

4-legged robot - a tetrapod. In the process, participants were expected to learn how to work with

a nodemcu (ESP 8266 WiFi Module which can be used for IOT applications), C based coding in

Arduino IDE, and fundamentals of mechanical stability in n-legged robots. The workshop had 13

teams from various colleges across India, and the number of participants ran into 50.

Techno-Entertainment show - Envisage - ShaastraThe most awaited techno-entertainment show of Shaastra 2020, Envisage hit a home run once again. For

the past 7 years, Envisage has gathered a huge crowd by delineating its mind-blowing projects and acts.

On the trail, this year the show put up its best projects and performances for the audience. One of its

projects was Techno-Orchestra, where multiple automated instruments are played simultaneously in a

coordinated scheme like an Orchestra. The show also included wonderful project performances like

Wiremap, which involved creation of illusion effects by projecting upon an array of strings. An automated

paint-ball painting bot was also presented. LED Sculpture a marvelous 3D LED matrix that reacts to music

& displays illusion patterns, attracted the spectators. This was followed by Radiant Troupe, a dance

performance with specialized suits that are controlled electronically. Light Painting, an automated laser

etching device to recreate light painting was also put up. Dazzling its onlookers, that was indeed a great

performance.

Our another vertical, Tech Ambience was also a huge success this year. We worked on different

interactive projects based on Augmented Reality(AR), automated sand art, image recognition and

persistence of vision. Thousands of people interacted with the projects as they were presented as student

exhibits during Shaastra.

Coming Up

CFI continued its legacy of inspiring innovative minds with a

long list of events from various clubs and teams. From

introductory sessions to advanced project groups with

foreign collaborations, competitions and new state of the art

building that hosted the infamous open house, this semester

was yet another quantum leap in the progress of CFI. Coming

up to upgrade the progress are various events like the

Student Innovation Program ,Aspiring Coordinators Meet,

Club proposed projects,etc. Stay tuned for the extensive

series of mind wrecking events planned out for the upcoming

semester.

STUDENT EXECUTIVE HEADAkash Anandan

cfi.iitm.ac.in

FROM THE DESK OF THE BRANDING AND ENGAGEMENT TEAM:Anand Krishna, Nandhini, Navaneeth, Nikitha, Vibhu Himani & Sampriti Mob: +91 9769361743