Interaction with School Kids

It was a wonderful experience to interact with school kids learning #programming using #Sanskrit in June 2022. They were curious about the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs), programming, computer science and engineering and other aspects of student life in higher education institutions.

Projects for Goa Assembly Elections 2022

Press coverage of Shri Kunal, Chief Electoral Officer, Goa (during Goa Assembly Elections 2022) felicitating IIT Goa students for IT applications (Voterdost chatbot, AI based webcasting and absentee voter system) developed by them under my guidance for Goa State Elections 2022. The students (Aditi Saxena, Sakar Salunke, Shivom Aghalte, Uppala Sumana, Shivam Jaiswal and Yuvraj Agarwal) designed, developed and deployed these solutions with the help of Dept. of Information Technology, Govt. of Goa. The ideas for these projects were floated by Shri Kunal to bring about more IT enabled services and governance during elections. The chatbot was also released during the visit by the Hon’ble Election Commission of India in January 2022.

The various related tweets can be found at the links: link1, link2, link3, link4

DST AWSAR Award 2021 and VLSID 2022

The 35th International Conference on VLSI Design and the 31st International Conference on Embedded Systems were held 26 Feb to 2 March 2022. Both VLSI design and embedded systems are two of the areas in which my group carries out research. Encouraging students to participate in these conferences is one way of helping them align with their field more closely. Prachi Kashikar, the 1st PhD student in my group, received the VLSID 2022 Fellowship. This year, I also served as a TPC member in the Embedded Systems track.

Another PhD student, Pavitra Bhade, is one of the winners of the DST AWSAR Award 2021 for the Best Story in PhD category. The Department of Science and Technology (DST), Govt. of India sponsored AWSAR award aims to promote story telling approaches to describe research. AWSAR stands for Augmenting Writing Skills for Articulating Research. The goal is to make research work accessible to non-experts. Pavitra wrote a story on her research about detection of cache side channel attacks by using a children’s playground as an example.