Guest lectures covering a diverse range of topics were the highlight of the third day of Pragyan 2018, techno-managerial festival at National Institute of Technology - Tiruchi, on Sunday.
The first lecture by A. S. Ramasastri, formerly the Chief General Manager-in-charge of the Department of Information Technology at Reserve Bank of India, focussed on areas relating to cyber security, analytics, computing and payment systems.
The second lecture by Bhargavi Nuvvula, vice-president of American Express Technology, India, was an elaborate presentation on the complexity of programming that goes behind implementing algorithms, and how things must be engineered to achieve artificial intelligence that can be compared to a human.
The third lecture was by Robert Metcalfe, the co-inventor of the Ethernet, a renowned Electrical engineer, technology executive and venture capitalist.
There were also sessions by Shivraj Morzaria, cardistry champion; Suhani Shah, leading life coach and author of 'Unleash Your Hidden Powers'; and Azeem Banatwalla, writer and stand-up comedian.
During the course of the day, six finalists of Topographya, the technical treasure hunt of the Concreate cluster, scoured the vast campus of NIT for clues and hints. The event required the participants to solve problems involving principles of deduction and surveying.
The final round of String Theory, the science-fiction event of Pragyan witnessed enthusiastic participants with formidable creative skills, weaving engrossing, intricate science fiction tales.
The Marketing Hub Final round witnessed participating teams pitching their promotion ideas, simulating a field product launch with marketing, presentation and ideation at full force.
Crime Busters that had participation of as many as 360 students in 120 teams required a mix of logical reasoning and ability to read between the lines by the participants who had to solve a mock case file. The event Contraption, under Core E Cluster initiated students into a chain of energy conversion steps in which one step triggers another leading to the completion of a final task.
In the final round of Hover, eight contestants were tested with tracks of increasing complexity.
The final day was also packed with seven workshops benefiting several students from other colleges. The workshops were on latest areas including C2000 Real Time Controller conducted by Texas instruments, Artificial Intelligence Chatbots conducted by American Express, cyber security by experts from Wipro, lean six sigma yellow belt workshop held by KPMG, on Mobile Application Development by Schneider electronics.
A guest lecture by Kevin Grazier, an American planetary physicist, who spoke on ‘embracing storytelling’ to connect well with people, and an infotainment performance by Poland based Manipulator, Shao, were the highlights of the second day of the event on Saturday.
