In the present world scenario, technicians need to have administrative, financing skills and managerial capabilities in them. At the end of the day, they should be technocrats with their horizons wide open and ready to adorn any mantle, said Mangalore Special Economic Zone (MSEZ Ltd) CEO and MD I S N Prasad. Speaking after inaugurating the four-day national-level technology fest ‘Engineer-2008’ at National Institute of Technology Karnataka in Surathkal on Friday he advised the engineers-to-be to keep exploring and not to limit themselves to any stream of thought.
Appreciating NITK for the theme of Engineer-08, socially responsible engineering, he said that challenges in the society are becoming more complex despite the progress in technology and added that every individual has a social responsibility, whatever lifestyle he/she adopts.
Taking a note of the general trend of looking towards US after an engineering course, Mr Prasad urged the young engineers to explore the Indian possibilities before thinking of an overseas career.
MRPL Group General Manager K Lakshminarayana said that an engineer is closely tied up with the social structure. “It is no more a question of man’s mastery over nature, but of the consequences of that mastery”, he said and added that Engineering for the sake of engineering, is now a narrow concept.
NITK Director- in-charge Dr G K Shivakumar presided. Dean Prof V R Shastry, Convenor of Engineer-08 Vaibhav Kabra and Students’ Union president Kunal Ahuja were present.
The Inaugaration was followed by a spectacular UV dance which was on the theme of a Time Machine. This was followed by the Engineer Expo in which Microsoft displayed its latest products including Photosynth-a phototourism software ,Silver Light ,Virtual Earth and Surface-the coffee table sized touchscreen computer which are due to hit the Indian market.
In Engineer
Earlier on the day, various events like forensics workshop, ‘Wings,’ ‘Marathon’ and ‘Perfect Machine’ were held, all of which witnessed tremendous participation.
First on the events list was the popular forensics workshop saw students lining up to try their hands at solving a crime based on introductory ideas gained from two lectures by Ashok, Professor at the School of Social Work and Dr Udayakumar of The Indian Academy of Forensic Sciences. Wings, the aeromodelling workshop gave the participants opportunity to build a glider from scratch under the tutelage of Adarsh of Bangalore, who pursues aeromodelling and flying as a hobby. The grand finale to this event was the demonstration of the tutor’s own rockets.
Rural innovators provided a platform for inventors from little known parts of India to showcase their designs. Amongst them were the Rainbow Versatile Disc (RVD) which uses colours instead of binary digits for data storage by Sainulabdeen and an Amphibian car created by P S Vinod of Kerala. Perfect Machine, a robotics event in which the task was to use a robot to play a game of pool and the preliminary round of Marathon, a 3-day event event testing all-round ability across various Computer Engineering areas were also held on Day-2. Events to look forward to on day 3 will be Automata- the Robotics event, Foxhunt- the HAM radio treasure hunt, photography workshops, a lecture by R K Shenoy of BOSCH India and Mr Barki.
