<p>At a time when the extended lockdown in the face of the coronavirus pandemic has hit the education sector badly, leading technical institute IIIT Naya Raipur has achieved a milestone. Two of its BTech final year students, Vedant Khandelwal and Vishal Pallagani, have got direct PhD admission in Computer Science at University of South Carolina, USA.</p>.<p>Both the students are of 2016 batch of the IIIT Naya Raipur and will be graduating this July. These students were previously selected for six-month institute funded major project at the same foreign university under the guidance of Professor Amit Seth, who is also the founding director, Artificial Intelligence Institute and Professor, Computer Science and Engineering, at University of South Carolina.</p>.<p>The six-month major projects of the students revolved around people behaviour through twitter in Covid-19. The projects use advanced Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence techniques to understand human behaviour. At IIIT NR, both the students had worked under Prof Venkanna U on a project titled 'Deep Learning Integrated Solar Powered Device for Automatic Plant Disease Prediction for Internet-of-Agro-Things (IoAT)'. In their work they had proposed novel automation of irrigation with an integrated health maintenance system for the crops.</p>.<p>"We are currently working on analysing the online conversations to track the social and mental health issues surfacing during the coronavirus pandemic. We are performing this analysis on more than 800 million social media posts since the beginning of March and more than 700,000 news articles about the Covid-19 pandemic. We are also working on various other research projects such as identifying the relations between cannabis and depression, developing a question answering system for the medical domain, understanding radicalisation, and suicidal instincts in social media posts. But these are all the projects we are currently working on, it is not guaranteed that we will continue to work on the same once we start our PhD, because we will be exploring more venues where we wish to research and might start working on that,” the students said.</p>.<p>Other students of their batch have already been placed with top IT companies such as Deloitte USI, Utopia Labs, Carl Zeiss, TCS Digital, TCS Ninja, Ericsson, Examly, Algotech, Robert Bosch and Delta X. 11% of the students from this batch went abroad for six-month major projects with reputed universities in Europe, USA and South Asia.</p>.<p>“We are proud that our students have been doing good and bringing laurels to our institution with their outstanding performance. Our main focus has always been research. It helps students to learn in a holistic way about their subject. Our institution makes the students abreast about the latest technologies in the IT industry be it artificial intelligence, data analytics or robotic. During Covid-19 too, our course module focuses on all these new technologies, job training and research. We are sure that both Vedant and Vishal will excel in their PhD programme like their other batchmates,” said Dr Pradeep K Sinha, vice chancellor and director, IIIT Naya Raipur.</p>
<p>At a time when the extended lockdown in the face of the coronavirus pandemic has hit the education sector badly, leading technical institute IIIT Naya Raipur has achieved a milestone. Two of its BTech final year students, Vedant Khandelwal and Vishal Pallagani, have got direct PhD admission in Computer Science at University of South Carolina, USA.</p>.<p>Both the students are of 2016 batch of the IIIT Naya Raipur and will be graduating this July. These students were previously selected for six-month institute funded major project at the same foreign university under the guidance of Professor Amit Seth, who is also the founding director, Artificial Intelligence Institute and Professor, Computer Science and Engineering, at University of South Carolina.</p>.<p>The six-month major projects of the students revolved around people behaviour through twitter in Covid-19. The projects use advanced Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence techniques to understand human behaviour. At IIIT NR, both the students had worked under Prof Venkanna U on a project titled 'Deep Learning Integrated Solar Powered Device for Automatic Plant Disease Prediction for Internet-of-Agro-Things (IoAT)'. In their work they had proposed novel automation of irrigation with an integrated health maintenance system for the crops.</p>.<p>"We are currently working on analysing the online conversations to track the social and mental health issues surfacing during the coronavirus pandemic. We are performing this analysis on more than 800 million social media posts since the beginning of March and more than 700,000 news articles about the Covid-19 pandemic. We are also working on various other research projects such as identifying the relations between cannabis and depression, developing a question answering system for the medical domain, understanding radicalisation, and suicidal instincts in social media posts. But these are all the projects we are currently working on, it is not guaranteed that we will continue to work on the same once we start our PhD, because we will be exploring more venues where we wish to research and might start working on that,” the students said.</p>.<p>Other students of their batch have already been placed with top IT companies such as Deloitte USI, Utopia Labs, Carl Zeiss, TCS Digital, TCS Ninja, Ericsson, Examly, Algotech, Robert Bosch and Delta X. 11% of the students from this batch went abroad for six-month major projects with reputed universities in Europe, USA and South Asia.</p>.<p>“We are proud that our students have been doing good and bringing laurels to our institution with their outstanding performance. Our main focus has always been research. It helps students to learn in a holistic way about their subject. Our institution makes the students abreast about the latest technologies in the IT industry be it artificial intelligence, data analytics or robotic. During Covid-19 too, our course module focuses on all these new technologies, job training and research. We are sure that both Vedant and Vishal will excel in their PhD programme like their other batchmates,” said Dr Pradeep K Sinha, vice chancellor and director, IIIT Naya Raipur.</p>
