CMU holds 3rd India alumni meet in city

The Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), a private research university based in Pennsylvania, organised its third India alumni meet here.

The meet, named CMU India Conclave 2018, was themed "Future of Work", and comprised of fireside chats, panel discussions and networking sessions.

Most of the discussions were centred around the future of the work, with emerging technologies as the driver. "At CMU, we have a strong technology related alumni. So, that is why, in the given situation, you are seeing this theme," Rashmi Gowda, one of the organisers of the event, said.

CMU organises biennial all-India meetings for its alumni. The first event was held in Mumbai and the second one in Delhi, which was organised on a much smaller scale.

India, which has the largest alumni base of CMU outside the US, has almost 2,000 alumnus from the university.

Devi Shetty, founder and chairman of Narayana Health, was the keynote speaker at the event.

Other panelists and speakers, which included both CMU alumnus and guest speakers, were ITC Infotech MD and CEO Sushma Rajagopalan, Mindtree CEO and MD Rostow Ravanan, Anand Anandkumar from Bugworks; Shyam Vasudevarao from Renalyx, Tushar Vasisht from Healthifyme, Amit Gupta from Yulu, Prashanth Prakash from Accel, Ravi G from Flipkart, Neeru Sharma from Infibeam, Siddhartha Agarwal, from Bhoruka group, among others.

The event also hosted child prodigy Saad Nasser as its panelist on transportation. Aged 16, Nasser dropped out of school at the age of 10 to follow his ambition of automobile engineering and co-founded Ati Motors.

"The aim of the event is to help network the alumni group and also facilitate the knowledge transfer," Rashmi said.

Founded in 1900 by Andrew Carnegie as the Carnegie Technical Schools, the university became the Carnegie Institute of Technology in 1912 and began granting four-year degrees. In 1967, the Carnegie Institute of Technology merged with the Mellon Institute of Industrial Research to form Carnegie Mellon University.