44 students prepare 10 projects at Winter School

Ten research projects on interesting topics devised at Winter School 2014 were displayed at National Institute of Technology - Karnataka (NITK) at Surathkal.

Winter School 2014 is the sixth in an annual series of intensive scientific research bootcamps for undergraduate students organised each year by Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), Pittsburgh, USA in collaboration with India's premier institutions of technology.

This year, it was held jointly  at Department of Electronics and Communication Engineering, National Institute of Technology Karnataka, Surathkal from December 10. During the course of this two-week workshop, a total of 44 students from across the country were mentored by faculty from CMU, NITK and volunteers from India and abroad, in the art of conducting original research.

Teams of students brainstorm to identify open research problems, some of which address deep and pervasive problems that affect India economically, socially and technologically, and then devise and implement potential solutions for these problems, drawing on broad technical areas such as machine learning, data mining, human-computer interaction, speech and language technologies, and multimedia analysis.

For undergraduate students who are mostly not oriented to working on real-world problem solving using technology, this is an immense confidence-building experience, where they find that they can not only address such problems independently, but also frequently takes the solutions beyond existing scientific frontiers, resulting in international recognition, publications and awards, said the release.

This year the students worked on a total of ten projects spanning a wide range of topics. Socially relevant project addresses important societal issues such as problems faced by the healthcare system in predicting patient recovery, challenges faced by the law-enforcement agencies in effectively analysing crime data to forecast crime, and creation of a voice-forensic database.

Other projects targeted towards more entertaining problems such as automatic translation of comics from one language to another, and theoretical issues such as modelling the brain's working through neural networks and self-learning systems.
The Winter school was financially supported by NITK Surathkal, Microsoft Research, Dell R and D, NITK Alumni Network and State Bank of India.  

The displayed projects are ‘Voice Forensics’ (Tejeswini Sundaram, Sakthivel S, Priya Soundararajan, Utkarsh Patange),  ‘Predicting crime rates for predictive policing’ (Selva Priya S, Lavanya Gupta, Aman Kumar Singh), ‘Predicting hospital readmission rates among diabetic patients’ (Ankit Kumar, Bhuvan MS, Vinith Kishore, Adil Zafar), ‘Emotion recognition’  (Dhruv Goel, Satish Palaniappan, Skand Arora), ‘Never-ending learning of sound’ ( Rohan Badlani, Aditi Bhatnagar, Amogh Hiremath, Ankit Shah, Parnika Nevaskar),  ‘Imparting depth to images’  (Aravind Srinivas L, Kumar Krishna Agarwal, Vinith Venkatesan, Pulkit Pattnaik, Ayush Utkarsh),  ‘Generating visual storyboards from text’ ( Akshay Uttamani, Jay Bothra, Ashwin Kalyan, Harsha Vardhan),  ‘Comic Polyglot’ ( Akshay Dixit, Gaurav Bansal, Selva Priyanka, Aman Raj, Harshvardhan Solanki, Farhat Abbas RV), ‘What makes an Image popular on social media?’ (Chirag Nagpal, Kodali Naveen, Megha Arora, Nimisha Sharath , Rohan Katyal) and  ‘Automatic commentary generation’ (Akshay Varun, Satya Narayana,Siddhant  Manocha, Vanya Jauhal).