List of Pragyan editions
Pragyan is an ISO 9001 and 20121 certified annual International Techno-management Organisation of the National Institute of Technology, Tiruchirapalli, India. Since its inception in 2005, it has been held every year over a period of three and a half days during either January or February. Every year, Pragyan sees participants from over 100 colleges from across India. Pragyan 2014 had a total footfall of 3,118 people over three days. Pragyan is the first student-run organization in the world and the third organization overall next to the London Olympics and Manchester United to achieve an ISO 20121:2012 Certification for Sustainable Event Management.
2005
The first Pragyan was held from 29 to 31 January 2005. The idea for a technical festival originated with the institution's students, who also bore responsibility for planning and organization; organization was supported both by the institution's director, P. Subramanian and by alumni, and guided by an advisory committee drawn from the institution's faculty.[1][2]
2006
Pragyan 2006 had increased participation from colleges across India, and international participation for the first time in the programming event ByteCode. Prominent guest lecturers included Yash Pal, Stephen Wolfram, Christopher Gill, and Christopher Charles Benninger. The chief sponsor for this year was Tata Consultancy Services. Other major sponsors included Videocon, Airtel and Hewlett Packard. The participation was close to 1,000 students from more than 70 colleges.[3]
2007
Pragyan 2007 was held from 1 to 4 February 2007, and included a large number of events encompassing both engineering and managerial disciplines. The guest lecture series, meant to give students an opportunity to listen to, interact with and be inspired by top practitioners from various disciplines included lectures by Douglas Osheroff, Rudolph Marcus, the aeronautical and mechanical engineer Guruswami Ravichandran, the author Gurcharan Das and a video-conference with Jimmy Wales, the co-founder of Wikipedia.
Pragyan 2007 featured an exhibition of re-modeled cars including a behind-the-scenes look organized by Dilip Chhabria of Dilip Chhabria Design Private Limited. In addition, there were a number of workshops including one on automobile design by Amarendra Kr. Das and another on digital signal processing - Pattern Recognition and Digital Watermarking. Pragyan 2007 also included a one-day management simulation game called "MyFirm". This event was hosted by Dr. Vinod Dumblekar, founder of MANTIS.[4][5]
2008
Pragyan 2008 was held from 28 February to 2 March 2008. It included lectures by several eminent scientists including Philippe Lebrun from CERN, Ronald Mallett, Noam Chomsky, Subramanian Swamy, Trilochan Sastry, K.R. Sridhar and Philip Zimmermann. It also featured several new workshops on ham radio operation, Linux, bio-inspired robotics, astronomy and management.[6]
2009
The fifth edition of Pragyan was held from 12 to 15 February 2009 in the NIT Trichy campus. The theme was 'Presenting the Future'. It included events, guest lectures, workshops and infotainment shows, some of which were conducted for the first time. Lectures were delivered by several notable guests including Peter Norvig from Google Research, astronaut Loren Acton, John C. Mather from NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Manish Tripathi from Dabbawallas and Kalyan Banerjee from Mindtree.
The most notable events include ByteCode — an online programming contest, Ventura — A business plan contest, Dalal Street — an online stock market simulation event, Avishkar — a design event and Ansyeshanam — a paper presentation contest.
There were a variety of workshops relating to JavaFX, animation, light painting and forensics.
The main sponsors were Petroleum Corporation Research Association, Mindtree, Department of Science and Technology (India), Sun Microsystems and TREC-STEP.
It also featured Crossfire, a panel discussion with noted panelists Prof. Anil Gupta from IIM-A, Dr P V Indiresan, Dr Sujatha Ramdorai and Dr Prabhakar Marur with Rashmi Bansal as the moderator. The theme for the panel discussion was 'India as a global knowledge superpower'.
Other shows organised under Infotainment for the entertainment of guests and participants included a display of Hand Shadowgraphy, a laser show with the theme 'Evolution' and a 'Techno-Magic' show by the renowned Christopher James.
In all, 38 events were organised and conducted over the course of the festival.[7]
2010
With the tagline, "Create.. Innovate.. Scintillate", the sixth edition was celebrated from 25 to 28 February 2010.
The main events were arranged into eight major clusters, namely, Encipher, Innovation, Brainwork, Chill Pill, Managing Technology, Robovigyan, Engineering Tomorrow and Adrenaline.
Crossfire, the panel discussion, was an integral part of the festival. With an eminent set of panellists comprising L S Ganesh, Subramaniam Vincent, Kishore Kumar, Dr Ramesh Jain, Sudhish Kamath and Jagan Jothivel, the event, moderated by Krish Ashok, had the panellists debating the topic ‘Why aren’t we I.D.I.O.T.S (I do it on my own terms)?’ to arrive at a common consensus.
Guest lectures offered students an opportunity to interact with the world's leading technologists — from famous Indians like Dr Ramesh Jain, N S Ramaswamy, Dr P. M. Bhargava, Dr Sreenidihi Varadharajan and Raj Bala, to foreign nationals such as Are Holen.
Workshops were aimed at putting to practice what one has already learned. Four workshops were organised - Adobe Flex, Ethical Hacking, 3D Photography and Hexapod robotics.
Exhibitions of various technological creations were set up across the campus. The Defence Research and Development Organisation presented a preview of some of India's finest arsenal and Bharath Electronics Limited displayed an array of military navigation system hardware. Hindustan Aeronautics Limited exhibited scale models and presentations on indigenous aircraft used by the Indian Armed Forces and their working.
The Infotainment shows included Sand Art by Amar Sen and a showcase of 3D visual effects, animation and other special effects by Zee Institute of Creative Arts. The final day had an air show and aircraft exhibition by the Rotor Sports and Hobby Club of Chennai.
In total, 43 events were conducted over the four-day period of the festival. The valedictory address was given by P S Rangaranjan from Tata Consultancy Services.
2011
The seventh edition of Pragyan was held from 17 to 20 February 2011. The tagline for the event was changed to “Let’s celebrate technology” in this edition which included over 40 events, encompassing engineering, science and management.
Guest lectures by eminent personalities included David Hanson, Sugata Mitra, Narayanan Krishnan, T V Padma, Stefan Engeseth of Detective Marketing and Ajeet N Mathur, Professor, IIM Ahmedabad.
Workshops on Gesture Controlled Robotics: Haptics, Computer Animation, Cloud Computing, Mobile Applications, Management Workshop, and Aeromodeling were organized.
A panel discussion was organised called Crossfire, featuring speakers Krish Ashok, Dr L S Ganesh, Subramanian Vincent, Dr Ramesh Jain, Kishore Kumar and Jagan Jothivel, on the topic "From joint families to live-in relationship, from pen pals to Facebook, from outdoor games to video games – this generation has surely changed a lot. But are these changes for the good? What are the priorities of youth at present? Where are we headed? And where do we go from there?".
An electronic musical instrument called Reactable was displayed prominently. Other events organised included GREENgineer, SAVE AS YOU BUILD, GreeNITT and an IGBC Session (on environmental engineering).
Over a hundred students from across India and some from outside India participated in Pragyan 2011 in the online events.[8][9]
2012
Pragyan in 2012 kept the previous year's tagline, "Let's Celebrate Technology". Held from 23 to 26 February 2012,[10] the festival expanded to include more than 50 events, distributed into the categories of Brain Work, Innovation, Chill Pill, Robovigyan, Greengineering, OpeNIT, Management, Engineering Tomorrow and Encipher.
Initiatives of this Pragyan included the Chennai Open Quiz, which served as the curtain raising event, Lakshya, a symposium with talks given by civil servants and members of the armed forces. Pengufest, an open coding members' consortium, and Sangam, an inter-departmental technical contest were also new additions to this edition.
Guest lectures were an integral part of the festival, with prominent speakers like Gayle Lackmann McDowell, Gert Lanckriet, J N Reddy, Michael E Brown, Jeff Lieberman, Swaminathan Gurumurthy, Dr Vijay Chandru, Dr Sivathanu Pillai and Narendra Nayak presenting guest lectures across three days.
Workshops on Bipedal Robotics, IC Engines, Light Painting, Intro to Stocks, Pengufest and Cyber forensics were conducted.
Exhibitions at Pragyan 2012 had the motto "Seeing is Believing". Exhibitions like Advanced Robotic Systems, Gripper Arm, Augmented Reality, Laser Tag and Catapult were crowd pullers in this edition.
Crossfire, a panel discussion among various eminent personalities such as Amoghavarsha, A N Chandramouli, J N Reddy, Arunabh Kumar, J Balamurugan, Sarath Babu and Professor Vinod was held, with the topic being ‘It's not about the Degree, it's about the Passion’.
Additionally, under the Infotainment section, the festival had three major attractions. Pragyan began with the Sky Lanterns show. Sky Lanterns are made of oiled rice paper on a bamboo frame that contains a waxy fuel cell and are launched into the sky in large numbers to form a beautiful spectacle. Next, a laser show was organized by InfySec. The closing ceremony of Pragyan ended with a special show by Stigma, an internationally acclaimed team involved in various performance acts including LED shows and fire dancing.
The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) granted Pragyan the ISO 9001:2008 certification in February 2012.
2013
Pragyan 2013 was held from 1 to 4 March 2013. The festival included more than 50 events which were divided into different clusters like Brainwork, Chill Pill, Core Engineering, Code It, Innovation, Manigma and Robovigyan.
The Pragyan Outreach events included ‘The Pragyan Open Quiz 2013’, which served as the curtain raiser event, ‘Pragyan Campus Connect’, an informal interactive session between the freshers and the final years on what lay in wait in the forthcoming years in college and how best to make use of this learning curve, ‘Srishti’ , a mobile making workshop held at the Institute of Yoga and Consciousness, Yoga Village, Visakhapatnam, ‘Disha’, the career counselling event for school and college students, ‘A Guide To Trichy’, a booklet detailing the must see places in Trichy, Wishberry, a Pragyan Social Responsibility initiative was brought out to help improve the infrastructure in a rural government school and ‘Pragyan Smart Cards’, a state-of-the-art replacement for the coupon distribution system.
The guest lectures featured prominent personalities like Anil Kakodkar, Tessy Thomas, Atul Gurtu, Rohan Dixit, David Christian and Richard Noble.
Workshops on Android Application Development, Automotive Systems and Advancements, Sixth Sense Robotics, Six Sigma, Tall Structure Design, Viral Media and Underwater Robotics were conducted.
The exhibitions were an absolute crowd puller with exhibits from DRDO, the spine of Indian Defense to Ark Technological Solutions, CVRDE, HAWT and Ark Technological Solutions.
Crossfire was titled “Failing Educational Institutions?” and featured eminent personalities like Chris Philips (Professor, Imperial College London), Dr Sultan Ahmed Ismail (Professor, New College Chennai), Bushra Shariff (artist manager and singer), Professor Eugene D’Vas (St. Joseph’s College, Trichy) and Prashanth Raj (Managing partner and director, Viral Fever Media). The panel discussion was moderated by Professor Vinod of the Humanities Department, NIT(Trichy).
Infotainment included Informals Fire Show, 3D Projection Mapping, Comedy Nightout by TVF, Pragyan's Got Talent Shows, Thalavattam Band and a Robo Dance performance by Robo Ganesh.
References
- ↑ Staff reporter (28 January 2005). "NIT to host `Pragyan' from tomorrow". The Hindu. pp. Tiruchi. Retrieved 8 June 2012.
- ↑ R. Krishnamoorthy (7 February 2005). "Pragyan: intelligence unlimited". The Hindu. Retrieved 8 June 2012.
- ↑ Staff reporter (1 February 2006). "Celebrate technology beneficial to society". The Hindu. Retrieved 8 June 2012.
- ↑ R Krishnamoorthy (13 February 2007). "NIT festival attracts student innovators". The Hindu. Retrieved 8 June 2012.
- ↑ Staff reporter (2 February 2007). "Indo-Russian `Youth Satellite' to be launched, says scientist". The Hindu. Retrieved 8 June 2012.
- ↑ Staff reporter (5 March 2008). "NIT-T wins techno-management event". The Hindu. Retrieved 8 June 2012.
- ↑ R Krishnamoorthy (2 February 2009). "Pragyan promises more this year". The Hindu. Retrieved 8 June 2012.
- ↑ Olympia Shilpa Gerald (15 March 2011). "Pragyan 2011: Fiesta for the techies". The Hindu. Retrieved 8 June 2012.
- ↑ Staff reporter (18 February 2011). "NIT-T students eager to set a Guinness Record at Pragyan 2011". The Hindu. Retrieved 8 June 2012.
- ↑ Staff reporter (24 February 2012). "Where futuristic solutions are born". The Hindu. Retrieved 10 June 2012.