L&T Technology Services Limited (LTTS), a leading global pure-play Engineering R&D Services company conducted a second edition of its unique industry academia initiative TECHgium that displayed the work of over 150 Engineering students with their groundbreaking solutions to the problems given by L&T and its clients. The quality of projects not only proved the talent of the students but also their passion towards engineering. This covered hundreds of engineering colleges across the country, including several top tier engineering institutes, TECHgium is a first of its kind initiative in India to scout for and recognize the best of engineering talent among the fresher community.
TECHgium ushers in a new generation of engineers with skills and capabilities that the industry covets. This initiative was aimed at imparting engineering students with relevant exposure to the challenges and practical insights for Industry 4.0. The main motto of TECHgium was to help create an ecosystem that bridges the industry-academia schism by facilitating the participants with an opportunity to work on technologies of tomorrow and enhance their career prospects and simultaneously augment the solution development team of LTTS.
LTTS invested over 100 working hours to mentor students shortlisted for the PoC round, with subject matter experts from respective industry domains mentoring the students. As a result, the winning teams came up with remarkable solutions around IoT, Machine Learning, Advanced Image Processing and Smart Tools. The best part was the students came up with this model within 4 months of time.
“The application process started in the month of November, and as soon as we got our problem statement we started working towards to it. We had to do the project in our college itself, it was tough without actually ever seeing how this model works in the industry but Google helped us a lot to get a clear picture.” Says Apurv from IIIT.
The team from Sri Ramakrishna Engineering College, Coimbatore were declared as winners for developing a mechanism for wide angle viewing for diagnostic hysteroscopy products. The students of National Institute of Engineering, Mysore won the second prize for creating a variable valve timing mechanism for internal combustion engine. The winner of the third prize went to the team from Sri Manakula Vinayagar Engineering College, Pondicherry for their work on Smart tools and integration with IoT platforms. A special prize was awarded to the students of Zakir Hussain College of Engineering and Technology, Aligarh for devising a Multi-camera Multi Target Visual Tracking System.
Some of the other noteworthy POCs demonstrated at TECHgium include active noise cancellation for automobile mufflers submitted by the students of IIT Madras that caters to the Transportation & Commercial Vehicles domain and Artificial Intelligence framework for Microgrids for Industrial Products submitted by the students of VIT University.
The winners of TECHgium were selected by a distinguished jury of industry experts including Mr K.S. Viswanathan, Vice President NASSCOM, Dr. Ranganath Navalgund, Honorary Professor, ISRO and Mr Ganapathiraman, Country Manager, ARC India.
“India has always been the nation of innovators and pioneers and the kind of engineering talent that can be brought to light here is unparalleled. TECHgium is our ode to the great Indian engineering potential and we are confident that this initiative will be instrumental in providing the right stimulus to the enormous academic potential of the country. The success of TECHgium would be immensely helpful in LTTS’ endeavor to propel innovation, bridge industry-academia gap as well as solve myriad engineering challenges and help in building digital skillsets among today’s youth.” said Dr. Keshab Panda, CEO & Managing Director, L&T Technology Services Limited said
“Across the whole spectrum of the industry, skill profiles are undergoing rapid changes witnessing a rising demand for enhanced digital capabilities. India has enormous pool of fresh talents propelled by innovative thinking and attitude to build solutions in key sectors where technology can play a revolutionary role. We are extremely hopeful that initiatives brought out by TECHgium will play an instrumental role in mentoring academic talents in the country, propel innovation in bringing technological empowerment to solve complex industrial problems in the country.” said K.S. Viswanathan, Vice President – Industry Initiatives, NASSCOM.
Dr, Keshab Panda also promised to provide employability to 100 students from this TECHgium with amazing packages, He also mentioned that the students who participated are have immense talent that they can be employed anywhere in the world in any companies.
Apart from this initiatives, L&T Technology Services Limited (LTTS) is also working on design, development and testing services for medical, fighter aircrafts, transportation, telecom & hi-tech, and the process industries. They have another interesting initiative called COO Club, which finds the best projects and talent within the company and help those employers to do masters in top universities like Hardward, Wharton etc, while L&T covers all their costs.
The second edition of TECHgium received a record-breaking participation from over 17,000 students across 220 engineering colleges signing up for the event. The platform gave aspiring engineering students an opportunity to create concepts, submit abstracts, present technical presentation and showcase Proof of Concept (PoC) on real life technical challenges. Some of the challenges included Machine Learning Platform for Video Analytics for elevators, Augmented/Assisted Reality applications for industrial customers, Video analytics tool for detecting human intentions and Reduction of Emission from Automobiles among others.
We hope to see more of such events which help students by bridging the gap between academia and industry and also motivate students to think and work beyond their textbooks.
