With great fanfare, the School of Engineering, Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham, Coimbatore campus, has conducted the 9th edition of its flagship Techfest, Anokha 2019 from 14th to 16th February, 2019. The mega episode was marked with 6,128 event registrations, 1,444 workshop registrations, 70 highly competitive tech contests, 30 scholarly workshops by industry leaders, inspiring ‘Lumiere’ talk series, School Zone outreach programs, fascinating TechExpo and the dazzling ‘Eventide’ cultural shows. Also, the faculty and students chose the occasion to pay their homage to the brave soldiers martyred at Pulwama, Srinagar. The social commitment of Anokha, which is showcased through many events and workshops, has made it India’s first and only university Techfest with United Nations Academic Impact (UNAI) accreditation. Major sponsors of the 2019 edition included Cognizant, British Council, H&R Block, Infoview and State Bank of India (SBI).
“Anokha Techfest is a challenging platform for students from all over India to participate in stimulating technical events that require innovation and creative thinking,” said Dr. Sasangan Ramanathan, Dean, Faculty of Engineering, Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham. “In addition to the contests, the three-day event also allows participants to listen to inspirational talks from eminent personalities, gain hands-on learning through numerous workshops hosted by major companies, and most importantly, they could learn to work as a team,” he added. While talking about the ‘School Zone’ outreach programs, Dr. Sasangan observed that the participation of high school students is an important aspect of Anokha and expressed satisfaction in the fact that the Techfest succeeded in instilling a taste Engineering and Technology in young minds. Finally, he thanked the student coordinators and faculty mentors for putting together a stellar show in line with motto “Dare to be Different”.
The event featured some of the popular programs including Robowarz, Robosoccer, RC Throttle, Maze Runner, Mine Sweeper, Machine Learning (ML) Marksman, Concrete Master, Opifex, Xiomara: Capture the Flag, Armageddon gaming, Water rocker, Jeopardy and the E-pictures short film contest. There were 30 workshops in cutting-edge areas such as electric & hybrid vehicle design, CNC, IoT, AR/VR, deep learning, Raspberry PI, drones, ANSYS Fluent and Vastu Vidya by industry leaders such as Robert Bosch, Intel, Mathworks, Cisco, NVidia, LMW, 24(7).ai, Archimaze and Amrita Technology Business Incubator (TBI).
TechExpo was another major attraction at Anokha 2019 which showcased a lot of state-of-the art technology including aircraft simulator, drone show and wild life photography. Exhibitors such as Roots, Mobil1 and Amrita departments & research centers such as Cyber Security, Cisco ThinQbator, etc. took part in TechExpo. School zone, an extensive school outreach program was also turned out to be a crowd puller. Designed to provide the children with a glimpse of the exciting technology of tomorrow, the event saw the participation of over 500 school children from various schools. School zone has provided school children with the opportunity to participate in 15 events such as School Wiz quiz, Marvel versus D, Sudoku, Sheldon Pictionary & Logic Magic coding contest.
While rest of the events showcased a brave new world of technology and innovation, Lumiere, a series of enlightening talks shed light on the importance of having a vision and willpower to achieve it. The program featured winners from all walks of life including Mr. Omkar Singh, Arjuna award winning marksman & Triple Commonwealth Gold medalist; Ms. Rajani Thindiath, Editor-in-Chief, Tinkle comics; Prof. Kanagaraj Pitchaivelu, Civil Services coach, Mr. Yuvaprakash Angamuthu, Mr. India Fitness Championship Runner up and Mr. Nelson Vinod Moses, Founder of Suicide Prevention India Organization.
The mega event culminated with a scintillating Eventide Musical Show by Film fare award-winning playback singer, Mr. Naresh Iyer supported by Mr. Aalap Raju and Ms. Neha Venugopal. In addition, there were also spectacular cultural performances by Ragasudha and Natyasudha student clubs. The cultural activities included a campus short film contest named E-pictures and it was judged by Mr. Nag Ashwin, director of the acclaimed biopic, Mahanati. The organizing committee for Anokha 2019 of faculty members Mr. M. Sreevalsan, Prof. Prashant R. Nair & Dr. K. V. Shriram as Conveners and Mr. Gopakumar P., Mr. Baskar A., Mr. Arunkumar C., Mr. Ritwik M. & Mr. Vijay Narayanan as Co-Conveners.
