Pragyan

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Jump to: navigation, search
This article includes a list of references, related reading or external links, but its sources remain unclear because it lacks inline citations. Please improve this article by introducing more precise citations. (October 2009)
Pragyan
Pragyan logo
Organisation type Student-run non-profit organisation
Founded 2005
Place Tiruchirappalli, India
Institute NIT Trichy
Major events Coding, Robotics, Management, Paper presentation
Prize money INR 11,00,000
Guests Jimmy Wales, Guruswami Ravichandran, Sivathanu Pillai, Gurcharandas, Stephen Wolfram, Douglas Osheroff, Rudolf Marcus, Robert Michelson, Noam Chomsky, Philippe Lebrun, Subramanian Swamy, Philip Zimmermann, Prof. Trilochan Sastry, Prof. Ronald Mallett, Dr. K R Sridhar, John C. Mather, Loren Acton, Josh Bongard, Peter Norvig
Slogan Lets Celebrate Technology
Website www.pragyan.org

Pragyan is the annual Science and Technology Festival of the National Institute of Technology, Tiruchirapalli, India. Since its inception in 2005, it has been held every year over a period of four days during either the month of January or February. The event aims to provide a common platform for students from all across the country and abroad to exhibit their technical skill and accomplishments; additionally, it is intended to encourage interaction between students and prominent technologists, scientists and industrialists. Every year, Pragyan sees participants from over 200 colleges from across the country and, since the event's second year, international delegations including students from Germany, Russia, USA and France.

The tagline for Pragyan was changed from "Create.. Innovate.. Scintillate" to "Let's Celebrate Technology" for the 2011 edition. The 2011 edition of Pragyan presents to the FOSS community - Pengufest, the first of its kind, consisting of talks, celebrations, hackathons, unconference and much more.

The Pragyan website is designed and maintained by the Webteam of NIT Trichy using the Pragyan CMS, a customized open-source Content Management System for the purpose.

Contents

[edit] 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. The event's Corporate sponsors included IBM, Hewlett-Packard, CTS, Texas Instruments, Autodesk, Dell, Logic Info, L&T, Microsoft, Discreet, Masibus and The Hindu Education-Plus.

The first 'Pragyan' featured more than a thousand delegates and industry representatives, including participants from 85 colleges (including the IITs and NITs) from all over India, who took part in 17 events and 35 different competitions covering the entire spectrum of engineering.

[edit] 2006

Pragyan 2006 witnessed increased participation from colleges all over the country, 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 5000 studentsfrom more than 100 colleges

[edit] 2007

Pragyan 2007 was held from the 1st to the 4th of 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, aeronautical and mechanical engineer Guruswami Ravichandran, 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 (DCD). 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, MANTIS.

[edit] 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.

[edit] 2009

The fifth edition of Pragyan was held from 12 - 15 February 2009 in the NIT Trichy campus. This year's theme was 'Presenting the Future'. This edition of the fest included events, guest lectures, workshops and infotainment shows; some of these 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.

Pragyan '09 also saw a variety of workshops relating to JavaFX, animation, light painting and forensics.

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 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 Mr Christopher James.

In all, 38 events were organised and conducted over the course of the fest.

[edit] 2010

With the tagline, "Create.. Innovate.. Scintillate", the sixth edition was celebrated from February 25th to 28th 2010. Pragyan 10 was an opportunity for engineering students to absorb new skills and display their talents; it was also a platform for interaction between students, scientists, technologists and industrialists.

The main events of Pragyan were distributed into various clusters including Encipher, Innovation, Brainwork, Chill Pill, Managing Technology , Robovigyan and Engineering Tomorrow.

Crossfire, the panel discussion, was an integral part of the festival. With the topic, "Why aren't we I.D.I.O.T.S?" (I do it on my own terms), six renowned panelists debated over their views and arguments to reach a common verdict - Krish Ashok, Dr L S Ganesh, Subramanian Vincent, Kishore Kumar, Dr. Ramesh Jain and Jagan Jothivel.

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 are aimed at putting to practice what one has already learned. Four workshops were organised at Pragyan '10 - Adobe Flex, Ethical Hacking, 3D Photography and Hexapod robotics.

Exhibitions of various technological creations were set up across the campus. The DRDO presented a preview of some of India's finest arsenal, while Bharath Electronics Limited displayed an array of Military Navigation System hardware. HAL exhibited scale models and presentations on indigenous aircraft used by the Indian Armed Forces and their working.

Sand Art by Mr. Amar Sen and a showcase of 3D visual effects, animation and other special effects by ZICA were also featured. The final day saw an air show and aircraft exhibition by the Rotor Sports and Hobby Club of Chennai.

In all, more than 40 events were conducted over the four day period of the festival.

[edit] 2011

The seventh edition of Pragyan was held from 17th-20th Feb, 2011. The tagline for the event was “Let’s celebrate technology” and included over 40 events, encompassing engineering, science and management. Guest lecturers included David Hanson, Sugata Mitra, Narayanan Krishnan, T. V. Padma, Stefan Engeseth of Detective Marketing and Ajeet N. Mathur, Professor, IIM Ahmedabad. Workshops on Haptics, aircraft design, Open source (Pengufest) were organised. A panel discussion called Crosswire featuring was also organised. 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). Hundreds of students from across India and some from outside India participated in Pragyan 2011.

[edit] External links
Institutes
About
Schools of Management
Techfests
Culfests
Bizfests
Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Pragyan&oldid=465141124"
Personal tools
Namespaces
Variants
Actions
Navigation
Interaction
Toolbox
Print/export