NITT’s four-day fest gets underway

The eighth edition of 'Pragyan-2012', the annual techno-management festival at the National Institute of Technology, Trichy (NIT-T), began on Thursday night in the presence of the institute director Dr Srinivasan Sundarrajan, executive director of BHEL, Trichy A V Krishnan and others.

The students proved their versatility in a fusion performance of various dance genres, a presentation that was the cynosure of around 3,000-strong student community. The students had an added reason to celebrate, as they had received the ISO 9001 (2008 edition) certification for conducting seven memorable editions that of the fest, giving it the stature of an international festival, last year. Pragyan is now among the top five student technical festivals in the country and this year it had evolved into a four-day multi-dimensional extravaganza of technological excellence.

This year, Pragyan showcases an impressive array of internationally renowned participants including Gayle Laakman, the author of 'Cracking the Cooing Interview' and the 'Google Resume', Jeff Lieberman, the host of the show 'Time Warp' on Discovery Channel, Gert Lanckriet, an associate professor in the department of computer engineering in the University of California, San Diego, Dr J N Reddy, the man behind the finite element analysis and Dr Sivathanu Pillai, the father of Brahmos Aerospace.

Explaining that without creativity and innovation, growth was not possible, Krishnan told the students that "innovation could be incremental or breakthrough." Nevertheless, it was the soft skills that were more needed to manage a large organisation and this could be achieved only through programmes like Pragyan. The highlight of Pragyan-2012 would be the technological exhibitions such as Kinect Installation (state-of-the-art motion sensing technology with an artistic touch), Augmented Reality (donning the LED glove and plunging into the interactive virtual world to conquer the unexplored), Robomania (hexapods, bipeds, humanoids, gaming bots, the venerable ductbot and an assortment of the best in artificial intelligence), Precision Instruments (used in archaeological surveying and cutting edge research) and Adaptive Gripper Arm (a German pneumatic marvel).