Sahyadri, the Official Nodal Centre of Toycathon-2021

Sahyadri College of Engineering & Management is the official Nodal Centre to host the prestigious National Event Toycathon 2021, to be held during 22nd June to 24th June 2021.
Toycathon is a National Level gaming Hackathon organized by the Ministry of Education’s Innovation Cell with support from the All India Council for Technical Education. A total of 19 teams from states like Punjab, Haryana, Bihar, Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh, etc., are going to participate at the Sahyadri Nodal Centre.
In the Three-Day event, there will be a daily mentoring session to the participants by gaming Experts and Designers in the morning, and in the evening, there will be Evaluation by the Jury. On 24th June 2021 at 12:00 PM, Hon. Prime Minister of India will address all the stakeholders of Toycathon. The Grand Finale will be held on 26th June 2021, where the results will be declared.
For Background and Overview of Toycathon,
Click the Reference Link: https://toycathon.mic.gov.in/about_toycathon.php
Toycathon is organized by Ministry of Education’s Innovation Cell with support from All India Council for Technical Education, Ministry of Women and Child Development, Ministry of Commerce and Industry, Ministry of MSME, Ministry of Textiles and Ministry of Information and Broadcasting.

Phase II: AICTE Sponsored One-Week STTP on “Innovative Approaches in Teaching Pedagogy”

Day Five (18th June 2021):

Dr. Pravin P Patil, Professor & Dean Rankings and Coordination, Controller of Examination, Graphic Era University, Dehradun, on the topic - “Simulation based Hands on Training”.

He is a M.Tech in Machine Designing and Ph.D in Mechanical Engineering from the IIT Roorkee. He is a recipient of MHRD / QIP Fellowship award of Govt. of India and a recipient of Meritorious Research Performance award at Graphic Era University, Dehradun consistently for last 11 years. He delivered an inspiring presentation on usage of Simulation Techniques in various areas and practical application especially in Military, Economics and so on.

Dr. Ananth Prabhu G, Professor-Sahyadri, Cyber Security and Cyber Law Trainer on the Topic - Effectively & Securely engaging online lectures”

He is a Post-Doctoral Fellow in Computer Science & Technology. He was recognized as one among the 30 unsung heroes of India by India Today in 2019 and also a Karnataka District Rajyotsava awardee 2020. He conducted 2000+ Workshops across India. He authored many popular books like “I own the Monks Ferrari”, “The Samurai who sold his Suzuki” and so on.
He shared a series of advanced Technologies and its advantages to conduct online lectures more safely and securely. He further emphasized on the Do’s and Don’ts in online classes and motivated the participants to do this noble task with utmost sincerity and dedication.

Mr. Gautham Nayak, Program Director-Technical Career Education on the topic - “Brain Storming”
Mr. Johnson Tellis, CEO – Technical Career Education on “Hands-On Lab”

Mr. Gautham Nayak is a Product Designer by Profession and heads the APEX Center for Social Innovation at Sahyadri. He has played a key role in the development of products like DreamKit, an electronic prototyping kit and Innovators Initiative, a game based learning platform to develop 21st century skills in younger kids.
Mr. Johnson Tellis is a B.E and MS in Neural Networks from Moscow Institute of Physics & Technology, Moscow, Russia. He is a Governing Council Member of Sahyadri College of Engineering & Management and one amongst 5 Start-Up ambassadors for AICTE, Govt. of India. The session highlighted the significance of Hands-on experience in the present teaching pedagogy. Mr. Johnson Tellis emphasized on how an opportunity based education will create more interest in learning, than outcome based education. They assigned the participants to Breakout rooms and conducted Brainstorming Session on “Online Teaching Techniques” using MIRO Board. They also shared insights on CANVA which can be an effective tool for Faculty in doing Presentations, Posters, and Invitations.

Webinar on NLP organized by Centre of Excellence in AI/ML

The Centre of Excellence (CoE) in Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, Dept. of Computer Science & Engineering, conducted a Webinar titled "Research Opportunities, Applications and Trends in Natural Language Processing (NLP)". A total of 80 participants from 23 Engineering Institutes / Universities participated in the Webinar. The Webinar was delivered by Dr. Shreyas Rao, Associate Professor, Dept. of Dept. of Computer Science & Engineering.
The session started with Dr. Pushpalatha K, HoD, Dept. of Computer Science & Engineering, addressing the gathering. She spoke about the establishment of Centre of Excellence in AI/ML at the Institute and the development of "Dhriti", Mental Health Resource bot by the CoE team. Dr. Rajesha S, Principal, spoke on the importance of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning areas in today's world and appreciated the COE-AI/ML for organizing Webinars, Workshops and developing products in the areas of AI/ML.
Dr. Shreyas Rao covered the basics of Natural Language Processing (NLP) area, components of NLP and showed a demo of NLP pipeline implemented in Python language. He explained the various NLP models such as Neural Network, Recurrent Neural Network (RNN), Encoder-Decoder and Transformers. He discussed the Transformer models including BERT, GPT, T5 and RoBERTa and how transfer learning has become the state-of-the-art literature in NLP research. Lastly, Dr. Shreyas mentioned the transformer applications in the areas of text generation, classification, summarization, translation and concluded by sharing insights into the key research opportunities in NLP for researchers and project opportunities for students.

Glimpse of Online Classes held in June 2021

Here is the information related to the Department-wise breakup of No. of Online Classes conducted on 18th June 2021 as well as the corresponding No. of hours engaged by the faculty members through Online Classes.

18th June 2021, Friday
DEPARTMENT	No. of Classes Conducted	No. of Hours Engaged
Computer Science & Engineering	19	27
Civil Engineering	5	8
Electronics & Communication Engineering	11	13
Mechanical Engineering	19	20
Information Science & Engineering	8	9
Basic Science	24	23
MBA	19	19

Quote for the day

The act of doing something un-does the fear.
- Shonda Rhimes