S. Vishnu Sharma
IIT Madras has seen great deal of developments in 2023. The previous year has been really a time of achievements.
The list of achievements for IIT Madras has been quite good in 2023. Some of them are mentioned below:
1) IIT Madras Zanzibar Campus Launch – IIT Madras became the first-ever IIT to launch a campus on a foreign country. While initially, the Institute will offer BS and MTech programs, in Data Science and Artificial Intelligence, more academic programs will be offered in the coming year.
In the first batch at IITM Zanzibar, students from Zanzibar, mainland Tanzania, Nepal, and India have been admitted with 40 percent of the students being women.
2) G20 Conference on Digital Technologies in Education – IIT Madras organised a G20 Seminar on ‘Role of Digital Technology in Education’ at its Research Park on 31st January 2023.
It was intended to identify policies for the effective use of digital technology in education in the G20 member countries.
The G20 Seminar was held as part of ‘Sherpa Track – 1st Education Working Group Meeting’ in Chennai, Tamil Nadu, from 31st January 2023 to 2nd February 2023.
The Education Working Group, under India’s Presidency of G20, had the key objective of identifying areas/themes to promote possible research and academic collaboration among educational institutions in G20 member countries.
3) Department of Medical Science and Technology – IIT Madras during May 2023 launched a Department of Medical Sciences and Technology, which will offer a four-year B.S. program in medical sciences and engineering. This is the first-of-its-kind in India.
The course offers an interdisciplinary approach to prepare students for designing life-saving medical devices, drug discovery, artificial intelligence in medicine, and fundamental medical research.
Top medical doctors in India and abroad, who were also closely involved in the development of the curriculum, will be ‘Professors of Practice’ in this department.
4) School of Sustainability – IIT Madras during October 2023 launched a School of Sustainability, which will boost the Institute’s strong tradition of exemplary work in this area.
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The School of Sustainability will teach new, interdisciplinary courses on sustainability, synergize research to tackle grand challenges, and provide a platform to host events and showcase technologies that can help drive both practice and policy.
Conceptualized as a Centre of Excellence, it will bring together faculty members from across departments and research centres.
5) School of Data Science & Artificial Intelligence – IIT Madras is also going to launch a School of Data Science and Artificial Intelligence, that will be established as the prospective 18th Department of the Institute.
Through this, the institute aspires to place IIT Madras in the orbit of excellence, improve rankings, and enhance its global/national visibility in the fields of DS/AI with applications to societal, industrial and academic research.
6) NIRF Rankings – Recognized as an Institution of Eminence (IoE) in 2019, IIT Madras has been ranked No.1 in the ‘Overall’ Category for the fifth consecutive year in India Ranking 2023 released by NIRF, Ministry of Education.
The Institute has also been ranked No.1 in the ‘Engineering Institutions’ category in the same Rankings for eight consecutive years – from 2016 to 2023.
7) BS (Electronic Systems) – IIT Madras during March 2023 launched a four-year online Bachelor of Science (BS) in Electronic Systems.
The key objective of the program is to meet the significant and growing demand for skilled graduates in the electronics and embedded manufacturing sector in India.
The program also features multiple exits and the students can get a Foundational Level Certificate, Diploma, or the BS degree.
The program aligns with the India Semiconductor Mission to make India a global electronics manufacturing and design hub. This is the second online BS program from IIT Madras following the BS Degree in Data Science and Applications, which has more than 17,000 students studying currently.
8) Supreme Court MoU on Usage Of Artificial Intelligence & Technology – The Hon’ble Supreme Court in October 2023 signed a Memorandum of Understanding with IIT Madras for collaborating on using Artificial Intelligence (AI) and emerging technologies for transcription tools, summarization of page transcript, translation Tool, an exclusive streaming platform for court trials, process automation and large languages models.
The move comes after CJI DY Chandrachud’s visit to IIT Madras in July this year.
The MoU is aimed to facilitate the digital transformation of the Indian judiciary, aligning it with the vision for a more efficient and technologically advanced legal ecosystem to improve access to justice.
9) Development of indigenous mobile operating system BharOS – An IIT Madras-incubated firm JandKOps developed an Indigenous Mobile Operating System that can benefit India’s 100 crore mobile phone users.
Called ‘BharOS,’ this software can be installed on commercial off-the-shelf handsets.
It provides a secure environment for users and is a significant contribution towards the country’s goal of ‘Atmanirbhar Bharat.’
BharOS Services are being provided to organisations that have stringent privacy and security requirements and whose users handle sensitive information that requires confidential communications on restricted apps on mobiles.
Such users require access to private cloud services through private 5G networks.
10) Development of indigenous 5G RAN Tech & transfer to Industry – In one of the largest technology transfer deals from academia in India, a 5G RAN (Radio Access Network) technology developed by a multi-institutional team has been licensed to an industry partner TEJAS NETWORKS (A Tata Group Company) for a sum of Rs. 12 Crore.
IIT Madras, IIT Kanpur and the Society for Applied Microwave Electronics Engineering and Research (SAMEER) developed a ‘5G RAN sub-system’ at the 5G Test Bed.
The three institutions are jointly licensing the 5G RAN technology to TEJAS NETWORKS (A Tata Group Company), which will play a vital role in leveraging it for further advancements and commercial applications.
11) Twelve IIT Madras alumni part of the historic Chandrayaan-3 mission – IIT Madras is proud to note that twelve of its alumni who are currently in Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) played a pivotal role in the historic Chandrayaan-3 mission.
Aspirations for 2024
IIT Madras is targeting incubating at least 100 start-ups across various sectors next year, in 2024.
Recognized as one of the top deep-tech start-up ecosystems in India, the IIT Madras Incubation Cell (IITMIC) is the institute’s umbrella body for nurturing, supporting, and overseeing various innovation and entrepreneurship projects.
Director of IIT Madras
Sharing his targets for 2024, Prof. V. Kamakoti, Director, IIT Madras, said IIT Madras saw a lot of ambitions realized during 2023.
In the past year, we took up several important projects including IIT Madras Zanzibar Campus, which became the first-ever IIT to be established overseas, launched a Department of Medical Sciences and Technology, and are aspiring to do many more things in this direction.
We are also looking forward to launching a new school on interdisciplinary sciences. It is very important as today, we are moving towards interdisciplinary education, he said.
We also want to close this financial year with the maximum amount of projects, said IIT Madras director.
Exciting initiatives
Director of IIT Madras said for 2024, they have a lot more exciting initiatives and socially relevant projects that would greatly benefit the nation.
We are looking at closing this financial year (31st March 2024) with 366 patents. We will try our best to see one patent a day. It is a matter of great pride at IIT Madras that we do a lot more of innovation.
We are also looking at starting 100 start-ups in 2024. We are also seeing a lot of interesting technologies coming up through Hyperloop start-up, ePlane, Agnikul Cosmos and Mindgrove Technologies, all of which are IIT Madras-incubated start-ups.
These start-ups will deliver products, which will be of great national importance, he said.
We are also working very hard towards maintaining the #1 ranking in NIRF (National Institutional Ranking Framework).
Hopefully, we are also looking to move to higher rankings in World Rankings as well. We want to start a couple of new courses in IIT Madras Zanzibar, he said.