Activities Report

2018presented at Convocation 2018

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Director’s Report onSeventeenth Convocation

The Chief Guest Shri. Kris Gopalakrishnan, Chairman of the Governing Council Prof. Raj Reddy, distinguished guests, my colleagues from the institute, graduating students and parents, other students, members of the media, and friends, I am very happy to present the report on the activities of IIIT Hyderabad for the past year as we continued our academic journey.

IIITIIIT Hyderabad is a Deemed University that operates entirely autonomously in academic, administrative, and financial matters. Research-led education with a special focus on undergraduate research has enabled the institute to contribute much to society through technology solutions and individuals who are equipped to take on the challenges offered. Our emphasis is on an education that produces competent, creative, and caring individuals with mature world-views on professional, personal, as well as on societal matters. I want to remind the new graduates of their special responsibility towards this as you take on the challenges and opportunities out there.you take on the challenges and opportunities out there.

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I. ACADEMIC PROGRAMMESThe institute has B.Tech programmes in Computer Science & Engineering, Electronics & Communication Engineering and in Building Science & Engineering. We also have trans-disciplinary programmes combining Computer Science and domains like Computational Natural Sciences, Computational Linguistics, and Humanities. We have masters programmes in technology areas and several domain areas. Our dual-degree programmes produce research-trained individuals sought by industries and universities. Our Ph.D and research-based masters programmes have propelled us to be among the top institutions in the country in our areas of focus.top institutions in the country in our areas of focus.

The institute admits undergraduate students through multiple channels including the JEE Mains, Olympiad, etc. This year we introduced a new mode of admission aimed at improving the diversity (gender, urban/rural) among the admitted students. Applicants to this Special Channel (SPEC) came from two modes: female students selected for the UDAAN scheme of CBSE which trains them for competitive exams and students completing first 2 years in 6-year integrated UG programmes. Students qualifying a written test were interviewed before the final selections. We are pleased to find 15 bright girls and boysboys through this channel. We are certain they will enrich the overall environment in the campus in the coming years.

II. FACULTYWe attract enthusiastic and dedicated individuals from all over the world as faculty members. Nine new faculty members joined the institute in the past year. And six faculty members got promoted. We invite and evaluate faculty candidates throughout the year. The opportunity to weave teaching and research dynamically is a unique opportunity that is available to the faculty members of IIITH. We take advantage of experts from the industry for teaching and research at the institute as Adjunct Faculty members. We have seven of them now.

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Prof. Nand Kishore Acharya was awarded the “Mahatma Gandhi Sahitya Samman” for 2016 by the Uttar Pradesh Hindi Sansthan in recognition of his writings on Mahatma Gandhi. The award consists of a citation and a cash reward of Rs. 4 lakhs.Dr. Jolly Thomas won the Biennial Bimal Krishna Matilal Logic Prize for the year 2018 for his paper Developing Metalogic to Formalize Ontological Disputes of the Systems in Metaphysics by Introducing the Notion of Functionally Isomorphic Quantifiers.Prof.Prof. Shatrunjay Rawat will chair the combined committee for curriculum for Polytechnic (Diploma) in Computer Science and IT. He has also been renominated for CAG’s Audit Advisory Board for the state of Telangana for the period 2017 - 2019.Prof. Pradeep Kumar Ramancharla has been appointed the Chairman of IAStructE "Indian Association of Structural Engineers”, Telangana State Centre. He was also a panelist at the first edition of Making of New India in Hyderabad.Prof.Prof. Vasudeva Varma has been elected to the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) India council. He will be its Executive Council Member from 1 Jul 2018 - 30 Jun 2022.Prof. P Krishna Reddy is appointed as Steering committee chair, International Conference on Big Data Analytics series, since 2018.Dr.Dr. Deva Priyakumar participated in the Lindau Nobel Meeting for young researchers, organized by Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) at German House, Delhi, 1 - 3 December 2017.Prof. P J Narayanan participated in the Heidelberg Laureate Forum held in Germany, 24 - 29 September 2017.Prof. Vishal Garg’s book Building Energy Simulation: A Workbook Using Design Builder was launched at Green Building Congress 2017.

While we celebrate the faculty members, I would like to condole the untimely passing away of a dear colleague, Prof. Navjyoti Singh. He always had a unique and integrated outlook on the area of Humanities and was singularly responsible for the trans-disciplinary programme on Computer Science and Humanities that the institute started. A disarmingly charming person and a gentle persuader, Navjyoti will be missed greatly by his students, colleagues at the institute, and everyone who knew him.

Some of the key faculty achievements for the past year include:

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III. RESEARCHThe team of faculty, research students, research staff, and undergraduate students produced about 350 papers in top conferences and journals in the past year. Over 35 of our students including several undergraduate students travelled to conferences held outside India to present their papers and to be part of academic discussions. In all, 33 of our Ph.D students have external competitive fellowships from TCS, Google, Intel, Visvesvaraya, etc., and several more from CSIR and other sources.

WeWe collaborate with several national and international institutions, playing lead roles in several multi-institutional projects. To the impressive list of Carnegie Mellon University, University of Pennsylvania, INRIA, UC Berkeley, Hebrew University, Bauhaus University, University of the Aegean, University of Dundee, Oxford University, Dublin City University, University of Colorado, Ecole Centrale Paris, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Aalto University, University ofCambridge,Cambridge, University of Quebec, Tampere University of Technology, Vrije Universiteit, National University of Rosario, University of Burgundy, Uppsala University, University of Mainz, University of Paris-Sud, Michigan State University, University of Maryland, University of Shanghai, University of Leiden, Mälardalen University, University of Liverpool, University of Bordeaux and Lawrence Berkely National Laboratory with the The University of Aizu and Innopolis University joining the list in the past year.

TheThe institute works with national organizations like the DRDO, ISRO, DAE, MCEME, NRDC, as well as the funding agencies like the DST, MCIT, DBT, MeitY, MHRD, SERB, on sponsored research projects. We also work with several companies on research projects funded by industries including Texas Instruments, Bosch, Nissan, TCS, Intel, Yahoo, Amazon, Infosys, Honeywell, NVIDIA, Rockwell Collins, Virtusa, IBM, Flipkart, Novartis, Microsoft, Hitachi, Saint Gobain, Siemens, CA Technologies, UURMI Systems, Japan International Cooperation Agency, Renault Nissan, Saint-Gobain, GE Global Research, Wells Fargo, OpenText, Qualcomm,Qualcomm, Talent Sprint, Google, Applied Materials India Private Limited, Inshorts Media Labs, Wadhwani Institute of AI, Cyient, etc. We collaborate with institutions like Aravind Eye Hospital and Sri Chithira Thirunal Institute of Medical Sciences to take our research directly to society and its people.

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Our researchers have done well in national and international technical conferences and competitions.

I am glad to report that TCS Foundation has accepted our proposal for continued CSR funding for the Kohli Centre on Intelligent Systems (KCIS) to the tune of Rs. 33 crores for the 5 years towards making KCIS a self sufficient and a highly visible entity.

IIITIIIT Hyderabad was selected to be a partner in the University Blockchain Research Initiative by Ripple Inc., a major player in blockchain based global payments space, along with 16 other universities including MIT, Princeton, UC Berkeley, UT Austin, and IIT Bombay. We will establish a Centre of Excellence in Blockchain area to foster research in the emerging areas in the coming years.

The paper Efficient Optimization for Rank-Based Loss Functions authored by Pritish Mohapatra, Michal Rolínek, C V Jawahar, Vladimir Kolmogorov, M Pawan Kumar received an Honourable Mention in CVPR 2018.The paper Word Spotting and Recognition using Deep Embedding authored by Praveen Krishnan, Kartik Dutta and C V Jawahar won the best paper award at DAS 2018: The 13th IAPR International Workshop on Document Analysis Systems (DAS), 2018.TheThe paper Unsupervised Learning of Face Representations authored by Samyak Datta, Gaurav Sharma and C V Jawahar won the best paper award at Face and Gesture Recognition (FG 2018): The 13th IEEE Conference on Automatic Face and Gesture Recognition (FG 2018), Xi'an, China.TheThe paper Efficient Semantic Segmentation using Gradual Grouping authored by Nikitha Vallurupalli, Sriharsha Annamaneni, Girish Varma, C V Jawahar, Manu Mathew and Soyeb Nagori won the Best Runner-up Paper Award at the CVPR Workshop on Embedded Computer Vision, 2018.The paper The paper BolLy: Annotation of Sentiment Polarity in Bollywood Lyrics Dataset authored by G Drushti Apoorva and Radhika Mamidi won the best paper award at PACLING 2017: 15th International Conference of the Pacific Association for Computational Linguistics, Myanmar in August 2017.The paper Semi-Adversarial Networks: Convolutional Autoencoders for Imparting Privacy to Face Images authored by Anoop Namboodiri and others won the best paper award at ICB 2018: 11th IAPR International Conference on Biometrics (ICB 2018).TheThe paper Spectral characterization of Artocarpus heterophyllus in relation to their biochemical properties - A case study from Attappadi forest, Kerala authored by Salghuna Nair and Ramachandra Prasad has won the best contribution to young researcher award at AIT2018 - the IX Conference of the Italian Society of Remote Sensing, Florence, Italy in July 2018.SnehaSneha Jain, M.S by Research, Building Science Research Center (BSRC) student received a Building Energy Efficiency Higher & Advanced Network (BHAVAN) Award 2018 from the Department of Science and Technology (DST), GoI and the Indo-US Science and Technology Forum (IUSSTF). She is one of the 12 students from India.Robotics Research Centre (RRC) solution to Multi Object Tracking was ranked 3rd in the world at the time of submission and currently ranked 5th on KITTI Leaderboard.

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The institute has been organizing lectures by eminent individuals in different areas.

Distinguished Lecture by Prof. Martin Hellman, Turing Award winner and Professor Emeritus of Electrical Engineering at Stanford University on The Evolution of Public Key Cryptography in February 2018.Distinguished Lecture by Prof. Jim Foley, College of Computing, Georgia Tech on A Computer Graphics Grand Challenge: How Real is Real Enough? in October 2017.DistinguishedDistinguished Lecture by Prof. Jitendra Malik, Arthur J. Chick Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at UC Berkeley on Deep Visual Understanding from Deep Learning in September 2017.Distinguished Lecture by Prof. Jaime Carbonell, University Professor and Allan Newell Professor of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University on Advances in Machine Learning and Big Data with Industrial Applications in September 2017.DistinguishedDistinguished Lecture by Prof. Rama Chellappa, University of Maryland, College Park, USA on The Upending of 5 decades of Computer Vision Research - Deep Representations, Big Data & GPUs in March 2018Distinguished Lecture by Prof. Adrian Kaehler, CEO and Founder of Giant. AI on Recent Advances in Artificial Intelligence” in November 2017.Distinguished Lecture by Prof. Risto Miikkulainen, Professor of Computer Science and Neuroscience at University of Texas on Evolution of Neural Networks in December 2017.DistinguishedDistinguished Lecture by Prof. Joydeep Ghosh, Schlumberger Centennial Chair Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Texas, Austin on Personalized Healthcare: Attaining segments of one from Electronic Health Records in July 2018.An invited talk by Prof. Paul A Rosen, Fellow IEEE and Project Scientist NISAR Mission, NASA on Renaissance in Radar Applications -- Vision for Earth and Beyond in November 2017.AnAn invited talk by Prof. Petri Toiviainen, University of Jyväskylä on Decoding the musical brain: using signal processing and machine learning to uncover neural correlates of music processing in November 2017.An invited talk by Prof. Chita Das, Department Head and Distinguished Professor of Computer Science and Engineering, Pennsylvania State University on Visual Cortex on Silicon in December 2017.DistinguishedDistinguished Lecture by Thiru T M Krishna, winner of Ramon Magsaysay Award, Social Activist and a Carnatic Music Vocalist on Privacy and the Public Gaze ~ a Singer's Reflection in September 2017

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The Centre for Innovation & Entrepreneurship of IIITH Foundation completed a decade in 2018. It has been home to early stage startups from any part of the country. It focuses on startups built on deep technology now. CIE has incubated 250+ startups and generated employment to 1400+ youth. With 83 incubated companies and about 430 employees working in them, CIE holds its position as the largest academic incubator in the country. In the quest to become a top deep-tech incubator in the country, CIE has started the following programs:

IIIT Hyderabad established a product lab under the Technology Transfer Office in January 2018. The objective of product labs is to translate the IP from the research labs to market-relevant products and solutions that an entrepreneur or a corporate can take forward as a business. The TTO has identified over 150 technologies that could be relevant to industry. From those, 5 proof-of concept products are being worked on, with a view to enable 3 EIRs. The TTO office also handles IP and patents. The institute has 2 granted patents and 15 in the process of filing during this period.

Avishkar, a six months accelerator program that provides funding, mentoring, etc., from proof-of-concept to market. Over the past 2 years, Avishkar had 6 batches and 13 graduated startups. During the FY 2017-2018, CIE invested INR 75 lakhs into 9 startups.IIITH Seed Fund provides funding to startups upto INR 25 lakhs. The fund has invested Rs 40 lakhs so far, with more in the pipeline.Utsah,Utsah, a monthly meet up series to facilitate the industry-academia startup synergy. From its inception until now, we have run 15 episodes of UTSAH, with an average footfall of 40 attendees per meet up.Tech4Social, a 3-month program with five days of contact sessions per month for tech-based social enterprises. Subsequently, an Atal Incubation Centre focussed on technology for social impact has been granted to IIIT Hyderabad.TheThe BIONEST incubator by BIRAC started in the past year. Its first program, a 6 months accelerator was launched in April 2018. The first cohort has 4 MedTech focussed startups in it.CIE conducted a series of roadshows for its deep tech accelerator & Medtech accelerator, in Bangalore, Mumbai & Hyderabad. This helped uncover 8 startups for the program.CIECIE has been sanctioned support from DST for setting up a PRAYAS Centre with a FAB lab and co-working support for startups with hardware prototype.

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IV. OUTREACHThe annual R&D Showcase on 24 and 25 February 2018 featured over 250 demonstrations or posters and was visited by over 1800 individuals from industry, R&D organizations, and colleges. Several invited talks and panel discussions were also held on those days. A semester-long certificate program in AI and ML was launched by the institute in January 2018 in collaboration with TalentSprint for industry professionals. This weekend program combines face-to-face lectures, doubt clearing sessions, and intense hands-on lab sessions. The demand far exceeded our expectations and the first batch had over 400 registrants,registrants, with about a third of them having 10 or more years of experience. The second batch started in June at Hyderabad and the third batch started in July at Bangalore. This program is creating a big impact in equipping the industry to the new challenges in AI and ML. The institute and its faculty played major roles in conducting several top conferences. These include BDA-2017, ISEC-2018, ICON-2017, etc. And Interspeech-2018, USMCA-2018, ICVGIP-2018 are in pipeline.

Several workshops, summer/winter schools also were conducted this year:

Indo-German Workshop on Computing in Chemistry, Biology and Medicine (CCBM 2017), 29 - 30 November 2017.Developer's Tutorial held on 14 February 2018, Hyderabad, India jointly organized by IIITH & European Union(EU) by Dr. Sachin Chaudhari, SPCRC.Building Science Research Center organized a short course on Building Energy Simulation for Energy Conservation Building Code (ECBC) 2017 in February 2018.AA two-day course for top leadership in the industry on Machine Learning and its applications was organized twice in the past year.A workshop on Music Cognition Symposium Neural, Behavioural, Cultural, and Therapeutic Perspectives in March 2018.Advances in Speech Processing Applications (ASPA-2018), 14 - 19 May 2018.IIITIIIT Hyderabad hosted Panini Linguistics Olympiad (PLO) camp to train and select the Indian national team for the International Linguistics Olympiad (IOL) in June 2018. Two teams went to Prague. Team India won 2 gold, 1 silver and 2 bronze medals and 3 best solution awards inIOL 2018. This is a moment of pride for us.The ninth IIITH Advanced Summer School on NLP (IASNLP-2018), 25 June to 7 July 2018.A Summer School on Social Computing was held from June - July, 2018.3rd Summer School on Computer Vision, Basics of Modern AI and the3rd Summer School on Computer Vision, Basics of Modern AI and the3rd Summer School on Machine Learning were held in July 2018.The 5th STEP Program on Computational Thinking & Its Applications with 104 students from classes 7th to 10th were held as usual from May - June 2017.MSR-ACM Academic Summit 2018 was held on campus in January with keynotes by Prof. Raj Reddy, Eric Horvitz, and Chris Bishop, and other top academicians from India.

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V. STUDENT LIFE & ACHIEVEMENTS

The value education program that started in IIIT Hyderabad in 2005 has now been adopted by the IITs, different universities, AICTE, UGC, etc. The Human Values Cell conducted Faculty Development Program for Student Induction in December 2017 at IIT Tirupati for about 120 faculty members from IITs, NIT Surathkal, Anna University, etc. Prof. Pradeep Kumar contributed actively in AICTE's nation-wide series of FDPs for 3 week student induction. AICTE has recognised Prof. Pradeep Kumar as AP & Telangana's State Academic Coordinator for the Induction Program.

II would like to briefly mention our efforts to support students financially so that top-class education provided at IIITH is not denied to anyone qualified for admission. The institute has guaranteed to the 15 students admitted through the SPEC channel required support, based on discussions with the alumni who are eager to support. We are also approaching several companies to help this cause through CSR contributions. As with alumni scholarships, we use a pay-forward or support-barter model wherein the students who are supported will help support students in the future as a payback. This will ensure support given to this have an impact on several generations of students to come.given to this have an impact on several generations of students to come.

All round development of the student is a key goal of IIIT Hyderabad. Opportunities to take part in cultural, sports and social activities exist at the institute. The human values program is continuing at the institute while it is spreading to different institutions in the country.

TheThe institute hosts regularly Distinguished Lectures by eminent individuals from different walks of the society. Apart from those, there were workshops with themes of Diversity and Gender sensitization. There were awareness talks on substance abuse, cybersecurity, social media addiction and mental health. Students organized various dance and music events throughout the year and hosted several programmes by external artists. Several inter-house sports and cultural activities were also conducted. Clubs like Debate, Photography,Film,Film, Drama, Dance, Art, Music, etc., are active on campus. The students also hosted a parliamentary debate that saw participation of more than 200 external students. The biggest annual event Felicity had the theme Global Weekend. As part of its campaign, the students took up many social initiatives.

AsAs part of NSS activities 2 blood donation camps, international yoga day, tree plantation, clothes collection and lake cleaning drives were organized. Students also engaged themselves in social activities like visiting orphanages and old-age homes, teaching the under-privileged children from nearby slums and participating in different awareness programmes including alcohol and drug addiction, women empowerment and government schemes. The new building Tarangini for student-activities was inaugurated in March 2018. It houses an amphitheatre with green rooms. It also has rooms for dance and music activities.music activities.

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VI. GRADUATING STUDENTS

VII. ALUMNI

Our students did well in national and international technical conferences and competitions.

On the Sports front:

Too Weak Too Slow was the best Indian Team at ACM-ICPC World Finals in Beijing, China. This is the 9th time in 10 years that a IIITH team has gone to the world finals.Team FalconX participated in CANSAT organized by The American Astronautical Society (AAS). The team comprised of 2nd and 3rd year UG students who performed well and were placed in 24th position.Bhaktipriya, a final year B.Tech student spent a semester at the CSAIL in MIT both doing courses and research.

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Our students performed well and won awards in badminton and table tennis (girls - singles and doubles, boys- singles and doubles) and chess tournaments at the 7th National Level Inter Engineering College Sports Fest 2018 organized by Vidya Jyothi Institute of Technology.PEC organized 2 days night cricket with participation of 400+ students on campus.Two lawn tennis courts (one for singles and one doubles court) with flood lights and fencing were built. It is one of the most popular sports now.

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The graduating batch of B.Tech, Dual Degree, M.Tech, Master of Science by Research, Ph.D, and MSIT programmes is 423 in number (with 125 UG, 213 PG and 85 MSIT). In the year 2018, a total number of 137 companies registered for conducting placements and made job offers to these graduating students. The institute had 100% placements in the past year.

The alumni of the institute are spread all over the world and have been making significant contributions in their respective spheres. In the past year, our alumni created impact through startups like Commut, DreamVu, and others. Some became faculty members in IIT Jodhpur, IIT Tirupati, and IIT Varanasi in the past year. And they continue to lead and advance product groups in several important companies of the world!’ As the institute is completing 20 years this year, special efforts are being made to strengthen the connect with the global alumni. As part of this, an alumni meet was held in Bangalore on 5 August thatthat was attended by over 180 members of the alumni from the first batch to those who are graduating today. Similar meets are being held in the Bay Area on 18 August and in Seattle on 19 August, with a grand finale at Hyderabad on 1 September. The alumni have setup an active alumni scholarship program for needy students. The alumni have contributed about Rs. 72 lakhs for this in the past and 35 students have received financial assistance through the scheme.These financial support engagements will also follow the support-barter scheme.

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VIII. SUMMARY

The Alumni cell organized:

I’AM Meet: Started in 2016, IIITH Alumni Meet (I’AM) is the annual alumni reunion organized by the Alumni Cell where alumni from batches at least 10 years old were invited to the campus for a reunion on 23 December 2017.Meet Your Alumni (MYA) initiative to introduce our distinguished alumni who excel in different fields. We had a session by Siddharth Sharma, a 2006 IIITH graduate who joined the ISB as an Assistant Professor last year.AlumniAlumni Portal: Alumni Cell has been successful in creating a one stop portal for connecting alumni with students and themselves. The alumni cell also maintains a database of the alumni towards keeping close ties with them.

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In summary, IIITHyderabad took several steps in the past year along its path towards being a globally visible academic institution with positive impact on the society. We graduated more students, published more papers, produced more theses, and secured more research grants from the government and the industry.

II congratulate graduating students and their parents once again. I implore the new batch of students joining the ever growing network of alumni to go out and conquer the world in your own unique ways. While doing so, keep a little bit of IIITH in your hearts and connect back with the institute of tomorrow to help push it forward. Great institutions are built and maintained by its alumni. It has been our privilege to be a part of your journey of life!

International Institute of Information TechnologyGachibowli, Hyderabad 500 032, Telangana, INDIA

Phone : +91-40-6653 1000 l Fax : +91-40-6653 1413 l www.iiit.ac.in