BITS Pilani

Latest news

• DST funding for expansion of Aakash Ganga project

  DST funding for expansion of Aakash Ganga project

  Akash Ganga, the rainwater harvesting project (Principal Investigators : Prof.  Rajiv Gupta, Professor of Civil Engineering at BITS Pilani and Mr B P Agrawal, Founder, Sustainable Innovations, US ) will be expanded and perfected in the next two years. The expansion will be in terms of sustainability, scalability, financial feasibility, viability and cultural integration.  The duo team will work with two voluntary organizations, namely, Society for Community Organization and People’s Education (SCOPE) and Samudra Vikas Samsthan to expand and perfect the Project in the next two years.  The  expansion project received funding of Rs 60 lakhs  from Department of Science and Technology, Government of India. This was stated by Prof Rajiv Gupta while he was speaking to the Media Relations  Unit of the Institute.

  Aakash Ganga, which has been implemented in six villages of Rajasthan, namely, Pilani, Raila, Harinagar, Lasedi, Indrasar and Kaakreu Kalan is a replicable and self sustainable rooftop rainwater harvesting scheme. The local village body acquires rights, from homeowners, for a fee to harvest their rooftop rainwater during the rainy season. The village body, in return,  supplies the stored and filtered drinking water to the villages for a fee that is affordable, economically viable and socially equitable.  Aakash Ganga has a multi-tier architecture consisting of a ‘Griha’ (Home) tank, attached to an individual house, Samooh (Collective) tank for collecting overflows from a group of houses, Sanjha (Common) tank for collecting overflows from Somooh tanks and other community structures, and a Gram (Village) reservoir, a large capacity reservoir for the village.  Aakash Ganga deploys GIS to optimize the water collection network and location of storage tanks. The Griha tank with a storage capacity of 20000 litres  has been designed to meet the drinking water needs of a house for 6-12 months with average rainfall of 400 mm. The network can be scaled to suit a large community.  

  Professor Rajiv Gupta said that Aakash Ganga is a comprehensive scheme which provides a network of tanks for providing water to the entire village, besides harvesting the rainwater. Its use of GIS images  helps in the design and implementation of tanks for improving the functional efficiency of the system. It would use a wireless network  to collect information about the distribution of water, tank leakage and maintenance which would go a long way in optimizing the water usage. Another facet of Aakash Ganga is the vegetation it supports as a result of which the villagers can grow  a lot of low water dependent plants such as Amla, Beri, Lemon, Lac,  Olive etc  in the vicinities of the tanks which help in income generation for the village. Prof Gupta added that Aakash Ganga is  scalable and is  replicable in any  rural or urban setting.  The project team will also develop a software which will work as a tool for  a Junior Engineer to replicate the scheme for other villages of the state. Above all, Akash Ganga is in perfect harmony with the village cultural ethos since the scheme provides facilities for worshipping at the water tanks, which also has a spin off ie it maintains cleanliness and hygiene near the tanks, Prof Gupta added.

• Guest lectures on Green House Gases Carbon Dioxide and Methane and Hydrogen as Future Fuel

  Guest lectures on Green House Gases Carbon Dioxide and Methane and Hydrogen as Future Fuel

   

  Two guest lectures on the theme, “Geen house gases : Carbon Dioxide and Methane and Hydrogen as future fuel by Dr S Sarkar, 

   Dy. General Manager GAIL, was organized by Mechanical Engineering Association on 18-19 February 2012.  Titles of the lectures were :

   

  1)      " A life we long for" covering green house gases Carbon Dioxide and Methane Management

  2)      "Development of CNG in India for transportation sector"

  Dr Sarkar is a mechanical engineer with majors in Gas and Steam Turbo Machinery from St Petersburg University and Peoples’ Friendship University, Russia. He was awarded the Best Candidate award in the University and  a Certificate of Honors by Ministry of Higher Secondary Education,  USSR. He has 33 years of experience in field of Petrochemicals, Turbo Machines, Oil Refineries, Power Plant equipment design and development. Dr Sarkar has done research in the fields of energy and combined cycle power plants. He has been instrumental in developing a National Standard on CNG, under the auspices of Oil Industry Safety Directorate, Ministry of Petroleum and Natural Gas.  His work area includes SUSTAINABLE & ENVIRONMENTALLY FRIENDLY projects like LANDFILL GAS PROJECT, Compressed Natural Gas PROJECT for Mumbai City.

• Seminar in the Department of Electrical & Electronics/ Electronics & Instrumentation Engineering

  Seminar in the Department of Electrical & Electronics/ Electronics & Instrumentation Engineering

  A seminar on ‘Bio-signal based On-road Stress Monitoring for Automotive Drivers’ by Dr R R Singh was held at the Department of Electrical & Electronics/ Electronics &Instrumentation Engineering on Wednesday, February 15^th 2012.  The seminar was based on the paper earlier presented by the author at the ““Eighteenth National Conference on Communications (NCC 2012)   held in IIT Kharagpur, February 3-5. 2012.

• Interface 2012 held

  Interface 2012 held

  The 35^th All India Management Convention, “INTERFACE 2012” was organized by the Department of Management, BITS Pilani on 10-12 February 2012.  The theme of Interface 2012 was “Aarambh – the creative beginning”. The inauguration function was graced by the presence of Mr. Valmeeka Nathan, Vice President and Head, Manufacturing Business Unit, Infosys Ltd as the Chief Guest and by Mr. Sameer Hanchate, a Film Maker and the Director of the movie “Gafla” as a keynote speaker.  Director,  Prof G Raghurama, and other faculty members and students were present on the occasion. The three day management festival had various activities including lectures and workshops by experts, seminars, panel discussions,  competitions, quizzes and management games. Speakers included Mr Sarat Babu, entrepreneur.

  In the quiz event, Prashn Chinh, the first position was secured by Shaheed Sukhdev of  College of Business Studies, Delhi and second position by BITS Pilani. In York & Slog 2.0, teams of BITS Pilani got both first and second positions.  Barter King was the other popular event in which first position was secured by Narsee Munji Institute of Management Studies, Mumbai, and second by IPE, Hyderabad. In B-Plan competition,  IIT Rourkee won the first position and the second position went to SP Jain Institute of Management and Research. In the finals of Case study,  there was a tie for the first place between IMT Ghaziabad and SITM Pune and second place was obtained by MICA, Ahmadabad.

• Online talk on "Cryptography"

  Online talk on "Cryptography"

  Embryo organized an  online talk on "Cryptography" on Friday, 10^th February 2012 in LTC 5106.  The speaker was Mr. Gary Kessler, an independent consultant and practitioner in the areas of computer and network forensics, mobile device forensics, computer and network security, TCP/IP and the Internet, and communications protocols and standards. He is also Interim Associate Program Director (Academics) for the Master of Science in Information Assurance program at Norwich University in Northfield, VT. In addition, Mr Kessler is an adjunct associate professor at Edith Cowan University in Perth, Western Australia, a member of the Vermont Internet Crimes Against Children (ICAC) Task Force, and editor-in-chief of the Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law. He is also a charter member of The Computer History Museum (formerly The Computer Museum) and the ‘Internet Society’.

• Online talk on "Wireless security and its implications"

  Online talk on "Wireless security and its implications"

  Embryo presented an  online talk on “Wireless security and its implications" at LTC 5106 by Mr Vivek Ramachandran, on Thursday, 9^th February 2012.  The talk covered  basic aspects of wireless security , commonly used attacks and ways to defend the

  same.  The speaker, Mr. Vivek Ramachandran (BTech from IIT Guwahati,), is a researcher in wireless security and the  founder of securitytube.net.He received international recognition as a Security Researcher in 2007 for the discovery of the Caffe Latte Attack . He was featured on CBS5, BBC, Computer World, Mac World, IT World, Network World, The Register etc.  

  
  

• Announcement of BITS Pilani “Class of 1981” Chair Professorship

  Announcement of BITS Pilani “Class of 1981” Chair Professorship

  Vice Chancellor Prof B N Jain has announced the creation of “Class of 1981” Chair Professorship in the area of  “Information Technology and other Engineering disciplines that preferably have a strong computational element”. This Chair Professorship, created by Alumni members of 1981 batch,  will be tenable at either of BITS campuses in Pilani, Goa, Hyderabad and Dubai.

  A Chair Professorship helps recognize and reward excellence in teaching and/or research by a member of the BITS faculty at either of its campuses or to induct a professor from outside BITS. Such a person would be re-designated as Chair Professor. Each “Chair Professorship” also helps establish an endowment with significant funds that are used to (a) make available to the Chair Professor a “research grant”, and (b) provide to him/her a small honorarium to cover additional effort required to fulfill the charter laid out for the endowment.

   

  The faculty, staff and students gratefully acknowledge this very significant initiative on the part of BITS’ alumni “Class of 1981”, and remain convinced that such initiatives will help BITS scale newer heights.