Awards & Achievements

Awards and Achievements

Awards and Achievements of BITS Pilani, K K Birla Goa Campus

Semester II of 2022-23

January to July 2023 – Semester II of 2022-23

Faculty/ Staff achievements

Prof. Anirban Roy, Department of Chemical Engineering and Founder, Epione Swajal Solutions (ESSIL) [incubated at BITS Pilani, K K Birla Goa Campus] inked an Indo-US Contract in Energy Sector for design of Membrane Based Direct Lithium Extraction (DLE) Pilot Plant for NEXT-ChemX Corporation, USA to be deployed at Austin, Texas for testing real life brines from Bolivia, including projects in Argentina and Chile.

Prof. Debasis Patnaik, Department of Economics and Finance along with Vedant Bhardwaj and Shashi Yadav received the ‘Best Paper – Reviewer’s Choice’ award for their paper titled ‘Safety as a Quality Care Assessment Parameter in Health Units of Goa State’ at the International Conference on ‘Interdisciplinary Research in Technology & Management’ held at IRTM from 20^th – 22^nd April 2023.

Prof. Debasis Patnaik also received the ‘Best Presenter Award’ for their paper titled ‘Impact of Covid-19 on Volatility of Indian Banking Sector Stocks’ Co-Authored by: Sameer M Shaikh, Melba Judieth Fernandes, Sunil Kumar Ambrammal, presented at ‘2023 Interdisciplinary Research in Technology & Management conference’ held from 20^th – 22^nd April 2023.

Prof. Narendra Nath Ghosh, Department of Chemistry and Prof. Anirban Roy, Department of Chemical Engineering and two scientists from ABSTCPL – Dr. Amit Chatterjee and Dr. Hemanthkumar Aiyer have been granted Indian Patent to ‘Nanoparticles Reinforced Hollow Fiber Membrane’. It’s a novel membrane developed by embedding specially designed nanoparticles, which are capable of degrading textile effluent under sunlight exposure, in hollow fiber membranes and was tested for its efficiency. A prototype was also developed for demonstrating material at the pre-pilot scale. The patent covers the nanoparticle-embedded hollow fiber membrane material specially designed for this purpose.

Prof. Ranjan Dey, Department of Chemistry has been elected to the Faraday Community for Physical Chemistry Council of the Royal Society of Chemistry.

Dr. Sarang C. Dhongdi, Dept of Electrical & Electronics Engineering has been co-opted as a member of LITD 27/WG 7 Sectional Committee on "Maritime & Underwater IoT", by Bureau of Indian Standards.

Prof. Snehanshu Saha, Department of Computer Science and Information Systems and Dr Margarita Safonova, Indian Institute of Astrophysics (IIA), an autonomous institute of the Department of Science & Technology, Government of India, led a group of researchers that included Prof. Santonu Sarkar, Jyotirmoy Sarkar (a doctoral student) and Kartik Bhatia (an undergraduate student at BITS Goa), that has devised a novel AI-based approach to identify potentially habitable planets with a high probability.

The team was able to detect and shortlist six potentially habitable planets, which are a subset of the 60 optimistic habitable candidates identified by Abel Mendez and his group in the PHL-EC database. This, according to the scientists, is a critical validation of the AI-based method. In addition, the team also proposed nearly 8000 candidate planets that showed anomalous features like Earth. Prof. Saha developed a novel anomaly detection algorithm (a subclass of AI algorithms) to detect potentially habitable exoplanets. Their work received wide news coverage (Print and Electronic) in English, Hindi, Malayalam and Bengali, also highlighted by the funding agency, DST, GoI.

Prof. Sumit Biswas, Department of Biological Sciences and Mr. Utpal Mallick, Research Scholar, ViSta Lab were granted design patent on Incubation system for marine organisms

Prof. Veeky Baths, Department of Biological Sciences has been selected as the member of the International Supervisory Board of the Human Capital Multidisciplinary Research Centre – largest ever initiative in Humanities and Social Sciences in Russia. Prof. Baths is selected as the leading foreign scholar.

Student achievements

Aditi Prabhune (2018PHXF0431G) a Ph.D. student in Department of Chemistry won the Best Poster Award at the 38^th International Conference on Solution Chemistry (38ICSC) in Belgrade, Serbia, held from 9^th to 14^th July 2023.

Anjli Varghese (2018PHXF0405G), a Ph.D. student in Department of EEE has been awarded as one of the Best Presenters at the 5^th International Conference on Computer Communication and the Internet, held in Fujisawa, Japan, on June 23-25, 2023.

She presented the paper titled ‘A Heterogeneous Ensemble Learning Approach for Leather Species Prediction,’ a part of her research work. Prof. A Amalin Prince and Dr. Malathy Jawahar are the co-authors of this paperwork. Her research work is supported by Tata Consultancy Services Research Scholar Program (TCS-RSP).

Chandresh Dwivedi (2017PHFX0411G), a PhD student in Dept. of Chemical Engineering has been awarded “SERB-FICCI Young Achiever Award” during the annual review held at IIT-Delhi on 14^th - 15^th Feb 2023. Mr. Chandresh is working in the sponsored research project titled “Design and Development of cost-effective carbon-silica dual phase fillers” in collaboration with M/s. Apollo Tyres Ltd, Chennai under the supervision of Prof S. D. Manjare. He is also the recipient of the prestigious “Prime Minister Doctoral Research Fellowship” (PMDRF) in 2019 – the first university wide research fellow to receive this award.

Debika Gogoi (2018PHXF0429G), a PhD student of the Department of Chemistry has won the “ACS Best Poster Presentation Award” at the International Conference on nanomaterials and Sustainable Applications (NANO-SA), 2023 organized by Institute of Chemical Technology, Mumbai (Marathwada Campus) held on 10^th – 11^th Jan 2023. The title of the poster paper: “Flexible and High-Performance Energy Storage Device from Biomass-Derived Porous Carbon Supported MnCo₂O₄ Nanorods and MnO₂ Nanoscales” by Debika Gogoi, Rajeshvari SamatbhaiKarmur, Manash R. Das Narendra Nath Ghosh*

Pritish R Shukla (2021PHXF0051G), the Birla Carbon-CSR-sponsored PhD student of the Dept of Biological Sciences has been awarded the prestigious Prime Minister's Fellowship for Doctoral Research (PMRF), 2023-2024 for PMRF-Project Title: "Recovery of Resources from Worn-Out Tires for Enabling Circular Economy’’

Shamik Prabhu Chodnekar (2020PHXF0003G) and Ashutosh Dwivedi (2022A4PS0905) 1^st year student of Mechanical Engineering represented BITS Pilani, K K Birla Goa Campus and won the Environmental Quiz Competition organized by Goa State Pollution Control Board on the occasion of World Environment Day 2023.

Sourav Sahoo (2018PHXF0033G), Prof. Radhika Vathsan (Department of Physics) and Prof. Tabish Qureshi (Jamia Millia Islamia, Delhi) co-authored paper, entitled “Emergence of Classicality in Stern-Gerlach Experiment via Self-Gravity” published in Annalen der Physik, February 2023 (DOI: https://doi.org/10.1002/andp.202200627) has been selected for a news article in Advanced Science News. Link to news coverage: https://www.advancedsciencenews.com/how-does-classical-physics-arise-from-quantum-mechanics/

Goa Campus players showed impeccable performance at ARENA 2023, BITS Pilani Hyderabad Campus's Annual Sports Fest held from 2^nd to 5^th Feb 2023, and were able to bring in following trophies for our college:

Boys Badminton Team won the third place: Ansh Gupta (2020A8PS1506G), Neel Khare (2019B4A70620G), Sushil Nayak (2020AAPS0239G), Tanmay Bankar (2020A7PS0976G) & Vardhan Palod (2020A7PS0982G)

Ansh Gupta, Neel Khare, Sushil Nayak, Tanmay Bankar and Vardhan Palod

Girls tennis team won 1st place, finals against Hyderabad Campus team A: Shruti Sen (2020A1PS2058G), Sanjanna Agarwal (2021B4PS2780G) and Anushka Sethi (2021B3A71074G)

Team Event Finals: BITS Goa Squash Team beat Hyderabad Campus Team A to win Gold.

Shrey Mehta (2020B3A71459G), Armaan Chowfin (2019B3A70289G), Siddharth Porwal (2021A4PS1377G), Shaunak Damle (2021A7PS2607G)

Individual Event Finals: Armaan Chowfin (Goa) beat Dhruv Kumar (Hyd) to win Gold.

Chess team won gold: Shreyas K (2020B4AA0714G), Ajit Chandrashekhar (2020A7PS0988G), Jaskeerat Ahluwalia (2020A3PS1608G), Siddhant Sawant (2021A3PS1047G), Reetish Rath (2022A3PS1254G)

Powerlifting weight category 69-74: Aaryan Marar won Gold

Table tennis Doubles: 2nd position BPGC A (Abheesh and Mandar) and 3rd position BPGC B (Yash and Hari)
Team event 2nd position BPGC A: (Abheesh Mandar Yash and Hari)

BITS UFC A finished second

Ultimate Frisbee Team - BITS UFC emerged victorious as the national champions in National College Ultimate Championship (NCUC) held at Ahmedabad, Gujarat on 1^st – 2^nd April 2023.

Eights students made it to the prestigious list of 6^th Edition of ET Campus Stars Class 2022-23. Ananya Gupta, Ansh Lalchandani, Astitva Sehgal, Ayushi Dubal, Dwij Dixit, Rayan Doshi, Tanmaiy Sethia and Viren Jindal participated in India’s largest hunt for the brightest engineering minds in the country which saw participation from over 35,000+ students from 2,000+ colleges. Of 87 students who emerged winners and made it to the coveted list, 8 are from Goa Campus.

The team consisting of Prayag Mohanty (2020A3PS0566G) and Gautam Sajith (2021A7PS2087G) emerged as the runners-up in the Heroes & Villains Quiz at the Linquiztics'23 organized by The Literary, Debate and Quiz Club (LDQ) of the Manipal Institute of Technology held from 17^th to 19^th Feb 2023.

The team consisting of Prayag Mohanty (2020A3PS0566G), Amit Kuvelker (2021A7PS3054G) and Dhruv Chandak (2021B3AA1068G) qualified for the finals of the General Quiz at the Linquiztics'23 organized by The Literary, Debate and Quiz Club (LDQ) of the Manipal Institute of Technology held from 17^th to 19^th Feb 2023.

Ashutosh Gupta (2019AATS0223G) pursued his off-campus thesis at the Biorobotics Lab, Carnegie Mellon University from June to Dec 2022. During his thesis, he co-authored a paper "A Curvature and Trajectory Optimization-based 3D Surface Reconstruction Pipeline for Ultrasound Trajectory Generation". The paper has been accepted to the 40th IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) 2023 to be held from 29^th May to 2^nd June 2023.

Bhuwan Tyagi (2018B2AA0844G) co-authored research paper, titled “5G Compact Planar Antenna for Multiple Applications”, has been published in IEEE MAPCON 2022 held from 12^th to 15^th Dec 2022. MAPCON is an IEEE event that creates an international platform for Microwave, Antenna and Propagation experts and technologists from Industry, Academia and Startup ecosystem to collaborate and share their vision, expertise and knowledge.

Shikha Bhat (2019A7PS0063G), Ruturaj Godse (2019A7PS0002G) and Shruti Mestry’s research paper titled ‘Studying the Impact of Transportation During Lockdown on the Spread of COVID-19 Using Agent-based Modeling’ based on the research conducted under the guidance of Prof. Vinayak Naik has been accepted at ICAART 2023: 15^th International Conference on Agents and Artificial Intelligence (https://icaart.scitevents.org/) to be held on 22nd to 24th February 2023 in Lisbon, Portugal.

Bhat, S.; Godse, R.; Mestry, S. and Naik, V. (2023). Studying the Impact of Transportation During Lockdown on the Spread of COVID-19 Using Agent-Based Modeling. In Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Agents and Artificial Intelligence - Volume 1, ISBN 978-989-758-623-1, ISSN 2184-433X, pages 80-92.

The research work was funded by Shastri Indo-Canada Institute (SICI), New Delhi and travel was supported by K K Birla Goa Campus.

Tushar Shrimali (2019B4A70266G) participated in 'Beginning Astronomy: Start a Data-Driven Journey' workshop organized by IUCAA at MAHE, Manipal from 2^nd to 4^th Feb 2023. This was a sponsored workshop and the selection for the same was competitive in nature.

Yash Nilesh Soman (2020AAPS1429G) won university-level Cisco thingQbator thingQuiz organized by Cisco thingQbator and Nasscom Foundation. It was a 2-stage national level competition, with students from 30+ top Indian universities participating in the same. As part of the preparation for this event, Yash completed the courses available on the Cisco thingQbator LMS page, and secured certifications of excellence in all of them. Earlier Yash won the intra-university level to qualify for the university level.
Semester I of 2022-23

August to December 2022 – Semester I of 2022-23

Faculty/ Staff achievements

Dr. Harikrishnan N. B., Visiting Faculty, Department of CSIS and APPCAIR co-authored (lead author) a paper titled: ‘Causality Preserving Chaotic Transformation and Classification using Neurochaos Learning’ which was accepted in the 36th Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2022) [CORE A*, consistently ranked among the top THREE of all AI conferences.

Prof. Lakshmi Subramanian, Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, as a contributor and collaborator of the Delhi Art Gallery, launched a catalogue "March to Freedom" as part of the Azadi ka Amrut Mahotsav celebrations in the Indian Museum, Kolkata during 13^th – 14^th Aug 2022.

Prof. Narendra Nath Ghosh, Department of Chemistry was awarded “BHARAT SHIKSHA GAURAV PURASKAR” and a “CERTIFICATE OF EDUCATION EXCELLENCE”, by KTK Outstanding Achievers and Education Foundation, New Delhi.

Dr. Naveen Gupta, Department of EEE was selected for the SERB International Research Experience (SIRE) grant supported by the SERB, Department of Science and Technology, Govt. of India.

This fellowship supports a two-month research visit to the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Essex, UK. During his visit, he collaborated with Dr. Zilong Liu, Lecturer, University of Essex, on a project entitled “Implementation of IRS-based NOMA-aided Cooperative D2D Communication System”.

Prof. Prasanta Kumar Das, Department of Physics, has been selected in the Visiting Associateship Programme at the Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics (IUCAA), Pune.

Prof. Rajesh Mehrotra, Department of Biological Sciences was awarded V S Rao Foundation’s C R Mitra Best Faculty Award 2021. Prof. Mehrotra was presented with a Citation and cash prize of Rs. 1,00,000/- as part of this award.

Prof. Ranjan Dey, Department of Chemistry, elected a Core Committee Member of Statistical Mechanics and Thermodynamics Group (SMTG) of Royal Society of Chemistry.

Prof. Samit Chattopadhyay, Senior Professor & Shri B K Birla & Shrimati Sarala Birla Chair Professor at the Department of Biological Sciences has been nominated as the Chair of the Board of Governors of the prestigious National Institute of Pharmaceutical Education and Research (NIPER) Hajipur, Bihar.

Prof. Snehanshu Saha, Department of CSIS and APPCAIR is offered a honorary position as Advisor to The African Center of Excellence in Data Science, University of Rwanda.

Dr. Solano Da Silva, Department of Humanities & Social Sciences co-authored a book ‘The Great Goa Land Grab, Saligao, Goa’ (2022) with Kenneth Bo Nielsen and Heather Plumridge Bedi, published by Goa 1556. ISBN 978-81-956329-2-3.

Dr. Sudhy S. Panicker, Department of Mechanical Engineering, published a SCOPUS Indexed paper entitled ‘Study of dual pulse gas metal arc welding process characteristics on IS 2062 steel’ by M. Arunkumar, P. Aneesh Kumar, S. Sampreeth, and Sudhy S. Panicker, Journal- Materials Today: Proceedings, Elsevier, 20 August 2022

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.matpr.2022.08.092

Dr. Sudhy S. Panicker, also published a Book Chapter entitled: "Springback in Tailor Welded Blanks Using a Heuristic Approach" by Sudhy S Panicker, Hariharan Krishnaswamy and Nirupam Chakraborti in book "Springback Assessment and Compensation of Tailor Welded Blanks" Published December 27, 2022 by CRC Press, Taylor and Francis group

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1201/9781003164241-5

Prof. Suman Kundu, Director, received IIHM Teachers Day Award from International Institute of Hotel Management (IIHM) in recognition of his services in the field of teaching and research on the occasion of Teachers Day Celebration. Prof. Kundu was nominated for this award by Founder and Chief Mentor of IIHM, Dr Suborno Bose.

Mr. Atul Sankaw, Senior Manager, Practice School and a 2002 Batch Alumni of Shree Rayeshwar Institute of Engineering and Information Technology was honored with the Outstanding Professional Achievement Alumni Award by his alma mater Shree Rayeshwar Institute of Engineering and Information Technology, Shiroda Goa an Engineering college in Goa established in 2001.

This Alumni Award was in recognition of his Excellent Contributions and Achievements in the Professional World at the State Level. He received the award at the hands of the Hon’ble Chief Minister of Goa Dr. Pramod Sawant during the Alumni Meet of the college held at the college campus on 23^rd Dec 2022. In the distinguished presence of Mr. Nitin Kunkolienkar, President Emeritus, MAIT India, and Mr. Subash Shirodkar, Minister WRD, Govt. of Goa and Chairman, Shivgram Education Society.

Student achievements

Project CanSat-Team Rayquaza qualified for CanSat India competition

A CanSat is a sounding rocket payload used to teach space technology. It is similar to the technology used in miniaturized satellites. It is an extremely popular form factor for student competitions.

BITS Goa had a CanSat team in 2019, but the project was stopped due to the pandemic. The project restarted in 2022 and the team has participated in India’s first-ever CanSat competition organized by Astronautical Society of India (ASI). The team has cleared the Preliminary Design Review stage (1st round) and are currently working on the Critical Design Review (2nd Round). The team started making the prototype for the CDR last semester.

The CanSat team consists of: Vikramvaidyanthan Venkatraman (Team Lead and Electronics Subsystem Lead); Om Diwan (Mechanical Subsystem Lead); Siddhant Vattsa (Communications Lead); Pratyush Kumar (Electronics Subsystem Team Member); Aakash Bedre (Mechanical Subsystem Team Member); Jonish Abisheck (Mechanical Subsystem Team Member); and Milind Singh Rao (Communication Subsystem Team Member)

About the competition: CanSat India, a student competition by IN-SPACe, is the first of its kind held in India. It is divided into four main phases. The first phase involves the submission of a PDR (Preliminary Design Review) Document. The second Phase involves the submission of a CDR (Critical Design Review). After this, a Flight Readiness check is done by the competition. Upon Clearing all the stages, the final launch of the Cansat itself is done. This is a year-long competition, with registrations starting in August and the final launch scheduled for June of the following year. The Astronautical Society of India organizes it. The main focus of this year's competition will be the descent control of the CanSat. It is an interdisciplinary project requiring various hardware and software skills.

The PDR document outlines the design of our CanSat. It explains the thought process behind every choice, justification, and possible alternative for said design. We have submitted our PDR and have made it to the second round, which involves the CDR.

The CDR document outlines the building of our prototype and the tests we do on it, and the results. We also have to mention if there were any changes made to the actual design in comparison to the PDR and if the results of the tests matched our expectations.

EINSat team presented papers at the AIAA International Student Conference

EINSat team presented following two papers at the AIAA International Student Conference in Adelaide, Australia on 29^th Nov 2022:

·         Multi-battery System as an alternative to Single Battery Storage in Nano Satellites.

·         Use of Fast Steering Mirrors in improving LOS Pointing Accuracy in Observation-Based CubeSats.

Project EINSat is the CubeSat project of SEDS Celestia - the first CubeSat undertaking at Goa Campus. The aim of the project is to design and build a 3U CubeSat which will be deployed to low-earth orbit and monitor stars to detect exoplanet transits.

A group of students viz. Kaustubh Murudkar (Founder and Team Lead), Vikramvaidyanathan Venkataraman, Parth Keswani, and Roehit Gupta worked on the paper presented in AIAA under the guidance of Dr. Kunal Korgaonkar and Prof. Sri Ram Shankar Rajadurai.

Project Kratos secured 2nd rank at Anatolian Rover Challenge, Turkey

Project Kratos, a Mars Rover team from BITS Pilani, K K Birla Goa Campus secured a worldwide rank of 2nd and stood 1st in Asia in the finals of the Anatolian Rover Challenge (ARC) held in Istanbul, Turkey. The team has also been awarded the best ‘Autonomous and Controls Vertical’ and ‘Science Vertical’ by consensus of the Judges and Jury. Kratos scored the most points amongst all the teams in Mission 3 (Testing capabilities of Robotic Arm) and Mission 4 (Testing Science vertical), with a 98 out of 100 score in the latter. Prof. Suman Kundu, Director of BITS Pilani, K K Birla Goa Campus congratulated the team on behalf of the Institute. The students’ team was led by Mr. Saurabh Kalra and supervised by Prof. Toby Joseph (Faculty at Dept. of Physics).

The Challenge, held from 22^nd to 25^th July 2022, was organized by the Space Exploration Society (UKET), and the final round of the competition hosted over 12 participant teams from all across the world. The competition was highly multidisciplinary and the tasks tested every aspect of the rover. Besides BITS Pilani, IIT Madras was another team from India that participated in the finals.

The various challenges in competition included picking soil samples and identifying them for signs of life, using a robotic arm to lift and manipulate heavy payloads and traversing autonomously through undulating terrain.

The project has participated in the Indian Rover Challenge 2020, the International Mars Hackathon (IMH) conducted by MSSA, International Rover Design Challenge (IRDC) 2021 and URC 2022. At the International Rover Challenge 2020, Project Kratos has qualified top among the new teams. The team secured the topmost position among the Indian competitors, ranked 2nd in Asia and finished 20th worldwide in URC 2022 (held in June 2022 at Utah, the USA). In the Science Task category, the team ranked 12th worldwide.

BITS Student team ‘BITSnPieces’ wins the first Goa Police Hackathon

Students’ team ‘BITSnPieces’ won the first prize in the first Goa Police Hackathon 2022 held on 10^th - 11^th Sept 2022. This was the first initiative of Goa Police after collaborating with premier academic institutions in Goa on the topics related to Cyber Security.   BITSnPieces team were presented with a cash prize of Rs. 25,000/-, a trophy and certificates.

Out of around 200 students and 43 teams that applied, around 20 teams were shortlisted for the 48-hour non-stop hackathon. Three teams from BITS Pilani, Goa Campus viz. BITSnPieces, BITS_AndroMalDetect and MalwareBusterz got shortlisted to participate in the hackathon and worked on the problem statement - Malware Analysis and Investigation.

BITS Pilani team ‘BITSnPieces’ comprising of Praneeth Bala, Bharath Hegde and Akhil Bansal, which bagged the first prize, were presented the award by the Chief Secretary of Goa, Shri Puneet Kumar Goel (IAS) in presence of missile woman of India, Dr. Tessy Thomas, Director General of Aeronautical Systems; the DGP of Goa Police, Shri Jaspal Singh (IPS), Director of IIT Goa, Prof. B K Mishra, Principal of GEC Dr. Rajesh B Lohani.

Accessible Labs wins Student Design Challenge at the EMPOWER 2022

Accessible Labs, a team consisting of 4 students viz. Akanksha Dasmohapatra (2020A8PS1777G); Raghav Mangalapalli (2019B3A70554G); Parthasarathy PD (2021PHXP0042G); and Anagha Rajesh (2020B2PS1953G) - has won the Student Design Challenge at the EMPOWER 2022 conference held at IIT Madras Research Park. The team worked on a project to make science labs accessible for blind students. The team was among the top four teams across India and was awarded Rs. 25,000 to take the project forward. The team is guided by Dr Swaroop Joshi, Assistant Professor, Computer Science and Information Systems.

The EMPOWER Conference is an annual technical event organized with the intent of bringing together all the stakeholders in the field of assistive technology, including researchers, user organizations, industries, as well as policymakers. The fifth EMPOWER Conference was held at the IIT Madras Research Park, Chennai, from 13^th to 15^th Oct 2022.

Further, the team was also awarded the Professor Suresh Ramaswamy award 2022-23.

Team AlgoManiaX, consisting of Ruturaj Godse, Tarush Agarwal and Aryan Gupta participated in the International Collegiate Programming Contest - an algorithmic programming contest for college students. Teams of three, representing their university, work to solve the most real-world problems, fostering collaboration, creativity, innovation, and the ability to perform under pressure. Through training and competition, teams challenge each other to raise the bar on the possible. Quite simply, it is the oldest, largest, and most prestigious programming contest in the world. This contest is conducted in multiple rounds, Preliminary - Regional - Continent Finals - World Finals. Team AlgoManiaX secured the following ranks in each of the rounds:

·         ICPC Online Preliminary Round (4th Sep 2022): Rank 24

·         ICPC Amritapuri Regional Round (8th Oct 2022): Rank 19

·         ICPC Asia West Continent Finals (24th Dec 2022): Rank 40

Lokesh Bolisetty (2019A7PS0103G), Dhyana Chidvilas Rottela (2019A7PS0093G) and Akash Reddy Y (2019A7PS0055G) participated and won the first place in "Analytica: The Data Analysis event" conducted as a part of Sankalp 7.0 by ICAR-NARM. The team had to analyse the data from a survey and make a tool for the brands to evaluate their performance on various levels.

The Music Society of BITS Pilani - Goa Campus participated in Festember, the annual cultural festival of NIT Tiruchirappalli held between 29^th Sept and 3^rd Oct 2022. The team bagged 2^nd place in Eastern Band, 2^nd and 3^rd place in Instrumental Duet, 3^rd place in acoustic band, 3^rd place is RAP and 3^rd place is Solo Eastern Singing.

The team consisted of: Sunal S (BASS & VOCALS) 2021H1060131G; Shivsundar R (VOCALS & GUITAR) 2019A7PS0081G; Amal Prakash (FLUTE) 2019A7PS0018G; Ankush Mahanty (VOCALS) 2019B1A81095G; Vivek Mohan (KEYBOARD & VOCALS) 2020A3PS1450G; Rishab Srivatsa (GUITAR) 2020A1PS1202G; Ishaan Shukla (GUITAR) 2020B2A82027G; Devansh Agrawal (TABLA) 2021A3PS2146G; Vedang Manu Varma (VOCALS & VIOLIN) 2021A8PS2986G; Kushal Sarkar (DRUMS) 2021A8PS0813G

The Music Society of BITS Pilani - Goa Campus bagged 2nd place at the Battle of Bands event held at Club Copa Cabana in Radisson Blu held on 27^th Dec 2022, along with the prize for the Best Keyboardist.
The team consisted of: Aditya Rai a.k.a PHOBIC (RAP) - 2022B3PS0331G; Shiv Patel (FLAUTIST) 2022A7PS1157G; Mannat Koolwal (SYNTH) 2022B5PS0085G; Shivsundar R (VOCALS) 2019A7PS0081G; Rupali Rajesh (VOCALS) 2022A7PS0006G; Ayush Jha (KEYBOARDIST) 2022B2PS1384G; Siddhi Venkatesh (VIOLINIST) 2022A4PS0815G; Shrijat Majumdar (DRUMMER) 2022A7PS0361G; Ankur Mudugu (GUITARIST) 2022A7PS0054G

Following students won at the BOSM 2022, held at BITS Pilani, Pilani Campus from 14^th to 18^th Oct 2022:

Badminton Team for Bronze Medal

Armaan Chowfin for Gold Medal in Squash

Amogh Rai for Bronze Medal in Triple Jump

Chess Team A for Silver Medal in the Blitz round

Chess Team B for Bronze Medal in the Blitz round

Palaash Patel for Silver Medal in Discus Throw.

Prerona Pathak for Gold Medal in Discus Throw

Chess Team A for Silver Medal

Chess Team B for Bronze Medal

Squash Team for Gold Medal

Aaryan Marar for Gold Medal in Powerlifting

Aditya Verma for Gold Medal in Taekwondo

Aaditi Basarkar, a Ph.D. student of the Chemistry department and Prof. Ranjan Dey, Department of Chemistry co-authored a paper titled ‘Dey-Biswas Equation is Highly Effective for Viscosity Prediction of Binary and Multicomponent Liquid Mixtures Including Ionic Liquid Mixtures’ and published in Journal of Molecular Liquids, 367 120457 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.molliq.2022.120457

Anjli Varghese, a Ph.D. student of the EEE department has been awarded as one of the Best Presenters at the 9th International Conference on Soft Computing & Machine Intelligence, held in Toronto, Canada, on 26^th – 27^th Nov 2022. She presented the paper titled ‘Texture Analysis on Digital Microscopic Leather Images For Species Identification,’ a part of her research work. Dr. Malathy Jawahar, Prof. A Amalin Prince, and Prof. Amir H Gandomi are the co-authors of this paperwork.

Her research work is supported by Tata Consultancy Services Research Scholar Program (TCS-RSP)

Mamta Kodarkar, a PhD student won Best Oral Presentation award at International Conference on ‘Environmental Sustainability and Biotechnology- Opportunities and Challenges’ held in Goa from 16^th to 19^th Nov 2022. Her presentation is on part of her research topic titled ‘Bioremediation of St. Augustine church Old Goa-India: Removal of sulphates’

Swetha R, a PhD student working with Prof. Utpal Roy, at Department of Biological Sciences received ICMR-Senior Research Fellowship Award, 2022-23 and also won the most prestigious 21st Congress of the International Society of Human & Animal Mycology (ISHAM) Registration Waiver (September 2022) Grant to be held at Delhi.

Fehad Nabi Khan, a PhD student in the Department of Chemical Engineering has been recommended to receive the prestigious Prime Minister's Fellowship to pursue Doctoral research. The fellowship is tenable for a maximum period of 4 years. Mr. Fehad will be working under the supervision of Prof. Srinivas Krishnaswamy from the Chemical Eng. Department on investigating "Multicomponent Phase Equilibria Studies in Water of Gaseous Components Present in Tail Gas Streams of Carbon Black Plant".

Malati Dessai (2013PHXP101G) and Prof. Arun V. Kulkarni co-authored a paper entitled ‘Calculation of tunneling current across trapezoidal potential barrier in a scanning tunneling microscope’ published online by the Journal of Applied Physics on 22^nd Dec 22.

Aaditi Basarkar (2017B2A10305G) published paper in Journal of Molecular Liquids, ELSEVIER (Impact Factor – 6.63)

Aditi Prabhune won the Third Prize in the ORAL Presentation at the National Symposium on Drug Discovery to Delivery (DDD-2022) Organized by Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC) and NIPER Guwahati, 2022.

Advait Anil Menon (2019A4PS0414G), Dept. of Mechanical Engineering was selected for a semester exchange at University of Guelph, Canada in Semester I AY 2022-23 (Sept- Dec 2022). He received a scholarship of total tuition fees waiver during his semester exchange at the host university.

The entire process of shortlisting and selection of student was coordinated by IPCD and Centre for International Programs Office, University of Guelph.

Anagha Rajesh (M.Sc. Chemistry) has featured in the list of top 10 finalists of Varkey Foundation Global Student Prize 2022 amongst 7000 applicants from across the world.

Arjun Tyagi (2019A8PS0579G) was awarded a fully-funded research internship for summer of 2022 at IIT Delhi by Arizona State University in August 2022.

Ruturaj Godse, a 4^th year student of CSIS secured the 2^nd Runner-up position in the ‘Innovate India Coding Championship (IICC) - 2022’ organised by AICTE (All India Council for Technical Education) and Coding Ninjas - India’s online upskilling platform for aspiring and professional coders, in collaboration with Chandigarh University held in August 2022 at Chandigarh. He won the cash prize of Rs. 50,000/, and received a trophy and certificate.

Shrey Mehta (2020B3A71459G), represented Gujarat squash team in the 36^th National Games conducted in Gandhinagar, Gujarat, from 2^nd to 5^th Oct 2022.

Shreyash Singh (2020A3PS1252G) a won consolation prize in "Essay Writing Competition" organized by Uttar Pradesh Hindi Sansthan held in June 2022. The prize containing cash prize of Rs. 2000, a certificate and memento were presented in Nov 2022.

Vrishti Godhwani (2022A7PS0260G) and Ashutosh Raj Dwivedi (2022B2PS0905G) secured IV Prize in English & Hindi category respectively at the Elocution Competition organized by Goa Shipyard Ltd. as part of Vigilance Awareness Week on 28^th Oct 2022 at BITS Pilani’s Goa Campus.
Semester II of 2021-22

January to July 2022 – Semester II of 2021-22

Faculty achievements

BITS BIRAC BioNEST bio-incubator ranked 4^th in the list of life sciences incubators in the private incubators category in the recent survey conducted by BioSpectrum India, a leading B2B media platform in Life Sciences. Overall BITS BIRAC BioNEST has ranked 7^th in India among 40 participating incubators and was applauded for the quality of its incubated startups and funding raised. It is the only bio-incubator in Goa.

Prof. Rayson K. Alex, Department of Humanities & Social Sciences has won the prestigious Fulbright-Nehru Academic and Professional Excellence Award for the academic year 2022-23. Prof. Rayson will teach a course titled, ‘Environmental Justice movements in India’ to the graduate students at the Fairhaven Interdisciplinary College at the University, and conduct his research on environmental humanities pedagogies in India and the US.

Prof. Arun V Kulkarni, Department of Physics was appointed a Scientific Observer for the Indian contingent of 5 (10+ 2 Level) students selected from all over India for competing in the International Physics Olympiad (IPhO). The IPhO was organised by the Physics Association of Switzerland in an online mode from 10^th to 17^th July 2022. The team won 1 Gold and 4 Silver Medals at this Olympiad.

Prof. Kulkarni was appointed by the coordinator of all Olympiad Programs, Prof. Anwesh Mazumdar at the Homi Bhabha Center for Science Education (Mumbai). In a training programme for the team of 5 students, Prof. Kulkarni also delivered lectures on Special Relativity and Coupled Oscillations from 4^th to 9^th July 2022.

Dr. Arnab K. Paul, Department of Computer Science and Information Systems, authored 3 top-tier publications (Core A). Among them, 2 were published at ACM HPDC, one of the best computer systems conferences in the world.

Prof. Bharat M. Deshpande, Department of Computer Science and Information Systems has been appointed as a member of the 10-member Goa State Information Technology (IT) Advisory Council constituted by the Government of Goa in July 2022.

Dr. Hemant Rathore, Department of Computer Science and Information Systems, received the prestigious "K Shankar Meritorious Paper Award 2021" awarded by IEEE Bombay Section for his paper entitled ‘Robust Android Malware Detection System against Adversarial Attacks using Q-learning’ published in Information Systems Frontiers. The award was declared on 31^st May 2022.

Dr. Priyadarshini Parakh, Dr. Gokulakrishnan Subramanian, Dr. Prasad Panzade and Prof. Halan Prakash, Department of Chemistry, were granted Patent in India for their invention ‘A Bactericidal Composition and a Method for Disinfecting Water Under Visible Light Irradiation’. This research work was supported by CSIR-India, DBT-India, ABSTCL, ABG and BITS Pilani, INDIA.

Prof. K A Geetha, Department of Humanities & Social Sciences received the "Best Presenter Award" for her paper titled "Women as Subaltern Counterpublics: A Feminist Discourse Analysis of the Farmer's protest" presented at the 8th World Conference for Women Studies in May 2022.

Prof. Lakshmi Subramanian, Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, has been selected to be a panel member of History and Archeology at the Research Council of Flanders, Belgium (2022-23).

Prof. Prasanta Kumar Das, Department of Physics has been selected in the Visiting Associateship Programme at the Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics (IUCAA), Pune in July 2022.

Dr. Rajiv Kumar Chaturvedi Department of Humanities and Social Sciences was appointed to National and State Level Task Group and Committee as a member for the ‘Thematic Task Group 6’ (to Promote the quality and coverage of forests consistent with social usages and ecological attributes of forests) constituted by Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change (Govt. of India) to facilitate the preparation of India's Long-Term Low Greenhouse Gas Emissions Development Strategy.

Dr. Chaturvedi appointed as a Team Leader of the ‘Sub-Committee of Climate Change, Biodiversity and Budgetary Aspects’ for preparation of Goa State Biodiversity Strategy and Action Plan.

Prof. Ranjan Dey, Department of Chemistry has been invited to join the Statistical Mechanics and Thermodynamics Group Committee of the Royal Society of Chemistry in July 2022.

Prof. Reena Cheruvalath, Dept. of Humanities and Social Sciences received a 'short-term research fellowship' from University of Victoria, British Columbia, Canada for the period from June to August 2022.

Prof. Snehanshu Saha, Department of Computer Science & Information Systems and APPCAIR, received global recognition for leading efforts in advancing technology for humanity and for his notable services and contributions towards the advancement of Engineering professions from IEEE Global Technical Activities Committee. He was invited by Knowledge Chamber of Commerce and Industry to speak on technology penetration; 02 European Patents (Granted); Board of Governors- HappyMonk AI labs, Bangalore; Featured in Media for work on Habitable Exoplanets (English, Bengali and Malayalam); Fellow-IETE and was a Visiting Scientist, Indian Statistical Institute, Bangalore (Summer Term).

Dr. Sravan Danda, Department of Computer Science and Information Systems, was elevated as a senior member of IEEE in April 2022. Senior member is the highest profession grade of IEEE for which a member may apply. It requires extensive experience, and reflects professional accomplishment and maturity. Only 10% of more than 4,00,000 IEEE members have achieved this level.

Mr. Tirtharaj Dash, Department of Computer Science and Information Systems, has been awarded Best Short Paper Award from the ACM in ACMSE 2022 for their paper: G. Chhablani, A. Sharma, H. Pandey, T. Dash, "Superpixel-based Knowledge Infusion in Deep Neural Networks for Image Classification", ACM Southeast Regional Conference (ACMSE), 2022, Virtual, USA, DOI: 10.1145/3476883.3520216.

Mr. Tirtharaj Dash has been a Program Committee member for the following top-tier conferences:

·         International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI-ECAI) 2022

·         AAAI-International Workshop on Combining Learning and Reasoning (CLeaR) 2022

·         International Conference on Database Systems for Advanced Applications (DASFAA) 2022

·         International Joint Conference on Neural Networks (IJCNN) 2022

Dr. Tusar Tirtha Saha, Department of Biological Sciences had his paper titled ‘Direct and Indirect Gene Repression by the Ecdysone Cascade During Mosquito Reproductive Cycle’ published in PNAS. The paper was co-authored by Roy S, Saha TT, Ha J, Banerjee R, Aksoy E, Kulkarni A, Raikhel AS.

Prof. Vinayak Naik, Department of Computer Science and Information Systems, has been appointed a member of the Research Advisory Council of D Y Patil International University, Akurdi, Pune

Prof. Vinayak Naik has been appointed a member of the Expert Committee for Science & Engineering Research Board (SERB), Department of Science and Technology (DST) Special Call on “Wearable Electronics for Biomedical Applications”

Student achievements

Five students/ alumni from K K Birla Goa Campus featured in ‘Forbes 30 under 30 – Asia 2022’ list released in June 2022. https://www.forbes.com/30-under-30/2022/asia/consumer-technology/

Malhar Patil, Rajat Gupta, and Shourya Agarwal (all alumni), are the founders of Flam App. They have raised $3.5 million recently and their current valuation is in the range of $50-$75 million.

Harish Uthayakumar and Shreyans Sancheti (both students and soon to be alumni in 2022), are the founders of Bluelearn. They have raised a pre-seed round of $4 million recently and their current valuation is in the range of $4-$6 million.

Project Kratos team of BITS Pilani, K K Birla Goa Campus consisting of 12 multi-disciplinary students represented the Institute at the finals of the University Rover Challenge (URC) 2022 held from 1^st to 4^th June 2022 at Utah, the USA. The team secured the topmost position among the Indian competitors, ranked 2^nd in Asia and finished 21^st worldwide in URC 2022. In the Science Task category, the team ranked 12^th worldwide. The team leader, Ithihas Madala (2018B1AA0607G), reported from Utah, the USA.

The final competition had 36 teams from top universities of 10 different countries. This year, with a record 99 registrations, BITS Pilani was one of the only 4 teams that qualified from India. The competition took place at Mars Desert Research Station (MDRS), where NASA also tests its rovers.

To augment the help rendered by the Institute, proud Alumni of BITS Pilani, Mr. Prashanth Palakurthi and Mrs. Anuradha Palakurthi generously supported the team with US$ 15,000.

Project Kratos secured a worldwide rank of 2^nd and stood 1^st in Asia in the finals of the Anatolian Rover Challenge (ARC) held in Istanbul, Turkey from 22^nd to 25^th July 2022. The team has also been awarded the best ‘Autonomous and Controls Vertical’ and ‘Science Vertical’ by consensus of the Judges and Jury. Kratos scored the most points amongst all the teams in Mission 3 (Testing capabilities of Robotic Arm) and Mission 4 (Testing Science vertical), with a 98 out of 100 score in the latter. The Challenge was organized by the Space Exploration Society (UKET), and the final round of the competition hosted over 12 participant teams from all across the world.

Team Scarecrows comprising of Sushant Sreeram Swamy (2019A7PS1031G), Hrishikesh Kusneniwar (2019A7PS0179G), Hitarth Kothari (2019A7PS0178G) and Hardik Shah (2019A7PS0076G) secured third position in the BITS Pilani API Hackathon 1.0 held in April 2022. The team was awarded a cash prize of Rs. 10,000 and also some goodies from Postman.

The team Analysis Aces comprising of Jayashree R (2018B3A70769G) and Sohan Misra (2019A4PS0771G), competed with more than 1600 teams in over three rounds and secured the first position in IMTheFuture 6.0. This national competition was organized by the Admissions Committee, Institute of Management Technology (IMT) Ghaziabad in January 2022. The team was also awarded a cash prize of Rs. 30,000.

The BITS Pilani - Goa Campus Women's Badminton team comprising of Aditi Sethi (2019B5A70261G) and Rajvi Sampat (2018B4A70820G) secured Runner-up Position (silver medal) in the Women's Team Badminton Event conducted during Revels, Manipal Institute of Technology's annual national-level Sports and Cultural Festival, held between 10th - 16th April, 2022.

The BITS Pilani - Goa Campus Men's Badminton team was crowned champions in the Men's Team Badminton Event conducted during Revels, Manipal Institute of Technology's annual national-level Sports and Cultural Festival, held between 10th -16th April, 2022. The team comprised of Sushil Nayak (2020AAPS0239G), Tanmay Bankar (2020A7PS0976G), Vardhan Palod (2020A7PS0982G), Anshit Garg (2018A8PS0306G), Manas Patil (2020B2A32020G), Ansh Gupta (2020A8PS1506G) and Abhav Mehrotra (2019A7PS0145G). Additionally, Sushil Nayak was awarded the Best Men's Player trophy.

Abheesh Bhardwaj (2019B1A41117G), Arjun Nag (2020A8PS2085G) and Mandar Joshi (2020A7PS1730G), representing BITS Pilani - Goa Campus, secured the second place (silver medal) in the Men’s Team Table Tennis Event which was a part of Revels, Manipal Institute of Technology's annual national-level Sports and Cultural Festival, held between 10^th April-16^th April 2022.

The team comprising Ayushi Dubal (2019A7PS0099G) and Naresh Chavan (2019B5A70638G) won the qBraid Challenge for OpenQASM. The challenge was a part of the Quantum Coalition Hackathon (QCHack 2022) hosted by students of Yale, Duke, Stanford and Berkley on 9^th– 10^th April 2022. The team built a robust parser that generates OpenQASM2.0 code which is equivalent to the input Amazon Braket circuit.

BITS Goa Team comprising of Sumiran Kasturi (2020B1B22041G), Ishan Tandon (2020A4PS0521G), Omkar Nabar (2020A7PS00119G) and Aniruddha Nayak (2020B1AA0711G) participated in Mimamsa, a national level annual Science Quiz organized by IISER Pune held on 20^th Feb 2022. The team emerged as the Zonal Topper for the Goa/ Karnataka Zone, and also secured the Subject Runner-Up position in Physics subject in the Prelims stage of the competition.

Abheesh Bhardwaj (2019B1A41117G) represented Haryana table tennis team in UTT National Ranking Table Tennis Championship – 2021 (Central Zone) held at Indore (Madhya Pradesh) from 3^rd to 9^th Jan 2022. Abheesh is ranked in top 100 players in that Zone.

Advait Anil Menon (2019A4PS0414G) Dept. of Mechanical Engineering has been selected for a semester exchange at University of Guelph, Canada in Semester I AY 2022-23 (Sept- Dec 2022). Advait will be receiving a scholarship of total tuition fees waiver during his semester exchange at the host university. The entire process of shortlisting and selection of student was coordinated by IPCD, BITS Pilani, K K Goa Campus and Centre for International Programs Office, University of Guelph.

Anagha Rajesh (2020B2PS1953G) has been selected as an Ashoka Young Changemaker for 2022. Ashoka is the world's largest network of social entrepreneurs. Out of 1000+ applications from across the country, Anagha made it to the list of 13 changemakers after 4 rigorous selection rounds. She will now be a part of a year-long training and co-leading program focused on accelerating her change-making initiatives in the mental health space.

Anagha Rajesh (2020B2PS1953G) won the best adjudicator prize at the IIT Kanpur British Parliamentary Debate (April 2022) and the second-best adjudicator award at the BITS Pilani British Parliamentary Debate (May 2022).

Anagha Rajesh (2020B2PS1953G) made it to the top 100 out of 26,000 applicants in the Adecco CEO for a Month contest.

Anagha Rajesh (2020B2PS1953G) has been shortlisted as one of the top 50 finalists for the Global Student Prize from among 7,000 applicants from around the world.

Aniruddha Nayak (2020B1AA0711G) & Sumiran Kasturi (2020B1B22041G) of Biological Sciences Department were selected for the prestigious JNCASR SRFP 2-month Summer Research Fellowship Programme at the Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research in Bengaluru in June 2022.

Anupam Kumar (2019A3PS0348G) has been selected as a Google Summer of Code Intern at GNOME Foundation. He will be working to add support for the Chromecast protocol in the GNOME Network Displays App, which currently supports only Miracast protocols. After this addition, users would be able to cast their laptop screens, videos, youtube videos, and play audio on their Chromecast devices (which includes Android TVs).

The project details: https://summerofcode.withgoogle.com/programs/2022/projects/DqAFewgr

Atishay Jain (2018B5A70908G), a fourth-year Physics and Computer Science student, has received the prestigious Mitacs Globalink Research Internship, sponsored by the Government of Canada (25^th July to 15^th Nov 2022). As a part of this internship, Atishay will be working at Dalhousie University in the field of Complex Networks on "Quantitative Analysis of Organismal Aging and Mortality" which uses Statistical Mechanics and Deep Learning to gain insight into this important process.

The Mitacs Globalink Research Internship is a competitive initiative for international undergraduates from Australia, Brazil, China, France, Germany, Hong Kong SAR, India, Mexico, Tunisia, the United Kingdom, and Ukraine. Each year, top-ranked applicants participate in a twelve (12) week research internship under the supervision of Canadian university faculty members in a variety of academic disciplines, from science, engineering and mathematics to the humanities and social sciences.

Arjun Tyagi (2019A8PS0579G) has been selected for Arizona State University's Summer Undergraduate Research Internship (SURI) program. His project advisor Prof. Arindam Sanyal was kind enough to extend his support to cover Arjun’s housing fee, insurance, etc. of around $4000. Arjun was also selected for IIT Delhi's Summer Research Fellowship Programme (SRFP) for summer of 2022.

Devashish Gupta (2017HD410151G) secured first position in ‘PackMax Ideate’ competition conducted by Techfest IIT Bombay and won prize of Rs. 87,500/-.   The hackathon was jointly organised by IIT Bombay and Godrej & Boyce. It was based on a set of computationally hard problems in the logistics/ transportation sector and aimed at reducing its overall carbon footprint and impact on the global climate. Results were declared on 26^th January 2022. (Video statement link: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/godrej_packmax-activity-6913176711475986432-auZK?utm_source=linkedin_share&utm_medium=member_desktop_web)

Hardik Shah (2019A7PS0076G) received the D.A.A.D Fellowship - for Summer 2022 in Germany. He will be pursuing 3D Scene Reconstruction from a stereocamera and deploying the same on a mobile ground robot. The reconstructed environment would then to be used for further scene understanding and path planning if required. Hardik will be working on this project under the supervision of Prof. Niclas Zeller at the Robot Vision Lab, HKA (Karlsruhe University of Applied Sciences).

Hardik Shah was also the Autonomous Subsystem Lead for Project Kratos for the year 2021-22. Project Kratos qualified to participate in University Rover Challenge 2022 finals which was held at the Mars Desert Research Station in Utah, USA from 1^st to 4^th June 2022. The team secured the topmost position among the Indian competitors, ranked 2^nd in Asia and finished 21^st worldwide in URC 2022. In the Science Task category, the team ranked 12^th worldwide.

Ishan Gupta (2020A3PS1451G) won the video editing competition organised by the Sports Engineering Association of India in January 2022. He won a cash prize of Rs 10,000/- and an invitation to the international conference on Sports Engineering held in Jodhpur from 3^rd to 5^th March 2022.

Ishan Gupta (2020A3PS1451G) participated in the International Heartfulness Essay Event 2021 and received an Honourable Mention among all the entries received in the category, whose results were announced in January 2022. The event was organized by Heartfullness Education Trust, Shri Ram Chandra Mission, UNESCO MGIEF and UNIC for India and Bhutan.

Kaarthick Raaja (2016PHXF0407G), Department of Chemical Engineering won second place in Jarakabande Eco Ultra 2022 marathon, conducted by Bhasin Sports on 23^rd – 24^th April, 2022 at Jarakabande Forest, Banglore.

Moitrish Majumdar (2017B4A70750G), completed his final semester thesis at Dartmouth College in the USA under the supervision of Dr. Alice C. Schwarze, Department of Mathematics. His thesis was selected as a contributed talk at the International Conference on Complex Networks (CompleNet), which was held virtually from 30th May to 1st June 2022 where he made a presentation on his work, involving network models in bacterial populations.

Namrata Ahuja (2020B2A81978G) participated as a speaker in the IMC’s YLF Annual Youth Conclave 2022, Session 4 ‘Digital India @100: Inclusive Growth’ organized by the IMC Chamber of Commerce and Industry’s Young Leaders’ Forum held on 24^th & 25^th June 2022.

DAY 1 - https://youtu.be/rUxsYddKU90

Day 2 - https://youtu.be/gDNetx6Cyb0 (01:01:00)

Neela Gayathri Ganesan, PhD scholar under the supervision of Dr. Vivek Rangarajan (Department of

Chemical Engineering) showcased her research work entitled “Biocosmetic nano-emulsions for skin-care

applications” in the workshop ISDC 2022 organized by Indian Home and Personal Care Industry

Association on 11 July 2022 at Goa.

Nikita Sahu (2018A1TS0654G) has received the Erasmus Mundus Masters Scholarship, for a two-year fully funded Master’s Program in Nanoscience and Nanotechnology, for the Academic Year 2022-24 across two EU countries. The approx. scholarship amount comes to 49,000 Euros. The link to the program is https://www.emm-nano.org/

Satyam Bansal (2020A7PS0171G), Ansh Srivastava (2020A3PS2056G), and Aayush Nayak (2020A8PS1301G) have been awarded the CHANAKYA UG-FELLOWSHIP from iHUB DivyaSampark, setup under NM-ICPS at IIT Roorkee for the project entitled "LoRaWAN Mesh-Based Emergency Communication System for Marine Applications," under the guidance of Dr. Rahul Thakur (Assistant Professor, CSE, IIT Roorkee) and Dr. Swati Agarwal for 6 months, with a stipend of Rs 10,000/- per month for each of the student.

Shikha Bhat (2019A7PS0063G) was selected for Micron India’s University Research Alliance (URAM) Scholarship 2021-22 in April 2022. The URAM Scholarship Program is to nurture and reward academic rigor, innovation, research and co-curricular pursuits of women engineers to support advanced STEM career pathways. She was one of the 59 recipients from all over India, and have received a scholarship amount of Rs. 1,00,000/-. More details about the scholarship can be found on their webpage - https://uramscholarship.in/

Shreya Kapila (2018A1PS0538G), Rishi Devendra Singh (2018A1PS0190G) and Neela Gayatri Ganeshan (PhD student under Dr Vivek Rangarajan) co-authored a paper under the guidance of Prof Vivek Rangarajan with the title of "A review on Green nanoemulsions for cosmetic applications with special emphasis on microbial surfactants as impending emulsifying agents", which is published in the Journal of Surfactant and Detergents 2022;1–17. The link for the paper is https://doi.org/10.1002/jsde.12571

Shubham Gandhi (2019A7TS0086G) received the Summer Internship Assistance (SIA) 2022 Award funded by Goa campus alumni of 2010 & 2012 batches. This summer he will be working as an undergraduate researcher at BINN Lab on 'Dynamic Object Recognition using NeuCube'. This assistance is offered to encourage students to conduct summer research at educational / research institutions across India (including BITS campuses) which is aimed at helping students gain valuable research experience that could manifest in the form of journal and conference publications later or help them choose their career path.

Shubham Gandhi (2019A7TS0086G) secured an off-campus thesis at Microsoft Research India for the first semester of the academic year 2022-23 after multiple rounds of interviews and assignments. He shall be working from the Bengaluru office on program learning - a combination of program synthesis and machine learning for a period of six months under Mr. Suresh Parthasarathy with Prof. Hemant Rathore as his on-campus supervisor.

Snehashis Alam (2021PHXP0026G), a PhD student in the Dept. of Humanities and Social Sciences under the guidance of Dr. Mohan Kumar Bera, authored a research paper: Snehashis, A., Vijaya, S. M., Kumar, M. K., & Shoaib, R. (2022) Characteristics of the Earthquake Swarms in the Andaman Sea Region, India, from 1960-2020. Disaster Advances, 15(3), 21–28.

Snehashis Alam also presented two papers:

“A Seismotectonic Analysis of Earthquake Swarm in Andaman and Nicobar Islands Region, India (1960 to 2020)” presented at International Indian Ocean Science Conference (IIOSC-2022) on Geology, geophysics and seabed mapping of the Indian Ocean, 14^th – 18^th March, 2022 at National Institute of Oceanography (NIO), Goa.

“Flood hazard and gender vulnerability: a case study of Malda District, West Bengal” presented at the International Conference on 'Challenges to Disaster Risk Reduction and Resilient Habitat' held on 5th and 6^th April, 2022, at Shaheed Bhagat Singh College, University of Delhi, New Delhi.

Tejas Musale (2019A3PS0409G) has been selected as a Research Intern at the Chair of Processor Design at the ‘Centre for Advancing Electronics Dresden (CFAED)’ of TU Dresden, Germany. This research internship will be under the guidance of Prof. Akash Kumar for a semester. He will be awarded with a scholarship of 861 Euros per month for the same. As a part of this research, he will be exploring Hardware Accelerators for Edge based Biomedical Signal Processing Systems.

Vedant Bang (2019AAPS0251G) and Anantha Vyasaraju (2019A3PS1323H) co-authored a paper titled "Effect of lanthanide dopants on stability of orthorhombic hafnium oxide for pyroelectric applications" which was published in the Materials Letters Journal Volume 317 on 17^th March 2022. The other authors of the paper were from CSIR-CEERI Pilani.

Link to the paper: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.matlet.2022.132097

Yash Nilesh Soman (2020AAPS1429G) successfully completed a coding challenge offered by Postman. 30 days of Postman – for developers is a coding challenge hosted by Postman, held in June 2022, was completed within 22 days. Yash was one of the 225 developers in the world who have successfully completed this coding challenge. Yash also completed Postman’s one-day Student Expert Program in June 2022.
Semester I of 2021-22

August to December 2021 – Semester I of 2021-22

Faculty achievements

Prof. Arnab Banerjee, Department of Biological Sciences, was awarded with the prestigious Prof. M. A. Akbarsha & Prof. M. Michael Aruldhas Gold Medal Oration -2021 by the Society for Reproductive Biology and Comparative Endocrinology [SRBCE].

Prof. Debasis Patnaik, Department of Economics & Finance, was appointed the Chairman and Convener of a three-member panel on ‘Water Resource Management and Utility in South and SE Asia’ at the 12^th International Convention on Asian Scholars Conference (ICAS12) held at Kyoto, Japan from 24^th to 27^th August 2021.

Prof. Debasis Patnaik was awarded “Bharat Ratna Dr. Radhakrishnan Gold Medal” on the occasion of 77^th National Unity Conference on Individual Achievements & National Development organized by GEPRA, New Delhi on 30^th October 2021.

Prof. Dibakar Chakrabarty, Department of Biological Sciences, and Akriti Rastogi authored a book chapter:

The Cnidaria: Only a Problem or Also a Resource? In ‘Jellies from the Southeast Asian Seas: Pains and Gains’, Nova Science Publishers, Inc, USA.

Dr. Javed Ahmad Bhat, Department of Economics and Finance published the following book chapter:

Bhat, J, A., (2021) “Choice Among Alternatives- An Evaluation of Indian Energy Basket”, Design, Analysis & Application of Renewable Energy Systems, Elsevier.

Prof. Mainak Banerjee, Department of Chemistry, deputed as a session judge in a two-day virtual international conference on "Advances in Green Chemistry and Sustainable Technology” DM’s College, Goa on 29th - 30th Sept 2021.

Prof. Narendra Nath Ghosh, Department of Chemistry has been invited to be a full member of Sigma Xi Society. Sigma Xi, the Scientific Research Honor Society is one of the oldest & largest international scientific organizations in the field of science and engineering. Prof. Ghosh and his team have been engaged in remarkable research in the area of nanoscience and nanotechnology. His current work is involved in the development of new nanostructured materials to address the issues related to energy storage devices, environmental pollution, etc.

Dr. Rajiv Kumar Chaturvedi, Department of Humanities and Social Sciences has been selected as an expert member for Goa State Governing Council of the State Level Steering Committee for National Adaptation Funds for Climate Change (SLSC for NAFCC) established by The Ministry of Environment, Forests and Climate Change, Govt. of India for a 3-year term.

Dr. Soumyabrata Barik (Department of EEE), Bikash Das, Vivekananda Mukherjee and Debapriya Das, authored a book chapter:

‘Optimization Algorithm for Renewable Energy Integration’ in ‘Intelligent Renewable Energy Systems: Integrating Artificial Intelligence Techniques and Optimization Algorithms’, John Wiley and Sons.

Student achievements

Prof. Souvik Bhattacharyya, Vice Chancellor of BITS Pilani unveiled a rover designed by a team of students of BITS Pilani, K K Birla Goa Campus in presence of Prof. D M Kulkarni, Dean Administration on 13^th Nov 2021. The multidisciplinary team of students which started in 2018 is called Project Kratos: Mars Rover. Presently the team comprises of about 70 students lead by Mr. Ithihas Madala and supervised by Prof. Toby Joseph (Dept. of Physics). Project Kratos aspires to develop a Mars Rovers equipped with advanced subsystems suitable for interplanetary deep space missions, seeking to study the application of engineering and scientific research into rover robotics, autonomous traversal, and detection of extraterrestrial life.

The team is preparing to participate in the competitions such as International Rover Competition (IRC), University Rover Competition (URC), International Mars Hackathon and the International Rover Design Challenge. In these competitions the rover is expected to fulfill tasks such as Extreme Retrieval task through rough terrain, Equipment Servicing task to perform intricate operations with 5 Degrees of Freedom arm, Autonomous Navigation and Life Detection.

Project Kratos involves various subsystems which contribute to the making of the rover.

1.       Mechanical - Works on the mechanical framework, designing and manufacturing of the entire rover. We will be using SOLIDWORKS as our main CAD software along with ANSYS for the FEA of the design.

2.       Autonomous - Is responsible for autonomous traversal of the rover in a non-discovered environment. We perform tasks like path planning, object detection and localization to enable the rover to calculate an optimum path using data from various sensors. ROS (Robotics Operating System) is used, and a firm grasp on Python or C++ is required.

3.       Life Detection - its objective is to design experimental techniques to detect life. The system uses Computation and Spectroscopic techniques to study soil and rocks characteristics, traditional lab techniques and emerging techniques like bioelectronics and biosensors.

4.       Electronics - Looks after interfacing between all on board electronics including a 5 Degree of freedom robotic arm, communication to the base station and powering the rover with the help of a customized Battery Management System.

A 5 minute video about the rover: https://youtu.be/_h06yqiy6YQ

Team comprising Aditya Mishra (2018A7PS0117G), Dhruv Nagpal (2018A7PS0095G) and Rohit Garg (2018A7PS0193G) participated in the hackathon 'COVID-19 Healthcare App Challenge' conducted by IQVIA technologies and Microsoft. Their web application 'HealthAPPy' was recognized as "Best Integration with Microsoft Power Apps Winner". The team donated the Prize money of $4,500 to a non-profit NGO 'Project Hope'.

The link for the same are as following:

Felicitation ceremony video - https://www.iqvia.com/landing/hackathon-winner

The award winners showcase page - https://devpost.com/software/healthappy

A 3 member-team consisting of Bhanupratap Bhardwaj (2019A4PS0723G), Chirag Goyle (2019A4PS0534G) and Heman Ketan Shah (2019A4PS0772G) won IIM Ahmedabad's Annual Flagship Case Study Competition, 'Armageddon' at their annual 'Red Bricks Summit'. The Red Bricks Summit is Asia's largest management symposium that attracts over 60,000 participants every year.
The case study competition was conducted in 3 rounds, with 2 case studies. The first case study was related to the digital growth strategy of a traditional brick-and-mortar retail company in India. The second case study was a case study on UPI Payments apps. It included formulating an expansion strategy and a revenue growth model for a UPI company in India by understanding the market and regulatory landscape to devise a GTM strategy for generating revenue in the next 5 years.

This is the first time that an undergraduate team has won this competition, considered India's most prestigious Case Study competition.  The competition had over 1550 participating teams, with a prize pool of INR 80,000.

Team comprising of Akash Jha (2018B5A80893G), Ritvij Kumar Sharma (2019A8PS0666G), Aviral Bansal (2017B4A41015G) and Arihant Bansal (2020A3PS0567G) won 3^rd Prize in ‘Harmony Bridging TradFi to DeFi Hackathon’. Harmony Hackathon invited developers to design solutions to bring Traditional Finance to Decentralized Finance using their cross-chain bridges. It saw over 750 participants and over a 100 submitted projects, competing for over $1 million in prizes and seed funding.

Team comprising of Akash Jha (2018B5A80893G), Ritvij Kumar Sharma (2019A8PS0666G), Aviral Bansal (2017B4A41015G), Mayank Mathur (2019A3PS0505G), Krishanu Shah (2020A7PS1728G), Sanskar Mohapatra (2020A1PS2112G) and Arihant Bansal (2020A3PS0567G) won "Harmony Composable Prize" and "Chainlink On The Rise" Prize in ‘Chainlink Fall 2021 Hackathon’. Chainlink Hackathon brought together developers to build the next generation of hybrid smart contracts alongside developers, creators, artists, and industry-leading mentors from across the blockchain ecosystem. It saw 1500+ participants all across the globe, with over 250 projects submitted.

Team comprising of Akash Jha (2018B5A80893G), Ritvij Kumar Sharma (2019A8PS0666G), Aviral Bansal (2017B4A41015G), Anshuman Singh (2018A4PS0512G) and Arihant Bansal (2020A3PS0567G) won 2^nd Prize in ‘IoTeX Grants Hackathon’. IoTeX, a leading decentralized, scalable, and EVM-compatible blockchain network for real-world dApps and digital assets, launched IoTeX Hackathon India 2021, in partnership with Lumos Labs. This virtual hackathon saw over 1500+ pan-India registration, wherein developers had to build dApps using real world data from Pebble tracker.

Aashish Moses (2018PHXF0008G), won the Best Paper Award for International Chemical Engineering Conference 2021 (100 Glorious Years of Chemical Engineering & Technology) at Dr B R Ambedkar National Institute of Technology, Jalandhar held from 16th – 19th Sept 2021.

Abhijit Dey (2017PHXF0423G), Research Scholar of the Department of Electrical and Electronics Engineering, received the visiting Ph.D. researcher position in the department of Aeronautical and Aviation Engineering (AAE), the Hong Kong Polytechnic University (HKPolyU), SAR, China. From March 2021 to October 2021, he served as the doctoral researcher in intelligent positioning and navigation laboratory, department of AAE, HKPolyU under the supervision of Dr. Bing Xu and Dr. Li-Ta Hsu. He was involved in the research related to direct position estimation (DPE), time-frequency analysis of global navigation satellite systems (GNSS) multipath error, and advance vector tracking-based receiver architecture for navigation with Indian Constellation (NavIC) signals.

Abhijit Dey (2017PHXF0423G), Research Scholar of the Department of Electrical and Electronics Engineering, was invited to participate and contribute in the GNSS training programme, 11-14 January 2022, Pokhara, Nepal, jointly organized by the Centre of Spatial Information Science (CSIS), The University of Tokyo (UTokyo), Japan and the International Committee on Global Navigation Satellite Systems (ICG).

Abhijit Dey (2017PHXF0423G) has reviewed six research articles for the journals such as IEEE Transactions on Aerospace and Electronic Systems, IEEE Systems, IEEE Sensors and IEEE Access.

Anupam Mukherjee (2017PHXF0408G) has won the VICAL Award for Best Students Paper Presentations in Chemcon-2021 awarded by the Indian Institute of Chemical Engineers (IIChE). The award was presented virtually on 16th Dec 2021 at the Annual INAE Convention. The VICAL Award includes a cash prize of Rs. 5,000. Anupam also won the Young Chemical Engineer below 35 yrs of age, at CHEMCON-2021. Anupam is currently working as a Research Associate at CSIR-IICT, Hyderabad after submitting his PhD thesis.

Anirudh Nagaraj (2018A7PS0216G) and KotamReddy Ganesh Reddy (2018AAPS0353H) co-authored a paper titled "Leak Detection in Smart Water Grids Using EPANET and Machine Learning Techniques" (link) which has been published in the IETE Journal of Education. The other authors of the paper were from CSIR-CEERI Pilani.

Akshay Valsaraj (2018B1A70608G), Ithihas Madala (2018B1AA0607G) and Nikhil Garg (alumni) under the guidance of Prof. Veeky Baths published a paper titled "Alzheimer’s Dementia Detection Using Acoustic & Linguistic Features and Pre-trained BERT'' at the 2021 8th International Conference on Soft Computing and Machine Intelligence (ISCMI).

The paper can be found here: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9654804

They are also currently working on another project titled "Comparison of NLP and EEG for Sentiment Analysis" under Prof Veeky Baths.

Avdhesh Vermani (2019A1PS1060G), student of the Department of Chemical Engineering won second prize at the 17^th Outstanding Young Chemical Engineer 2021, a national level competition organized by Indian Institute of Chemical Engineers, held on 2^nd - 3^rd September 2021 for the paper entitled “Application of Artificial Intelligence Algorithms to Capture Bubble Geometry Variations in a Gas-Liquid Contacting System”, co-authored with Mr. Anupam Mukherjee, Mr. Abhichal Ghosh, Dr. Kamesh Reddi, Dr. Siddhartha Moulik and Dr. Anirban Roy.

Avdhesh Vermani also presented a paper entitled “Application of a Deep Learning Based Image Processing Framework to Predict Mass Transfer Coefficient in a Gas-Liquid Contacting System: A Case Study for Bubble Geometry Variations in Surfactant Ozonation System” at the 10^th International Congress on Sustainability Science and Engineering, an international level conference organized by American Institute of Chemical Engineers, held from 13^th to 15^th September 2021. The paper was co-authored with Mr. Anupam Mukherjee, Mr. Abhichal Ghosh, Dr. Kamesh Reddi, Dr. Siddhartha Moulik and Dr. Anirban Roy.

Lubna Muzamil Rehman (2018H1010021G) has won the Innovative Student Projects Award 2021 at Master’s Level for her Thesis titled ‘Understanding Thermodynamics of Salt-Water Systems’ awarded by the Indian National Academy of Engineering (INAE). The award was presented virtually on 16^th Dec 2021 at the Annual INAE Convention. The INAE Award includes a cash prize of Rs. 15,000 and an INAE-Student Membership for the next 5 years. Lubna is currently pursuing her PhD at KAUST, SA in Membrane Technology.

Malini Roy (2019A1PS1112G) was awarded the first prize for the best Technical Paper Presentation at the 17^th Outstanding Young Chemical Engineer 2021, a national level competition organised by Indian Institute of Chemical Engineers held on 2^nd – 3^rd September 2021. The paper entitled, ‘Development of a Deep Learning Based Hydrodynamic Cavitation Technology for Dye Degradation: An Artificial Intelligence (AI) - Machine Learning (ML) Framework’ was co-authored with Jasneet Kaur Pala, Anupam Mukherjee, Dr Anirban Roy, Dr Reddi Kamesh and Dr Siddhartha Moulik.

Nikhil Mane, Kathit Shah, Sanjay Mane, Prof. Arnab Banerjee (Department of Biological Sciences) and Dr. Siddhartha Tripathi were awarded Prof. M.G. Deshpande Award BEST PAPER Award in Academia for presenting the paper entitled “Effect of Newtonian and shear thinning medium on human sperm motion within a microchannel” Fluid Mechanics and Fluid Power, at 48th National Conference, held from 27th - 29th Dec 2021, at Dept. of Mechanical Engg. BITS Pilani, Pilani Campus.

Pranay Mathur (2017A8TS0487G), Yash Jangir (2019A8PS0526G) and Prof. Neena Goveas (Professor, Dept. of CSIS) won the Best Paper Award for the paper entitled "A Generalized Kalman Filter Augmented Deep-Learning based Approach for Autonomous Landing in MAVs" at the International Symposium of Asian Control Association on Intelligent Robotics and Industrial Automation (IRIA), held from 19^th to 22^nd September 2021.

Prayag Mohanty (2020A3PS0566G) participated in the Linquiztics SciBizTech Quiz'21 (Finalist) organised by The Literary, Debate, Quiz Club, MIT Manipal held from 1st to 5th Oct 2021.

Ritvij Kumar Sharma (2019A8PS0666G), Akash Jha (2018B5A80893G), Arihant Bansal (2020A3PS0567G) and Aviral Bansal (2017B4A41015G) participated in the Harmony - Bridging TradFi to DeFi hackathon and won the third prize in Track 3: Cross-Chain - “DeFi/NFT/DAO”. Their project was selected in the top 23 finalists out of 104 projects. The project is sort of a card game but it uses NFTs. People can join by connecting their Metamask wallet and buy base NFTs that they provide and then use those to craft NFTs of higher rarity. The looks of all NFTs are created by the team. People can also buy and sell NFTs in their marketplace and with increase in rarity of the NFTs, and can get a higher rank on the leaderboard. Currently, this project is in the prototype phase. Hackathon website link: https://gitcoin.co/hackathon/harmony-defi/onboard

Shameer Ahmed B (2017PHXF0006G) of PhD student of Department of Biological Sciences was awarded Elekta award for attending virtually the EPSM 2021-Conference attended EPSM held from 8^th – 10^th Nov 2021.

Shikha Bhat (2019A7PS0063G) received 2 prestigious scholarships:

1. Generation Google Scholarship for women in Computer Science 2021 APAC Region, by Google

Generation Google Scholarship: for women in computer science was established to help aspiring students pursuing computer science degrees excel in technology and become leaders in the field. The scholarship was awarded based on a passion for technology, academic excellence, demonstrated leadership, and commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion. She received a scholarship amount of USD $1,000 and got to attend the 2021 APAC Scholars’ Virtual Retreat that took place at the end of June, hosted by Google.

https://buildyourfuture.withgoogle.com/scholarships/google-scholarship-recipients/

https://buildyourfuture.withgoogle.com/scholarships/generation-google-scholarship-apac/

2. Grace Hopper Celebration Student Scholarship 2021, by AnitaB.org

The Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing (GHC) is a series of conferences designed to bring the research and career interests of women in computing to the forefront. It is the world's largest gathering of women in computing. She was awarded the student scholarship to attend virtual GHC 2021 (September 27th - October 2nd) by AnitaB.org, based on academic merit, interest in CS and work done to uplift the community.

https://www.gracehoppercelebration.com/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grace_Hopper_Celebration_of_Women_in_Computing

Shivam Nikam (2020B2AA1911G) a student of Department of Chemistry, won the 2^nd Prize in the Elocution Competition organised by Goa Shipyard Limited on the occasion of Vigilance Awareness Week-2021 observed from 26th Oct to 1st Nov 2021 with the theme ‘Independent India @ 75: Self Reliance with Integrity’.

Shreya Kapila (2018A1PS0538G) a final year student of Chemical Engineering, made an Oral Presentation for her work on "Microbial Surfactants As Green Emulsifiers For Skincare Cosmetic Nano-formulations" at Gulf Coast Undergraduate Research Symposium (GCURS) organized by Rice University, USA on 16th October 2021. She was one of the only 3 Indians and one of the 250 researchers selected from all over the world to participate in this most prestigious undergraduate research conference in the southeast. She worked under the guidance of Prof. Vivek Rangarajan.
Semester II of 2020-21

January to July 2021 - Semester II of 2020-21

Faculty achievements

Dr. Sudeep Baudha and Manish Varun Yadav (2017PHXF0421G), Electrical and Electronics Engineering jointly filled an invention patent application related to ‘Design of A Compact Dual-Band ‘Bits-Goa’ Shaped Planar Antenna for Wi-Fi And WLAN Applications’ in July 2021.
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Dr. Sudeep Baudha and Manish Varun Yadav (2017PHXF0421G) jointly authored a book titled Antennas for Multiple Application Volume – I, published in March 2021
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Dr. Monojit Bhattacharjee, Department of Mathematics has been awarded INSPIRE Faculty Fellowship by Department of Science and Technology (DST) on 13^th July 2021. Dr. Bhattacharjee has been awarded the grant of Rs. 35,00,000/- which will be received over the period of five years.

The Government of India has launched a unique scheme “Innovation in Science Pursuit for Inspired Research (INSPIRE)” with several components. INSPIRE Faculty Fellowship Scheme is one such component of the INSPIRE Programme which offers a contractual research award for carrying out independent research to young achievers.
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Prof. Angshuman Sarkar, Department of Biological Sciences and his team have investigated a novel mode of action of an already established drug used for the treatment of malaria named ‘Quinacrine’ for the treatment of human breast cancer. Their work has been published recently in a well-known International Journal ‘Biomedicine & Pharmacotherapy’ which publishes papers on clinical and basic medicine and pharmacology. This research work was financially supported by Goa Cancer Society and Department of Biotechnology, Govt. of India.

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Dr. Arnab Banerjee, Department of Biological Sciences, has been awarded the Prof. G P Talwar Young Scientist Award 2021 by the Indian Society for the Study of Reproduction and Fertility (ISSRF) for his contribution in research in the field of reproductive biology.

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Prof. Debasis Patnaik, Department of Economics delivered an invited lecture on incubators as tools for entrepreneurship promotion entitled ‘The university business incubator: a strategy for developing new research/ technology based firms’ at the Institute of Pharmaceutical Technology, Tirupati as part of AICTE Training And Learning (ATAL) Academy’s Faculty Development Programme on the theme of Innovation, Incubation and Entrepreneurship on 9th July 2021.

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Dr. Ganesh M. Bapat, Department of Mechanical Engineering won 1^st prize in Developing Countries Grant Competition organized during 28^th Congress of the International Society of Biomechanics. The award consists of 1000$ grant to be used for the research work. Students, Ritvik Puranik and Vivek Gupte contributed to this project.

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Dr. Hemant Rathore, Department of CSIS, has been selected to participate at the Google Research India Graduate Symposium – 2021.

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Authors J. Sarkar, S. Sarkar, S. Saha, and S. Das were awarded for the best paper entitled as “d-BTAI: the dynamic-Binary Tree Based Anomaly Identification Algorithm for Industrial Systems” in the Main track of 34th IEEE International Conference on Industrial, Engineering Other Applications of Applied Intelligent Systems (IEA/AIE), 2021.

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Dr. Rajiv K Chaturvedi, Department of Humanities and Social Sciences contributed in a report titled: ‘Mapping Climate Change Hotspots in Indian Forests based on observed Climate Change and High Resolution Climate Model Projections’ published by Forest Survey of India (FSI). Based on observed historical climate data and by using future climate change projections in the 21^st century this report mapped climate change hotspots in Indian forests at a very high spatial resolution. The study concludes that forested grids in Himalayan region and from the north-eastern States consistently appear as climate change hotspots across climate change scenarios and time-horizons.

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Prof. Snehanshu Saha, Department of CSIS, authored 7 Top tier International Journal Publications (Scimago Q1) including IEEE Transactions, Elsevier, and Springer.

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Prof. Snehanshu Saha authored 6 Top tier International Conference Publications (CORE A Rank).

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Dr. Solano Da Silva, Department of Humanities & Social Sciences and a team of international researchers has contributed multiple chapters in a recently published book The Language of the Becoming City based on four years of research on the urban environment. The study explores how urban spaces are transformed by people interacting with the world that surrounds them by evoking more just living conditions. It is also an effort to demonstrate how the urban environment could be imagined in ways that differ from the neoliberalist view. Other imaginations, arising from different perspectives on and incentives for development, such as equity and inclusiveness, might produce another city entirely. The book is based on fieldwork from four different urban contexts in Sweden, South Africa, India and Brazil.

Palmer, Henrietta (ed.) The Language of the Becoming City: Making Spatial Justice from Conflicts, Commons, Networks and Hybridity, Berlin, JOVIS Verlag GmbH. Preview the book at: https://www.jovis.de/en/books/product/the-language-of-the-becoming-city.html

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Dr. Sougata Sen, Department of CSIS, worked with undergraduate students to start the ACM Student chapter at BITS Pilani Goa.

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Dr. Sougata Sen published in a CORE 2020 A* conference that has moved to a journal publication format in CORE 2021 (http://portal.core.edu.au/core/media/justification/CORE2021/4607ISWC.pdf )

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Mr. Tirtharaj Dash, Department of CSIS, was selected to participate at the Google Research India Graduate Symposium.

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Mr. Tirtharaj Dash was selected for the ICML 2021 Workshop on Computational Biology Fellowship.

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Student achievements

Team GreaseMonkeys SAE-BAJA won 1^st place in the Sales Event, 2^nd place in the Cost Event and secured the 3^rd best team position in Overall Static Events among 150 teams from all over India.

Baja SAE is a Collegiate Design Series competition run by the Society of Automotive Engineers International (SAE International). Teams of students from universities all over the world design and build small off-road cars. All cars have engines of the same specifications. The goal in Baja SAE racing is to design, build and race off-road vehicles that can withstand the harshest elements of rough terrain.

The 13^th edition of BAJA SAEINDIA in the year 2021 received a total of 282 registrations from all over the country. The competition takes place in two phases that are The Virtuals and The Main Event. Only the teams clearing virtuals go for the main event. Top 150 mBAJA teams and Top 50 eBAJA teams are selected from the virtuals to show their skills and knowledge in the main event.

The Main Event took place over 5 days (from 21^st to 25^th April 2021) with various events divided in two categories - Static and Dynamic events. Due to the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic scenario, the BAJA SAEINDIA OC decided to have a virtual main event with Static and Dynamic events conducted on different platforms online.

Team GreaseMonkeys SAE-BAJA accepted the challenge with a highly motivated team of 25 students and designed an ATV virtually to compete in BAJA SAEINDIA 2021. The team excelled with clearing Virtuals and participated in the Main event with full confidence and determination.

The Static Event is the combination of Design, Manufacturing, CAE analysis, Sales and cost events where teams have to submit reports and then present them in front of a panel of judges. Static events are one of the most important parts of the main event as it caters the students to learn all the basics of setting up their own project as an automobile Company.

Team GreaseMonkeys SAE-BAJA was among the top 15 teams who got selected for the vehicle design finals. From the overall awards in the static events, the team was placed 1^st in the Sales Event, 2^nd in the Cost Event and secured the 3^rd best team position in Overall Static Events among 150 mbaja teams from all over India.

The entire team has put in a very valiant effort throughout the year and at a difficult time in achieving these results.

The Core Coordinating Team Members:

Shashank Sonpawale      2018A4PS0533G

Suhas Badadal                2018B1A40600G

Yagyant Thacker               2018A4PS0529G

Smit Joshi                        2018A4PS0516G

Amal Nair                        2018A4PS0802G

Shresth Agarwal               2018A4PS0944G

Other Team Members

Sharvil Bartake                  2019A4PS0274G

Anshul Kumar                    2019A4PS0651G

Aksh Rajput                        2019A4PS0745G

Soham Mahajan               2019A4PS0040G

Siddharth Awale               2019A4PS0808G

Agam                                    2019A4PS0521G

Anurag Goyal                     2019A4PS0475G

Ameya Saunshimath       2019A4PS0626G

Sagar Batra                         2019A4PS0569G

Dev Mehta                          2019B1A41084G

Zainah Shaikh                    2019B2A11078G

Prakriti Srivastava            2019A4PS0628G

Ishant                                    2019A4PS0531G

Akshay Sheth                     2019A4PS0797G

Hemant Srivastava           2018B1A40956G

Prashant Raghava            2019A4PS0763G

Aditya                                   2019A4PS0766G

Ayush Gupta                      2019A4PS0743G

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Team Pegasus secured 1^st place in the Design Report and 3^rd place in the Technical Presentation sections of the SAEISS Aero Design Challenge 2021.

59 teams from reputed institutions from across India participated in the challenge that was held in an online mode. The event ran over ten months in which teams had to conceptualize and design a UAV that met the mission profile of the competition. The students of Team Pegasus created two innovative UAVs for the challenge, one with a morphing wing that made it capable of carrying varied payloads with different flight times. The other is a joined wing configuration that significantly reduces drag without sacrificing lift.

The Aero Design Challenge is a UAV design competition conducted by the Society of Automobile Engineers India Southern Section (SAEISS). Each team is required to conceive, design, and develop a prototype of a fixed-wing UAV meeting the mission requirements. The challenge features two classes, Regular and Micro. The competition featured five categories for each of the two classes: Video Presentation, Application Report, Fabrication Report, Design Report, and Technical Presentation.

The Design report was the primary means of conveying how the aircraft was designed for the mission focusing on the design process and the aerodynamics of the proposed UAV. The Technical Presentation involved pitching the design in front of a panel of judges. The team followed an innovative approach in design and presentation to bridge the gap that the team had in terms of experience as this was their second time participating in the competition. The entire competition started in August 2020 and ended in July 2021.

Prof. Ranjit S. Patil, head of the Mechanical Engineering Department, BITS Pilani, Goa Campus, mentored the team which consisted of Ashvin Ramesh (Captain) (2018A4PS0559G), Pragalbh Singh (Vice-Captain) (2018A4PS0517G), Pranjal Anand (2018A4PS0874G), Deven Paul (2018A4PS0047G), Paul Jacob (2019B5PS0809G), Vardhan Shah (2019A4PS0665G), Ishan Neogi (2019A4PS0393G), Rachit Gupta (2019A3PS0466G), Dritiman Sinha (2019AAPS0005G), Shivank Maheshwari (2019A4PS1036G), Rajat Garg (2019B4PS0282G) and Gaurav Shinde (2019B5PS0852G).

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Team Visio comprising of Aviral Kumar Goel (2019A7PS0166G) and Vaibhav Ganatra (2019A7PS0010G) are working on a Computer Vision based smart stick to help the visually impaired navigate independently. Since January 2021, the team has following achievements to its credit:

1. Social Innovation Challenge 2020 (Jan 2021): First prize in Social Innovation Challenge 2020 organized by Indian Institute of Science (IISc) and Keio University, India Japan Laboratory. Over 150 teams across India participated in this hackathon. The team received a cash prize of Rs. 50,000. Further details and Results at - https://csp.iisc.ac.in/SIC2020/

Following this, the team presented the proof of concept for smart device to enable navigation for the visually impaired in a Virtual conference at the India-Japan Laboratory Joint Webinar Series on 'India Japan Innovation Potentials on Technology, Culture and Development’ organized by the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) and Keio University, Japan. More details - Prize Winners of the Social Innovation Challenge | India Japan Laboratory ????·??

2. Hackathon 2021 (Jan 2021): First prize in Hackathon 2021 organised by BITS BIRAC BioNEST Incubator and Centre for Innovation, Incubation and Entrepreneurship (CIIE), BITS Pilani, Goa in collaboration with Stademy (Startup Academy), Australia. The team received a cash prize of Rs. 20,000. They received an Incubation Offer from BITS Birac BioNest.

3. Virtual Impact Hackathon (May 2021): First prize in Virtual Impact Hackathon organised by Giftabled Foundation in lieu of Global Accessibility Awareness Day.

4. Falling Walls Lab India 2021 Finalist (August 2021): The team was selected in National Top 16 finalists for Falling Walls Lab India 2021 organised by DWIH New Delhi, DAAD German Academic Exchange Service and Academy of Scientific and Innovative Research(AcSIR). (https://www.linkedin.com/posts/dwih-new-delhi_fwlindia-innovatorsconnectdwih-activity-6833249918413508608-rwBP)

5. PI-WOT 2021 Startup showcase by PanIIT Alumni India (September 2021): More than 270+ startups participated throughout India and after the final round of screening, only the Top 10 startups were selected in all four early/social/b2b/growth stage tracks. The team’s startup was selected in the social category.

Cohorts - The team has also been selected in Conquest BITS Pilani Top 10 (July 2021) out of 1000+ registrations in the BITSian Track and in the Cisco thingqbator Cohort-4 Top 30 (September 2021) out of 812 teams.

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Team 'left_on_read', consisting of Ruturaj Godse (2019A7PS0002G), Shikha Bhat (2019A7PS0063G), Astitva Sehgal (2019B5A70640G) and Naresh Chavan (2019B5A70638G) secured 2^nd position in all India level and 51^st in the worldwide ranking in the Reply Challenge 2021: Teen Edition, which is a worldwide online team-based coding competition. The 4-hour challenge involved solving 5 problems using algorithms. For more details, please visit https://challenges.reply.com/tamtamy/challenge/code-teen-2021/stats

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Team Giriko consisting of Giransh Sasan (2018B1A10587G), Richa Naik (2018AAPS0267G) and Kopal Srivastava (2018B1AA0594G) were declared the National Winners of Product Construct, a Product Management Case competition organised by IIT Madras, where they won a cash prize of INR 25K.

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Kaustubh Mururdhkar (2019B5A80769G), Paurush Punyasheel (2019B4A30184G), Ankit Verma (2019A1PS0887G), Abhay Kamble (2019A7PS0128G) and Yashraj Patil (2019B5A31038G) participated in the International Astronomical Search Collaboration conducted in India by SEDS India. This event was for citizen scientists to look at data generated by PanStars Observatory and identify potential asteroids in the data. The campaign by the aforementioned students was successful and two submissions were recognized as provisional discovery of Main Belt asteroids – 2021 Dh7 and 2021 EZ41.

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Kashyap Mehta (2018B4A70655G) and Ashwani Kottapalli (2018B4A70646G) secured Runner-Up Position in the Alzheimer’s Disease and Cognitive Decline track out of 1100+ hackers from 48 countries organized by WSIS Forum '21. The World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) in collaboration with the Global Coalition on Aging (GCOA) organised a virtual hackathon named Ageing Better with ICTs. As part of WSIS Forum 2021, co-organized by ITU, UNESCO, UNDP and UNCTAD, the hackathon was focused to build solutions based on 17 sustainable development goals of the UN. This hackathon was focused on ideating and building solutions for healthy ageing with the help of ICTs.

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Akash Jha (2018B5A80893G) was selected in Ethereum India Fellowship 2.0 as Track 1 fellow in January 2021. He was part of a 20 student developer cohort out of over 2000 applications from all over India. Top web2 developers from all of India were selected to educate and train them in web3. For further information about the fellowship: Blog Post

More recently, Akash also won the Polygon Bounty in EtherPunk Hackathon for his project DMon - a NFT based AR trading card game. He also won the GeoSpatial Marketplace bounty for Harmony One Love Hackathon for his project GeoSpatia.

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Anagha Rajesh (first year student MSc Chemistry) secured the first position in the Jot It Down AI Article Writing Contest. This competition witnessed participation from university students across India. It was organised by Marktechpost.com, a California based Artificial Intelligence platform with approximately 70,000 visitors per month and 30,000+ Facebook members. As the winner, Anagha will be awarded INR 6000 and a one-month long consultation internship at Marktechpost.com. Her article revolved around the role of AI in transforming the stories we tell.

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Anhadveer Khokar (2017A8PS0714G) has been designated a Nikola Tesla Electrical Engineering Scholar, by the EE Department of Columbia University. This honour is awarded to the most exceptional applicants to the graduate program (about 15-17 applicants per year).  Upon joining Columbia, Tesla Scholars receive a scholarship of $2,500 and in addition, they are invited to participate in special academic and cultural events organized in their honour, along with the EE faculty. More information about the Tesla Scholarship: https://sites.ee.columbia.edu/nikola-tesla-electrical-engineering-scholar-program

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Dev Churiwala (2018B1A70602G) was selected to be a part of the prestigious Tezos India Fellowship 2.0 cohort organized by the Tezos Foundation in July 2021. This fellowship is awarded to the most exceptional software developers. This year only 30 fellows were selected from over 3800 applicants. Over the course of the fellowship, Dev developed Decentralized Exchange Liquidity Pools on the Tezos blockchain, used for highly efficient StableCoin trading. Apart from invaluable mentorship from industry leaders, he was also granted a stipend of $2000 as part of the fellowship. More info about the fellowship can be found here - https://devfolio.co/blog/tif-strikes-back-for-the-next-edition/.

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Devesh Kumar (2019AAPS0270G) was selected as a Google Summer of Code (GSOC) '21 Developer at JBOSS. https://drive.google.com/open?id=11TML7X0s4EDBNDZEl-HVjPiTFDed7OyJ

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Eibel Salil bagged the first prize ($800) in the 'Open Innovation' track of the 'Think With Terra' ideathon organized by Terra India and Lumos Labs. The ideathon was a national event that challenged the Indian developer community to share their knowledge of what can be accomplished with blockchain technology by identifying issues that people face on a daily basis, be it in the overall business industry or for causes such as the COVID-19 pandemic. The medium article announcing the results of the ideathon published by Lumos Labs in: https://medium.com/lumos-labs/we-wrapped-up-the-think-with-terra-ideathon-200-ideas-with-blockchain-applications-96eb48a25385

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Harshitha Kamath Miyar (2020H1290002G) II Year student of ME Biotechnology secured 2nd place in the poster presentation section for her BE project titled "Fungal Hydrophobins: Characterisation and Gold Nanoparticle Synthesis", at APOGEE 2021 hosted by BITS PILANI, Pilani Campus held on 20th - 21st March 2021.

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Himanshu Jain (2019A3PS0423G) became the first BITSian across all 3 campuses to crack a product role at MPL (Product Manager @ MPL) at the end of second year. Himanshu ranked 9th in India in ProduScope 2021 organised by E-Cell, IIT Guwahati & PM School from July 12 to July 20. More than 390+ teams across India participated from different B-Schools, Engineering Colleges and various product communities with leading product leaders. He also won 2 times PM School India Weekend Case Challenges for TESLA and MX TakaTak.

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Ishan Yagnik (2020A3PS1756G) won the Consultathon 2.0 along with other members - Rishabh Dowerah, Amaan Sadri, Aastha Bharill.

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Pranav Mahajan (2017AATS0277G), a final year Electronics and Communications Engineering undergraduate under the guidance of Prof. Veeky Baths recently published a first author original research article in the Frontiers in Aging Neuroscience journal (Impact factor: 4.362). The paper focuses on deep learning-based approaches for the early detection of Alzheimer's dementia from spontaneous speech. For further details please find the paper here -https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnagi.2021.623607/full (open access).

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Prayag Mohanty (2020A3PS0566G) won the Goa & Nagpur cluster final of the digital edition of Tata Crucible Campus Quiz 2021 that was telecasted on Youtube, Twitter and LinkedIn on 19th March 2021 and Times Now on 26th June 2021. He received a cash prize of Rs. 35,000/- and proceeded to the western zonal finals of the quiz, as part of the top 24 quizzers in the country. He is the youngest champion to proceed to the round of 24.

Given below is the report of the same from the website of the quiz:

https://www.tatacrucible.com/campus/report2021/cluster12.html

The quiz finals' video:

https://youtu.be/RB5GvwFq3UI

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Rakshit Mittal (2017A8B40984G - dual degree student of Department of Electrical and Electronics Engineering and Mathematics), Rochishnu Banerjee (2018A7PS0140G – student of Department of CSIS), Dominique Blovin (Télécom Paris, France) and Soumyadip Bandyopathyay (Asst. Professor, CSIS) received the Best Position Award Certificate for their paper entitled ‘Towards an Approach for Translation Validation of Thread-level Parallelizing Transformations using Colored Petri Nets’ at the 16th International Conference of Software Technologies (ICSOFT) held from 6th to 8th July 2021.

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Rakshit Mittal (2017A8B40984G), a dual degree student of Department of Electrical and Electronics Engineering and Mathematics, under the supervision of Dr. Soumyadip Bandyopadhyay, won the Third Prize in the ACM Student Research Competition Grand Finals Undergraduate Track 2021. Rakshit got qualified to participate in the grand final by winning the First Prize at the ACM Student Research Competition, PLDI 2020. Rakshit is the second student from India to win this prize after a IIT Bombay student won it in 2009. Both the student and the advisor are invited to the ACM's Awards Banquet scheduled to be held on October 23rd, at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco, CA (Covid permitting).

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Sarthak Gupta (2019AAPS0290G), a member of the top 30 teams selected worldwide as the finalists of the Innovate4Health Challenge by Johns Hopkins University. Sarthak was the only BITSian in a 3 member team that completed the challenge.

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Sayani Mallick (2019AAPS0218G) was selected as an Outreachy open-source intern for Eclipse Adoptium for the project "Simplify and gamify external AQA tests". This year only 71 interns were selected from all over the world out of about 7000 applicants. Sayani also received the honor of being selected as a speaker at EclipseCON 2021 on the project 'Gamifying external tests in Eclipse Adoptium using machine learning and Twitter'.

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Shikha Bhat (2019A7PS0063G) received a scholarship of USD $1,000 and to attend the 2021 APAC Scholars’ Virtual Retreat that took place at the end of June, hosted by Google. The Generation Google Scholarship for women in Computer Science was established to help aspiring students pursuing computer science degrees excel in technology and become leaders in the field. The scholarship was awarded based on a passion for technology, academic excellence, demonstrated leadership, and commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion.

https://buildyourfuture.withgoogle.com/scholarships/google-scholarship-recipients/

https://buildyourfuture.withgoogle.com/scholarships/generation-google-scholarship-apac/

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Shreyash Singh (2020A3PS1252G) won the 1st prize in ‘DREAMS All Goa College Level Online Essay Competition’ organized by GREEN ARMY in February 2021.The results were declared in June 2021. Shreyash received a cash prize of Rs. 5000 and a certificate.

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Siddhartha Shandilya, PhD Student of the Department of Mechanical Engineering won the Bright Idea Competition on Innovation and Entrepreneurship held on 23^rd January 2021 organized by DSIR- PRISM- TOCIC IIT Guwahati in association with BITS Pilani, Pilani Campus. The title of his proposal was ‘Enhancement of Thermal Efficiency of Burner by Enhancing Design of Gas Burner’.

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Suraj Gupta (2017B2A30329G) and Ashutosh Vashist (2017A1TS0892G) were appointed as Undergraduate Student Researchers at the prestigious INSEAD Business School (Ranked #1 according to FT Global MBA Ranking 2021) to work on a project in the entrepreneurship domain from January 2021 under the Department of Entrepreneurship and Family Enterprise.

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Vallari Shende (2017B1A70699G), fourth year student pursuing dual degree in M.Sc. Biological Sciences and B.E. Computer Science was awarded the Khorana Scholarship 2020 being conducted in joint support by The Department of Biotechnology (DBT), Govt. of India, Indo-U.S. Science and Technology Forum (IUSSTF) and WINStep Forward.

She is also awarded the Future Research Talent Awards 2020 jointly offered by ANU College of Science, ANU College of Health and Medicine and ANU College of Engineering and Computer Science to students from India. Under this program, she will be doing a two-month remote summer internship at Australian National University. She will be working under the guidance of Dr. Jean Wen on a project based on Computational Biology of RNAs.

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Semester I of 2020-21

August to December 2020 – Semester I of 2020-21

Faculty achievements

The term of Prof. Arun V Kulkarni, Department of Physics, as Visiting Associateship at the Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics (IUCAA), Pune has been extended for a period of another three years w.e.f. 1^st August 2020.

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Prof. Lakshmi Subramanian, Department of Humanities and Social Sciences authored:

a. The book ‘Singing Gandhi’s India Music and Sonic Nationalism’ (Roli Books, Delhi 2020)

b. A Chapter; ‘Cohabiting with Contagion: lessons from History’, in The Viral World ORF Global Policy edited by Maya Mirchandani and Shobha Suri. (Durham University and Wiley Blackwell 2020) https://www.orfonline.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/The-Viral-World.pdf

c. ‘Musical Publics in Twentieth-Century Madras: Competing Narratives of Sonic Sociability’ in Tejaswini Niranjana edited Music, Modernity, and Publicness in India (O.U.P., 2020)

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Dr. Rajiv Kumar Chaturvedi, Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, contributed to India’s official (prepared by the Union ministry of Env. Forest and Climate Change) Biennial Report on Climate Change to United Nations, scheduled to be submitted to UN by the Govt. of India on 31st Dec, 2020.

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Dr. Rajiv Kumar Chaturvedi contributed to preparation of Goa’s State Action Plan on Climate Change, received the honor to co-present the SAPCC to Goa Cabinet on 28th of Oct, 2020.

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Prof. Ranjan Dey, Department of Chemistry was awarded Certificate of Recognition by the ‘Journal of Chemical Thermodynamics’, in November-2020.

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Prof. Samit Chattopadhyay, Department of Biological sciences, received the J C Bose National Fellowship for the year of 2020 to 2023.

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Prof. Sumit Biswas, Department of Biological sciences, has been invited to be a Fellow of the High Energy Accelerator Research organization (KEK), Japan.

Student achievements

BITSPilani–Goa team won Gold Medal at iGEM 2020

Team BITSPilani-Goa was the first-ever BITSian team to participate in iGEM 2020. The iGEM (International Genetically Engineered Machines) Foundation is an independent, non-profit organisation dedicated to the advancement of synthetic biology. Each year, they host the iGEM competition, where they give 250+ student teams an opportunity to push the boundaries of bioengineering through designing, building, testing and measuring systems of interchangeable biological modules with standard biological methods.

The BITS Goa team consisted of Shruti Sridhar, Gourav Saha, Ameya Thete, Yogen Borkar, Pranav Ballaney, Saransh Gokhale, Sharanya Shastri, Arya Agarwal, Suhas Badadal, Ithihas Madala, Shrilaxmi Patil, Naman Choudhary and secondary Principal Investigator (PI), Malabika Biswas along with Sumit Biswas, Associate Professor in the Department of Biological Sciences, BITS Pilani K K Birla Goa Campus, as Principal Investigator (PI). The team was graciously funded by our generous alumni.

For iGEM 2020, BITS Goa focused on a problem plaguing the sugarcane industry: the problem of post-harvest sucrose deterioration. With the interdisciplinary team of twelve members from the departments of Biological Sciences, Chemical Engineering, Physics, Economics, Computer Science, Mechanical Engineering, and Electrical branches, they came up with a solution — SugarGain, to help reduce the loss plaguing both the farmers and the mill owners. SugarGain contains genetically-engineered Escherichia coli that target the invertase enzyme responsible for this deterioration.

The team won a Gold Medal at the iGEM 2020 Giant Jamboree on 22nd November 2020 along with two special awards for the Best Software and the Best Composite Genetic Part.

More information about the project and the team can be found at the team Wiki (https://2020.igem.org/Team:BITSPilani-Goa_India).

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Team Vikings wins HAB-59: Hackathon 59 Atmanirbhar Bharat and Evotech 4.0

Team Vikings, consisting of Anshuman Singh (2018A4PS0512G), Akash Jha (2018B5A80893G), Ashwani Kottapalli (2018B4A70646G), Abhijeet Swain (2018B4A70540G), Wahib Sabir Kapdi (2018A3PS0247G) won the following hackathons:

HAB-59: Hackathon 59 Atmanirbhar Bharat’s main objective was to identify potential secure applications that not only replace but work better than those banned by the Government of India. It was powered by MIT-ADT, TERRE Policy Centre and Smart Campus Cloud Network. Team’s Solution Chimera aimed to provide a one-stop social hybrid gaming platform to promote Indian Game Developers.

Project link: https://devfolio.co/submissions/chimera

video link: https://youtu.be/Q1u4beOSzX8

They were placed First in the Gaming Category and received a cash prize of Rs. 1 lakh.

Links: MIT ADT University Pune organises Hackathon 59 Atmanirbhar Bharat 2020, Winners | HAB 59, IIT Roorkee, JSPM’s, VIT Vellore, BITS Pilani and MIT ADT University Students win Hackathon 59-Atmanirbhar Bharat

Evotech 4.0: Organized by Bharati Vidypeeth's College of Engineering, New Delhi. Team’s solution LearnAR. The team was placed 2^nd in the Education Theme Category and won a cash prize of Rs 3,000/-.

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Team Project RT antenna design selected for final prototyping

Team Project RT, consisting of Devashish Gupta (2017A4PS0151G), Soham Deshpande (2018AAPS0723G) and Stuti Panda (2018B5PS0912G) under the guidance of Dr. Sudeep Baudha participated in an antenna design competition called SWANtenna20 for the Sky Watch Array Network (SWAN) organsied by IUCAA (Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics, Pune). The goal was to design a novel dual-polarized antenna element for astronomical observations at low radio frequencies. Over 39 teams from 32 prestigious Indian educational institutions registered, involving more than 200 students and 60 faculty mentors. The team was shortlisted to present their design to a jury consisting of renowned antenna experts in India. The design has been selected for final prototyping, which will be done when the COVID-19 situation improves.

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Team Pegasus secures 3^rd prize in a Sustainability Challenge

SAE Aero Club, team Pegasus, consisting of Ashvin Ramesh (2018A4PS0559G), Pragalbh Dev Singh (2018A4PS0517G), Utkarsh Singh (2018AAPS0349G), Paul Jacob (2019B5PS0809G), and Vardhan Nihal Shah (2019A4PS0665G) participated in a Sustainability Challenge: 'Drone-a-thon: Propelling Sustainability’ organized for start-ups, Industry Associations for Drones, and Academia. This hackathon was in collaboration with 3DEXPERIENCE Lab and the Drone Federation of India. The team bagged the 3^rd prize among a total of 440 teams who registered for the hackathon from all over India. The hackathon was open for start-ups and industry associations for drones as well. ‘Drone-a-thon: Propelling Sustainability’ is a Design-Simulate-Experience 10 days challenge that inspires Young Minds to be the future innovators and future entrepreneurs in the UAV / Drone sector and it aims to use the 3DEXPERIENCE platform and boost participants' innovation capabilities, develop more creative solutions and create the conditions for remarkable talents to stand out. The Top 5 teams were additionally allowed to pitch their idea to the Shell Oil Company – one of the most diversified international oil companies.

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Team Rasoee wins First Runners-Up at the 2020 Global PyTorch Summer Hackathon

Team Rasoee, comprising of Ameya Laad (2018A7PS0124G), Arijit Gupta (2018A8PS0856G), Anish Mulay (2018B3A70907G), Dev Churiwala (2018B1A70602G) and Smitesh Patil (2018A7PS0167G) won First Runners-Up at the 2020 Global PyTorch Summer Hackathon in the mobile/web application category.  Rasoee is a web/mobile application that can be used to identify food items from images. The app can identify 308 different types of dishes from over 5 different cuisines. After identifying the dish, it also provides (if possible) a list of key ingredients that are used to make this dish and link to a recipe and some tutorial videos on YouTube.

The team was declared runners up globally, in the Web/Mobile Applications category. There were around 2500 participants from 114 different countries participating in the hackathon.

Project link: https://devpost.com/software/groundwav

https://medium.com/pytorch/rasoee-a-picture-is-worth-a-thousand-ingredients-82576790a7bc

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BITS Team wins Top Marketer certificate Google Online Marketing Challenge

Team comprising of Parul Verma (2016A8PS0405G), Ameya Sinha (2016A7PS0049G), Sonali Saksena (2016A7PS0791G), Raghav Agrawal (2016A7PS0079G) and Raghav Bhatia (2017B2A80634G) participated in the Google Online Marketing Challenge and received the Top Marketer certificate after successfully completing the challenge. The team, under the guidance of faculty, Mr. Tirtharaj Dash ran ad campaigns for a non-profit organization, BDA Benevolent Fund, a charity fund for dentists in need and managed to increase their website traffic by 54% and received an overall positive feedback as well.

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Anupam Mukherjee received the following awards:

Best Paper Award at CHEMCON 2020 organized by Indian Institute of Chemical Engineers (IIChE) for the paper titled "Cavitation based Advanced Oxidation Process for effective treatment of emerging pollutants: A case study of real-life greywater streams"

Best Paper Award at SCHEMCON 2020 organized by Indian Institute of Chemical Engineers (IIChE) for the paper titled "Study of Hydrodynamic Cavitation based hybrid advanced oxidation technology: A case study for degradation of Sodium dodecyl sulphate"

BRIC (BIRAC IKP) Idea Exposition Award: 1st Prize on "Healthcare and Environment" at GIM Goa 2020. (In collaboration with Epione Swajal Solutions LLP) for the paper titled "Prototype Development for Treatment of Grey Water Appliance GeRRy"

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Jasneet Kaur Pala received the following awards:

Best Paper Award at SCHEMCON 2020 organized by Indian Institute of Chemical Engineers (IIChE) for the paper titled "Zero Liquid Discharge Strategy And Related Energetics : A Study Of Thermal Desalination Integrated With Crystallization"

IIChE Awards for the Year 2020 - Late Lakshmi Nandakumar Award of the Institute for best presentation in Schemcon 2020 by a Lady Student

Best Poster Presentation at International Conference on Sustainable Technologies for Water Treatment and Desalination (STWTD - 2020) for the paper titled “Techno-Energy Analysis of MSF with Crystallizer & Zero Liquid Discharge Strategy”

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Akash Jha (2018B5A80893G) and Ashwani Kottapalli (2018B4A70646G) secured first position in All India Elixar AR Challenge organised by Elixar Systems, CSIR-CEERI. Over 350 participants participated in the competition which concluded in August 2020. Team’s entry for the competition was CoARona an AR one stop shop for all Covid related needs including news, resources nearby and even medical triage.

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Akshay Valsaraj (2018B1A70608G), M Ithihas (2018B1AA0607G), Nikhil Garg (2016B1A30597G), and Mohit Patil (alumni), under the guidance of Prof Veeky Baths published a paper titled "Motor Imagery-Based Multimodal Biometric User Authentication System Using EEG'' at the 2020 International Conference on Cyberworlds (CW), 272-279, in the biometrics category. The paper can be found here: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9240525

They are also currently working on another project titled "Identifying Psychiatric Disorders With Speech and Deep Learning" under Prof Veeky Baths.

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Akshay Valsaraj (2018B1A70608G) received the prestigious Mitacs Globalink Research Internship for the summer of 2021 from Alberta University to work under Prof Padma Kaul to analyse echocardiography images using deep learning,

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Anirudh Nagaraj (2018A7PS0216G) secured the 2^nd prize for a paper on "Using EPANET and Deep Learning to Predict and Localise Leaks in Smart Water Grids" at the National Technical Paper Contest conducted by the Institution of Electronics and Telecommunication Engineers (IETE-NTPC). The paper was submitted in December 2020 and the presentation was conducted on 3^rd January 2021.

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Aniruddha Nayak (2018A4PS0850G) and Vivek Gupte (2018B1A40948G) won second prize globally in NASA Challenge: A Common Restraint and Mobility Aid System for Multiple Gravity Environments. In this challenge, participants had to design a restraint and mobility aid system for space habitat enclosures that can be compatible with multiple gravity situations and can be reconfigured based on the gravity situation that it is deployed in. The winners for this challenge were announced on September 11, 2020.

https://grabcad.com/challenges/nasa-challenge-a-common-restraint-and-mobility-aid-system-for-multiple-gravity-environments

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Ankur Prakash (2017A4PS0676G) participated in the Heartfulness Essay Event 2020 organized by Shri Ram Chandra Mission. He secured 4th Rank among essays written in English in the state of Goa

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Devanshu Wakhale (2017A4PS0293G), Aniruddha Nayak (2018A4PS0850G), and Vivek Gupte (2018B1A40948G) won the first runners up prize at the University of Queensland Engineering Design Hackathon India. In this hackathon, participants had to design a low-cost, easy to manufacture Covid-19 Ventilator.

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Navneet Raghunath (2017A3PS1902G) co-authored a conference paper with Prof. M.K Deshmukh and Prof. Sandip S. Deshmukh, titled "Field Performance Monitoring of Roof-Mounted SPV Systems: Application of Internet-Enabled Technologies" which was accepted to be published at Spriger's SIST book series. The conference was held on 21-22 August.

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Prakhar Yadav (2019H1030032G), Dhairya Parikh (2019H1030906G), Dilpreet Kaur (2019H1030907G), Kajal Parikh (2019H1030016G) and Prof. Hemant Rathore presented a paper on "Movie Recommendation System Addressing Changes in User Preferences with Time" in 20th International Conference on Hybrid Intelligent Systems ( HIS 2020 ) on 14^th December 2020. The paper shall be published by Springer Varlag.

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Rakshit Mittal (2017A8B40984G), a student of CSIS Department won Gold Medal in Programming Language Design and Implementation 9PLDI) Conference 2020 ACM Student Research Competition. He is the first Indian to win a Gold Medal at ACM Student Research Competition, Undergraduate Track. His paper was titled ‘Translation Validation of Code-Optimizing Transformations involving Loops using Petri Net Based Program Models’.

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Ruturaj Atul Godse (2019A7PS0002G) participated in the ACM India Coding Contest and won second position in the finals and also won cash prize of Rs 10,000/-. The contest, held from 31^st October to 21^st November 2020, consisted of three rounds of coding and an interview. More than 1,100 students participated in the contest and after two rounds, 11 students were selected for the final round and interviews.

For more information: https://www.acm.org/articles/acm-india-bulletins/2020/online-coding-contest-2020-results

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Shashank Gupta (2020A4PS1816G) won the overall Global Voices MUN (Model United Nations) series organised by the DAIS, which includes a scholarship of 5000 USD. He received High Recommendation in UNOOSA organised by BITSMUN DUBAI, in World Leader's Summit organised by Bhubaneswar IMUN, in WHA organised by NTU MUN Singapore and in UNGA:DISEC organised by BITSMUN Goa. He also received Best Delegate in UNESCO organised by NIT SILCHAR MUN, in UNSC organised by Indian Diplomacy Summit, in African Union organised by VIT Pune MUN and in UNHRC organised by BITSMUN Hyderabad.

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Suraj Gupta (2017B2A30329G) and Ashutosh Vashist (2017A1PS0892G) have been selected for the prestigious Idea-to-Startup Lab, a start-up pre-accelerator by the Indian School of Business (India) and Bocconi University (Milan, Italy). Their start-up, PharmBox has been selected in the Top 25 ideas nationally out of 500+ applications to develop it further via the pre-accelerator.

Idea to Startup Lab is a first of its kind training program tailored for aspiring entrepreneurs in India. This hands-on training program combines cutting-edge practices from management, entrepreneurship, design thinking, and academic research. PharmBox is a touchless 24/7 available medicine dispensing machine product integrated with an Android Application so that people have access to medicines in this crucial time of crisis when the pharmacies are not open. Their product dispenses medicines to a customer through a complete contactless model.

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Yashraj Sah (2018A4PS0065G) and Yash Bohra (2018B3AA0711G) bagged the 2^nd position in EY CAFTA Case Championship 2020 organised by Ernst & Young, among all the UG students across India in ‘Managing Cash & Investment’ category.

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Semester II of 2019-20

January to July 2020 - Semester II of 2019-20

Faculty achievements

Dr. Anirban Roy, Department of Chemical Engineering, co-authored a book on “Modeling in Membranes and Membrane-Based Processes” (Wiley publishing house). The book is available on Amazon and publishing house Wiley

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Epione Swajal Solutions (a startup by Dr. Anirban Roy, Assistant Professor, Department of Chemical Engineering) and Mr. Anupam Mukherjee (pursuing PhD under Dr. Anirban Roy’s guidance) won the BRIC Idea Exposition on “Healthcare & Environment” organized by BIRAC Regional Innovation Centre in collaboration with IKP and Goa Institute of Management (GIM) held at GIM on 21 & 22 February 2020.

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Prof. Dipankar Pal, Department of EEE, presented a research paper, co-authored with BITS Goa scholars, Mr. Akhilesh G. Naik and Mr. Debarshi Deka, titled, “ASIC Implementation of High-Speed Adaptive Recursive Karatsuba Multiplier with Square-Root-Carry-Select-Adder” in the 11th LASCAS 2020- a signature conference of IEEE CAS, on 26th of February, in San Jose, Costa Rica.

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Prof. Lakshmi Subramanian, Department of Humanities and Social Sciences has been recognized for her expertise in maritime history, and has been invited by the University of Leiden to conduct a master classes tentatively scheduled in June 2021.

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Prof. Lakshmi Subramanian, has been invited to write for Observer Research Foundation on Covid 19 from a historical perspective. She has also been approached by Palgrave to assist in the writing of a new economic history of India. Her book ‘The Sovereign and the Pirate’ (O.U.P., 2016) was selected by the New Books Network, New York to initiate a discussion.

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Prof. Reena Cheruvalath, Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, along with I Manalo and H Ayabe, presented a poster, entitled as “Planning as a metacognitive strategy, diagram use, and depth of moral reasoning" at EARLI SIGs 8 and 16-Dresden 2020 in DGUV Congress, Dresden, Germany.

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Prof. Snehanshu Saha, Department of CS&IS, was the recipient for the “Outstanding Paper Award” at the 12^th International Conference on COMmunication Systems & NETworkS (COMSNETS) held at Bangalore on 7^th January 2020.

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Student achievements

Prajakta Bhende, PhD scholar from the Department of Biological Sciences, working under the supervision of Dr Anasuya Ganguly and Dr Judith Braganca, had won a paid research internship to work in Cardiff University, UK with Dr Polina Prokopovich, School of Pharmacy for a few months. Due to the covid-19 ourbreak she will travel to UK at a later date. Her topic of research was to make novel scaffolds out of PHA. Prajakta Bhende also helped in testing Covid-19 patient samples at GMC, Goa.

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Sheetal Thomas, a PhD scholar of Department of Economics along with Mridula Goel and Dipak Agrawal (2020) co-authored “A framework for analyzing financial behavior using machine learning classification of personality through handwriting analysis” Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Finance, Elsevier, Vol. 26, June 2020, 100315, DOI:10.1016/j.jbef.2020.100315 (Scopus, ABDC Grade “A” Journal, Quartile-1)

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Project Kratos amongst top 10 global participants at Indian Rover Challenge (IRC)

In January 2020, Project Kratos a twenty five student team with Akash Chaudhary as Team Lead was selected to participate in the finals of the Indian Rover Challenge, held at Vellore Institute of Technology, Chennai. The competition was conducted from 17^th to 19^th January, and 4 different challenges were conducted to assess all aspects of the Mars Rover: Extreme Retrieval Task, Equipment Service Task, Astronaut Assistance Task and Life Detection Task.

There were 21 teams in finals, from colleges all across the world. We are glad to say that, in the first year of participation itself, Project Kratos stood 10^th amongst all participatory teams, and also attained first rank amongst all newly participating rovers.

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Enactus BITS Goa's Project Sivaar enters the Top 24 Projects globally!

Project Sivaar by Enactus BITS Goa led by Naman Gupta and Yash Agarwal enters the Top 24 Teams globally out of 1730 active Enactus teams. The team of 15 students participated in Enactus 1 Race 4 Oceans with Project Sivaar. Project Sivaar: aims to tackle the problem of ocean acidification, marine habitat loss and climate change through the creation of sustainable and innovative ocean farms and seaweed cultivation while creating micro-social entrepreneurs out of underprivileged communities and farmers around Goa. The Team has partnered with organisations like TERI & NIO for this endeavour and is guided by Prof. Mridula Goel.

Out of 107 innovative projects from 20 countries, the project has been selected in the Top 24 projects worldwide and will be going to the final round of incubation & mentorship. Top 3-5 teams get a funding opportunity of $25000 and a fully-sponsored trip to Utrecht, Netherlands. The team will also be representative of the Ocean Student Advisory Group for Impact 4 Oceans during UN Global Goals Week.

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Team InfinityBox wins the World Regionals of HULT Prize 2020

Team InfinityBox has won the World Regionals of HULT Prize 2020 and is one among the Top 50 startups worldwide who will attend the accelerator at Boston and aim for the $1 Million Prize! InfinityBox is a team of IIT KGP and BITS Pilani students solving the challenge of rising usage of single-use plastics by following a circular economy model for food delivery containers.

BITS student Shiv Kumar along with 3 IIT Kharagpur students namely - Shashwat Gangwal, Soham Chandorkar and Keshav Godala constitute Team InfinityBox.

Across three pilots in Kharagpur, Gurugram and Mumbai, they have had an outstanding adoption rate of 75% among the consumers. The latest Mumbai pilot was in partnership with Swiggy. The team is looking at replicating this success and have a bigger impact alongside Swiggy. Once operational, InfinityBox would reduce at least 200,000 Kgs of plastic within 2 years.

Read more about InfinityBox at https://www.infinityboxkgp.com/

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BITS Goa Campus team Changemakers in top 50 globally

Suraj Gupta (2017B2A30329G), Ashutosh Vashist (2017A1PS0892G), Kushal Rathi (2018A3PS0508G) represented India as team "Changemakers" in the Hult Prize Global Regional Finals at Dhaka, Bangladesh(virtually) and secured a position in the Top 50 globally.

It is organized by Hult International Business School, conducted in March 2020. The Hult Prize is an annual, year-long competition that crowd-sources ideas from MBA and college students to solve a pressing social issue such as food security, water access, energy, and education.

They developed a solution, "PiezoRun," to recover waste heat energy from road transportation to tackle the everlasting energy problems.

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BITS Goa Campus team PharmBox selected in top 30 Hack the Crisis – India, an Online Hackathon

Five students of BITS Goa Campus - Suraj Gupta (2017B2A30329G), Ashutosh Vashist (2017A1PS0892G), Aditya Ketkar (2016A7PS0081G), Vishnu Nair (2017A1PS0800G) and Ishan Sharma (2019A3PS0297G), along with one student of Hyderabad Campus, Ishita Kukreti (2017A1PS1037G) participated in the Hack the Crisis – India, an Online Hackathon. This hackathon was organized by Garage48, ‘Hack A Cause – India’, and ‘Ficci Ladies Organization Pune’ and supported by the Ministry of Electronics & Information Technology, Government of India (MEITY). The hackathon is part of a global initiative, and their team, "PharmBox," was selected in the Top 30 out of more than 3000 teams (15000+ participants) from all over India in the competition held on 3-5 April 2020. They developed a medicine vending machine system to tackle the problem of medicine procurement in India. The team leaders, Suraj Gupta and Ashutosh Vashist shared their experiences of the hackathon in an interview with Accelerate Estonia."
Our concept video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xAxU0pfQJx8&feature=youtu.be

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The Goa round of the 16th edition of the Tata Crucible Campus Quiz, a national level quiz competition held at BITS Pilani, K K Birla Goa Campus on the 16th February 2020, kicked off with a quick preliminary written round that saw two teams from BITS Pilani Goa Campus (One: Lucky Kaul and Shiv Kumar, Two: Navneet Raghunath and Ratnakant Govenkar) become a part of the top six teams for the on-stage final, out of a 114 teams.

The audience was enthralled by an entertaining 45 minute final that was hosted by quizmaster Giri 'Pickbrain' Balasubramaniam, that saw a dominative performance from Lucky and Shiv, who went on to defend the title they had won in 2019.

The Director of BITS Goa, Prof. Raghurama G felicitated the winners with a cash prize of INR 75000. The runners up were felicitated with a cash prize of INR 35000.

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Three students of Goa Campus namely Shiv Kumar (2017B3A10585G), Mayank Phadke (2017B3A80625G) and Ishita Srivastava (2016A8PS0236G), have made it to the prestigious list of Economic Times Campus Stars Class of 2019-20.

The third edition of ET Campus Stars was launched in September 2019. It was a four-phase program participated by 49,000+ students from 2000+ colleges out of which 104 students nationwide were selected for this list.

The full list is available here: https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/etcampusstars

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Samesh Lakhotia’s (2018AAPS0553G) proposal for Google Summer of Code 2020 has been accepted. He will be working with HydraEcosystem.org on his project, https://summerofcode.withgoogle.com/projects/#6296902657638400. Samesh is also Coordinator, Developers' Society BITS Goa (DevSoc).
Devansh Aggarwal’s (2018A7PS0131G) proposal for Google Summer of Code 2020 has been accepted. He will be working with The Mifos Initiative on his project, https://summerofcode.withgoogle.com/projects/#5282825042919424.

Google Summer of Code is a global program focused on introducing students to open source software development. Since its inception in 2005, the program has brought together 15,000+ student participants and 12,000 mentors from over 118 countries worldwide. This year, Google has funded 1195 student projects for 199 open source organizations who benefit from active involvement from new developers.

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Aditya Choudhary (2017A7PS0041G) along with 5 students from different colleges grouped randomly as a team won the Code For Good 2020 Hackathon. It was the 1^st virtual and the biggest Code For Good event till date where 40 teams competed with each other.

CFG is a hackathon for social good organisations. Here, students work alongside employees of JPMC to develop technical solutions for NPO’s to tackle real world problems. From 23rd July, over the span of 3 days, Aditya’s team developed a solution for Janaagraha Centre for Citizenship and Democracy which is working to develop a platform that enables citizens to report societal problems to the public authority.

In the 48 hours, they developed a solution for citizens to register complaints about civic conditions with simple interactions through WhatsApp & SMS. Interaction through WhatsApp was processed to extract information on issue and location through ML which can be accessible to NPO through a dashboard. Each member of the team was awarded an Apple iPad worth about Rs. 1.8 Lakh.

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Alish Dipani (2016A7TS0005G) and Mehul Rastogi (2016A7TS0087G) were selected as Teaching Assistants for an international online computational neuroscience summer school Neuromatch Academy held from 13^th to 31^st July.

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Alish Dipani (2016A7TS0005G), was selected for a grant by The Ruby Association for his project titled Rubyplot: An advanced plotting library for Ruby. He was one of the five recipients with applicants from all around the world, the grant amount was JPY500,000 for the period from November 2019 to March 2020. This was an extension of his Google Summer of Code (GSoC) 2019 project under The Ruby Science Foundation. Link for this project can be found here.

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Ashutosh Vashist (2017A1PS0892G) was selected to participate in the MIT Africa Takes on COVID-19 Hackathon (https://covid19challenge.mit.edu/africa-takes-on-covid19/), a hackathon organized by MIT students from May 1-3, 2020. The objective of the Hackathon was to encourage innovations to tackle COVID19 in Africa. Ashutosh was amongst 350 participants selected from a diverse pool of more than 2500 international applicants from over 100 countries. He was chosen to be a participant in Track E. Sustaining Primary Care During COVID-19, comprising of participants from worldwide cross-functional teams.

The Hackathon required the teams to build a product prototype in 48 hours, make suitable business and financial models for a potential scale-up.

Ashutosh led the team, “Lifeline”, communicated across different timezones to manage and offered his analytical and product development skills. The team was amongst the Top 20 in the Hackathon.

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Ashutosh Vashist (2017A1PS0892G) was selected as a Delegate to participate in the prestigious 2020 Harvard College Project for Asian and International Relations (HPAIR) Harvard College Conference (https://hpair.org/harvard-conference-2020), in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the USA from 14^th to 17^th February 2020. It is the largest international student-organized conference in the world. This year’s theme was Striking a balance: Vision of a Conflicted World. Ashutosh was amongst 300 delegates selected from a diverse pool of about 4000 international applicants from around 80 countries. He was chosen to be a participant of the Stride Funding Impact Challenge, comprising of delegates in global cross-functional teams.

The Impact Challenge required the team to provide a comprehensive review concerning the target audience of the upcoming startup and list out relevant marketing channels for their campaign.
Ashutosh led the team, collaborated with the take of the relevant stakeholders and gave the final pitch. His pitch was deemed amongst the best by the judges of the Impact Challenge.

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Ayushi Dubal (2019A7PS0099G), a first year student of Department of Computer Science and Information Systems has been selected for a scholarship of Google's 2020 APAC Women Techmakers Scholars Program.

Through the Women Techmakers Scholars Program, Google is furthering Dr. Anita Borg’s vision of creating gender equality in the tech industry by encouraging women to excel as active participants and leaders in the field. The scholarship is awarded based on academic performance, leadership, and impact on the community of women in tech. Ms. Ayushi cleared three rounds of selection - a written essay round, the Google Online Challenge, and a telephonic interview, to be selected as one of 74 scholars from all across India and Greater China.

Scholarship includes a cash scholarship of 1000 USD, and an invitation to a virtual retreat organised for the scholars, which had multiple workshops and sessions that boosted personal and professional growth.

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A research scholar, Kasi Bandla, working under the guidance of Prof. Dipankar Pal presented a paper, titled, “Design of Low Power, High Speed, Low Offset and Area Efficient Dynamic-Latch Comparator for SAR-ADC”, in the IEEE 2020 International Conference on Innovative Trends in Communication and Computer Engineering (ITCE 2020) in Aswan, Egypt, on 08 February 2020. The paper was jointly authored along with Mr. A. Harikrishnan and Prof. Dipankar Pal.

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A paper entitled “Outage Analysis of OFDMA Based NOMA Aided Full-Duplex Cooperative D2D System”, authored by R. Bajpai (2019PHXF0003G), A Kulkarni (2017A3PS0901G), G. Malhotra (2017A8PS0512G), N. Gupta (Faculty), has been accepted for an International Conference on Telecommunications, scheduled to be held at Indonesia on 5^th to 7^th October 2020.

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During Practice School-II with UST Global, team BITSIAN_HACKERS consisting of Ravi Sadhwani (2016A8PS0302G) along with other three students of Pilani Campus viz. Teertha Raj Chatterjee, Kartik Nawal, and Abhinay Pande participated in D3 Code Pursuit Hackathon 2019. They showcased the work in D3 Global Summit in December. The team won Runners Up position amongst 440+ teams globally. Each one was awarded Samsung Note 9 as prizes for the same. They have also filed a patent in association with UST for the same algorithm designed.

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Rachit Rastogi’s (2016B3A80358G) research paper titled 'Renewable energy firm's performance analysis using machine learning approach' was accepted for the conference "SEIT 2020, The 10th International Conference on Sustainable Energy Information Technology" to be organized in Leuven, Belgium. The paper got published in Procedia Computer Science journal by the Elsevier publications. This paper was co-authored by Dr. Ritika Jaiswal (Department of Economics, BITS Goa) and Dr. Raj K Jaiswal (Department of Computer Science, BITS Goa) who mentored and guided him throughout the process.

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Sharad Chitlangia (2017A8PS0472G), a student of Department of Electrical and Electronics Engineering has won funding support of 10,000 USD (Rs. 7.64 lakhs) provided by Microsoft Research’s Reinforcement Learning Open Source Festival. This year only 6 students were selected globally.

The Reinforcement Learning (RL) Open Source Fest is a global online program focused on introducing students to open source reinforcement learning programs and software development while working alongside researchers, data scientists, and engineers on the Real World Reinforcement Learning team at Microsoft Research NYC. Students work on a four-month research programming project during their break from university (May-August 2020).

Please find more information at this link: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/academic-program/rl-open-source-fest/

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Shrishailya A Agashe (2019A7PS0004G) has filed a patent for a project titled ‘Contactless Sanitation System’ in the Indian Patent Office. Shrishailya has invented an attachable system for contactless sanitation of the hand and feet which is specially designed and prototyped for the current COVID-19 pandemic situation, wherein contactless hand/ feet washing is an absolute need. Another unique point of the project is that the users are not needed to replace the existing hand washing basins/ stations, since an external attachment is provided for making the process of hand and feet washing contactless and completely automated.

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Snigdha Tiwari (2019A8PS0555G), designed a website for Tehsil Dadri (www.tehsildadri.com) , on a pro bono basis in July 2020 so that people and employees of the tehsil get all the information on one platform. It is regularly updated with the coronavirus pandemic information, public orders and press releases.

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Tanmay Dixit (2016B2A30593G), along with Prof. Mridula Goel Priyesh Srivastava, Hariram Ramakrishnan and Rajath Reghunath co-authored an IEEE paper entitled "Cloud-based Mobile and Web application to support managing the treatment of Tuberculosis" which was published in COMSNETS 2020 (International Conference on COMmunication Systems & NETworkS) and can be accessed here https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/9027426/ .

The nature of tuberculosis, a serious chronic disease, requires regular, continuous drug-based treatment, periodic diagnostic monitoring for serious side effects on liver function and proper supportive dietary nutrition. The app is developed to be very simple and explicit for patients to feed their data and the web interface is to optimize doctor’s time in following up on the treatment of the case. Use of the app is expected to solve problems related to the administration of TB treatment, like migration, infectiveness for health and care providers etc. The research paper won the best paper award at the NetHealth Workshop on January 11, 2020 in Bangalore.

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Uma Matlani (2018H1290017G), a student of M.E. Biotechnology was selected for the Khorana Program for Scholars 2019 to work under the mentorship of Dr. David R Andes, of University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA during the summer vacations (29^th May 29 to 3^rd August 2019). The program is jointly supported by Department of Biotechnology, Govt. of India, Indo-U.S. Science and Technology Forum (IUSSTF) and WINStep Forward.

The program includes travel expenses, stipend, stay, and health insurance of the selected student.

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NIRMAAN (During COVID 19 lockdown period)

Community members at BITS Pilani, KK Birla Goa Campus launched an initiative, together with Nirmaan - Goa Chapter to help migrant workers and other labourers in Zuarinagar. The initiative has raised funds through donations and has been able to provide more than 300 families dry grocery packs. We also helped many labourers and families access cooked food and dry rations provided by the government. Faculty members who are part of the initiative helped more than 100 migrant labourers register for travel on Shramik trains and many are also being provided a small sum to support them through the journey. We are also collaborating with the Primary Health Centre at Cansaulim (which covers the Zuarinagar area) in training trainers to raise awareness and bring about behavioural changes to reduce the spread of COVID-19.

NIRMAAN volunteer wishes to thank everyone who came forward to donate and spread the word about the initiative.
Semester I of 2019-20

Faculty achievements

Prof. Debasis Patnaik, Department of Economics was felicitated by Kalinga Institute of Social Sciences at National Conference on ‘Teaching Methodology for Tribal Students’ for ‘Alternative Pedagogical Directions in Social Science Teaching and Research’ on 27th Sept 2019

Prof. Ranjan Dey, Department of Chemistry, has been elected as an Associate Editor of Physical Chemistry Chemical Physics (PCCP), a Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC) journal.

Student achievements

A student-team of BITS Pilani, K K Birla Goa Campus--Project PINAKA--was declared winner at the Boeing University Innovation Leadership Development (BUILD) program held in September 2019. Six winning teams, 3 student teams and 3 teams amongst early-stage start-ups were selected from 26 finalists.

Project PINAKA is a team of motivated engineers mentored by Prof. Shibu Clement, Associate Professor, Dept. of Mechanical Engineering, working to introduce AI into Aviation. The team included Saksham Agrawal, Kshitij Chhabra, Harshwardhan Shirodkar, Devanshu Wakhale, Srisreyas S, Harshvardhan Chandirasekar, Bharat Gupta, Prithvi Ramesh, Shambhavi Singh, and Devansh Gupta.

The team innovated Solar Endurance UAV which is an artificially intelligent autopilot system which is being made to be deployed on electric fixed wing drone. An array of sensors are placed in different configurations, this data is fused together and processed by an AI system which then predicts wind patterns. The post processing system then uses this data to enter air streams to conserve energy. So far the team has made one prototype to collect test data.

The BUILD program is Boeing’s unique aerospace innovation, leadership and talent nurturing program for university students, faculty and early-stage start-ups. The program invited ideas in the fields of aerospace, autonomous vehicles, advanced manufacturing, augmented and virtual reality, artificial intelligence and machine learning, materials, robotics and the Internet of Things. The incubator program was launched in collaboration with seven incubators--IIT Delhi, IIT Gandhinagar, IIT Bombay, IIT Madras, IISc Bangalore, T-Hub Hyderabad and KIIT Bhubaneshwar.

The BITS teams entered Boeing BUILD competition 4 months ago and since then Boeing has provided students rigorous training in understanding the entrepreneurial process along with Business modelling. Students passed through 5 stages of the competition where two rounds were interviews with the jury and two rounds were Regional and National level pitch competitions.

Team Mythoclast_Sanguine_DataStructures, participated by Sarthak Agarwal (2016B4A70511G), Mohit Kurani (2016A7PS0076G) and Divyanshu Shekhar (2017A7PS0962G), qualified for The 2019 ICPC Asia - West Continent Final Contest to be held on 14-15 January, 2020. It is a multisite contest to be held in Tehran and Kolkata. The team secured a rank of 19 out of 2400 teams that had applied to the Amritapuri site.

Mr. Suraj Gupta, Mr. Kushal Rathi, Mr. Jash Patwa and Mr. Madhur Pol participated as team "Piezo-Boys" in the ‘Hult Prize on Campus,’ organized by Hult International Business School, conducted on 30^th November 2019. The Hult Prize is an annual, year-long competition that crowd-sources ideas from MBA and college students to solve a pressing social issue such as food security, water access, energy, and education. The winner of the Hult Prize Challenge will receive a $1 Million USD seed funding from The Hult Prize in partnership with the United Nations. Team "Piezo-Boys" is selected to represent BITS Goa in the Hult Prize Regional Summit to be held in Boston, Massachusetts. They developed a solution, "PiezoRun" to recover waste heat energy from road transportation to tackle the everlasting energy problems.

Goa Campus students Mr. Lucky Kaul and Mr. Shiv Kumar secured the National 2^nd Runner-Up position in the prestigious 16^th edition of NTPC Electron Quiz '19 held at Power Management Institute, Noida. The National Final was a close competition till the end with IIT Madras securing the top honour. BITS Pilani, Goa Campus qualified for the National Finals by emerging as one of the winners of the Western Regionals held at Mumbai. This edition of the Quiz saw 1,132 registrations across six cities with participation from 566 teams. 18 institutions contested in three semi-finals.

Mr. Saptarshi Roy and Mr. Prakash Tiwari, Directors of NTPC, awarded the prizes to the winners. The Electron Quiz initiated in the year 2004 and since then has connected with young minds intending to develop a healthy learning and development culture. The National Finals were also telecasted on ET Now.

Mr. Abhijit Dey (2017PHXF0423G), Research Scholar of the Department of Electrical and Electronics Engineering, participated in the Young Professionals in Space-Dubai Conference 2019, held on November 4-6, 2019 in Dubai, UAE. The conference was organized by IEEE & Muhammad Bin Rashid Space Centre (MBRSC). Young Professionals in Space (YPS) is an initiative to bring scientists, practitioners, engineers and leaders of the space industry and agencies together on a single platform to discuss recent research breakthroughs, technical advances, existing opportunities and emerging space technologies. The platform aims to provide the young generation with a holistic view of the science, engineering and space technology fields and provide access to professionals and experts from around the world.

Mr. Dey was among the 31 participants who were selected to receive a travel grant for the Young Professionals in Space Conference 2019 out of a total of 251 young scientists, practitioners, engineers and leaders from around the world.

During the conference, Abhijit met astronauts from UAE, researchers from academia and industry, shared research conducted at BITS-Pilani Goa and ongoing projects. He also participated in a workshop, ‘Introduction to Amateur Radio and Satellite Observation’ at the Conference.

Ms. Awani Khodkumbhe (2016A8TS0331G), a final year B.E. Electronics and Instrumentation student ranked in the top 20 among the Electrical students all over the world, in the IEEE SSCS Rising Star 2020. The ceremony will take place during the premier conference of IEEE SSCS - ISSCC 2020 in San Fransisco, California in February 2020. She was mentored by Prof. Bram Nauta, Prof. A. J. Annema, University of Twente and Prof. Abhijit Pethe, BITS Pilani, K K Birla Goa Campus.

Ms. Oindrila Ghosh (2018A1PS0080G) and Ms. Vidhi Rai (2018B3A40713G) won the British Parliamentary Debate Tournament (Novice category) organised by Symbiosis Law School, Pune between the 23^rd and 25^th August, 2019.

Mr. Ruturaj Atul Godse, a first year student of BITS Pilani, K K Birla Goa Campus, has been selected for the prestigious Aditya Birla Scholarships 2019. The scholarship amount of Rupees One Lakh per year is given to the selected student to cover the fees. Mr. Godse, who stood second in this year’s BITS entrance exam–BITSAT, is pursuing BE degree in Computer Science at Goa Campus. Two students of BITS Pilani, Pilani Campus, have also been selected for this scholarship this year.

Every year 40 students from top engineering, management and law colleges of India are selected for this scholarship through a very rigorous selection process. Only top 20 students, in terms of their entrance exam ranking, from BITS Pilani, XLRI, FMS, and selected IIMs, IITs, and law colleges are eligible to apply for this prestigious scholarship which is valid for the full course, subject to ongoing performance. Around 440 students are eligible to apply for this scholarship. As part of the selection process, students’ overall academic and co-curricular achievements are assessed, essays written by these students are reviewed and interviews are conducted by eminent panel of luminaries and academicians. Selected students are closely monitored for the renewal of their scholarship every year.

Instituted in 1999, the Aditya Birla Scholarships provide an excellent opportunity for scholars to learn through networking with the country’s first truly global conglomerate.
Semester II of 2018-19

Faculty achievements

Prof. Narendra Nath Ghosh, Department of Chemistry received a Visiting Scholar Award to visit the Department of Chemistry of the University of Tartu, Estonia to teach a course entitled ‘Nanomaterials and Nanotechnology and their applications’ in the Analytical Chemistry for Excellence in Analytical Chemistry program, which is an Erasmus Mundus Joint Master Degree programme.

Prof. Narendra Nath Ghosh is in the top 10% of highly cited authors in the General chemistry portfolio of journals published by the Royal Society of Chemistry UK.

Dr. Rajiv Kumar Chaturvedi, Department of Humanities & Social Sciences co-authored a paper published in Nature Sustainability titled ‘China and India lead in greening of the world through land-use management’. The paper received 31 citations within 6 months of publication. In terms of Altmetric score this paper is ranked 1^st of the 42 tracked articles of a similar age in the journal Nature Sustainability. Further this paper is ranked 65^th of the ~ 3 Lakh tracked articles of a similar age in all journals, world over.

Prof. Reena Cheruvalath, Department of Humanities & Social Sciences was awarded ICSSR ‘Data Collection Abroad Fellowship’ to do research in the University of Kyoto, Japan, May-July 2019.

Prof. Reena Cheruvalath received JSPS (Japan Society for the Promotion of Science), Grant-in-aid for Scientific Research on 'Language, Culture and Critical Thinking: The possibilities of measuring objectives with task,' Role: Co-investigator (July, 2019).

Dr. Arnab Banerjee, Dept. of Biological Sciences has received “Membership in Reproduction and Endocrinology, SRBCE, 2019” award From the Society for Reproductive Biology and Comparative Endocrinology, India in recognition of his research contributions in the field of mammalian reproductive physiology.

Student achievements

Two teams bagged first positions in Grand Finale of Smart India Hackathon, 2019

Two teams representing Goa Campus bagged first positions in different categories in the Grand Finale of Smart India Hackathon, 2019 (SIH, 2019); one of the world's biggest Hackathon, held at 48 centers across India on 2^nd - 3^rd March 2019 and organised by MHRD, Government of India.

Team ZENIITH, comprising of Ahan M R, Vedashree Kulkarni, Gaurav Sangle, Aryan Agarwal and Sanket Badgujar, won a cash prize of Rs. 50,000/- in their problem statement under the Ministry of Railways at Nagpur.

Team APPTHLETES won a cash prize of Rs. 1,00,000/- in their problem statement under ISRO at Ahmedabad. The team comprised of Gargi Balasubramaniam, Adithya R., Abhiraj Hinge, Mayank Manuja, Pranav Agarwal and Samarth Jain.

Smart India Hackathon 2019 is a nationwide initiative to provide students a platform to solve some of pressing problems we face in our daily lives, and thus inculcate a culture of product innovation and a mindset of problem solving. Out of about 2 Lakh students across India, 300 teams consisting of approx. 1500 students were declared as winners of SIH 2019, under their respective problem statements.

Lucky Kaul and Shiv Kumar won Goa edition of Tata Crucible Campus Quiz, 2019

BITS Goa hosted the Goa edition of Tata Crucible Campus Quiz, 2019 on 27^th January 2019. A total of 100 teams took part in the preliminary round of the quiz from which the top 6 teams went through to the on-stage final. The quiz was conducted by quizmaster Giri 'Pickbrain' Balasubramaniam in his usual energetic style. Lucky Kaul and Shiv Kumar from BITS Goa dominated the final, leaving all the other teams behind and eventually brought back the title to BITS Goa after a gap of three years. The winning duo walked away with a cheque of Rs. 75,000, which was presented by Prof. Sunil Bhand, Dean, Sponsored Research and Consulting Division, BITS Pilani.

BITS Pilani, Goa Campus Students win design prototype competition

Two students of Goa Campus, Mr. Suraj Gupta (2017B2A30329G) and Mr. Taaha Nizam (2017A8PS0582G) have secured first place for their design prototype namely ‘Smart Sole’ presented during ‘Open Innovation in Community Based Rehabilitation (CBR) for People with Disabilities (PWD)’ and ‘Interdisciplinary Design Thinking Hackathon' organized by Cognitive Neuroscience Lab, Department of Biological Sciences and Leeds Business School of University of Leeds from 15th to 17th March 2019. The winners were announced in April 2019.

SMART SOLE: The 'Smart Sole' is an ingenious assistive device that aims to help people with neuropathic feet. Such people are sufferers of foot desensitization which leads to their nerves getting embedded and ultimately causing ulcers among other symptoms. 'Smart Sole' aims to demolish the root of the problem by taking a sensory input and transferring it to a band on the wrist or placed in somewhere else. Apart from being simple (Smart Sole itself requires no charging), cost effective and durable, it also serves as a base for other customizations and future products.

Project DiVe won the best project award in the Open Showcase event

Project DiVe won the best project award during the Quark 2019 in the ‘Open Showcase’ event among all the BITS projects and second best among all the projects that were displayed. The project was led by Atharva M. Dharwa (2017AAPS0266G) and had received financial supports from the Institute funding scheme, EEE department, Sandbox lab and CTE.

BITS Goa students participated in the L&T CreaTech 2019

Three students of Goa Campus - Ashutosh Vashist, Suraj Gupta and Raghav Kapoor participated in the L&T CreaTech 2019, a product prototype design competition, organized by Larsen and Toubro. Their team, "Piezo-Boys" was selected from over 500 teams, participated from more than a hundred of India’s leading engineering institutes. "Piezo-Boys" was selected as one of the top 12 teams to represent BITS Goa in the Grand Finale, held in Mumbai on 15^th Feb 2019. They developed a solution, "PiezoRun" to recover waste heat energy from road transportation to tackle the everlasting energy problems.

BITS Goa students won Annual Case Study Competition

BITS-Goa team comprising of Ms. Manika Kanjani (2015B4A10586G) and Mr. Naveen P S (2015A1B30716G) stood first among 230 colleges across India in the National Finals of Case Sensitive, the Annual Case Study Competition. The competition was organized by BITS Pilani, Hyderabad Campus, which was held on 14^th April 2019.

Ms. Anjli Varghese (2018PHXF0405G), PhD scholar from EEE department, has been awarded TCS Research Scholar Program scholarship for the project entitled 'Image Processing and Machine Learning Techniques for Leather Species Identification' under the supervision of Prof. A. Amalin Prince.

Ms. Priya Sharma (2015PHXF0003G) (Department of Biological Sciences) Won BEST POSTER AWARD for One minute on water sanitation poster presentation in National Academia Conclave on Urban Sanitation held at CEPT University, Ahmedabad on 9^th and 10^th March 2019

Two students, Mr. Arnav Gupta (2015B1A30810G), from the Dept. of Biological Sciences, and Mr. Akul Gupta (2016B3A70298G), from the Dept. of Computer Science & Information Systems and Economics have been awarded the prestigious MITACS Globalink Reasearch Internship, sponsored by the Government of Canada for the summer of 2019. As part of this internship, Arnav will be undertaking research on ‘Bioinformatics Technician in Genomics & Metagenomics’ under Professor Robert Colautti at Queen’s University in Kingston, whereas Akul will be undertaking research on ‘Testing of Machine Learning Programs’ under Professor Hadi Hemmati at University of Calgary, Alberta, Canada.

Mitacs Globalink Research Internship is a competitive program for international undergraduates from Australia, Brazil, China, France, Germany, Hong Kong SAR, India, Mexico, Tunisia, United Kingdom, and Ukraine, that pairs top-ranked international students with specific research expertise with faculty at Canadian universities for a twelve week research project of mutual interest in the period of May to October. The research internship is held under the supervision of Canadian university faculty members in a variety of academic disciplines, from science, engineering and mathematics to the humanities and social sciences.

Mr. Abhiraj Hinge (2016A7PS0053G), a third-year computer science student, was selected as one of the Economic Times Campus Stars - Class of 2018-19. This year, 91 students were selected from a pool of 35,000+ applicants from over 2,000+ engineering colleges in India. The selection was conducted over 4 rounds, the first two of which were psychometric and domain-knowledge tests. Third round involved a group activity to determine leadership skills. The last round was an interview conducted by a panel member from a panel of CXOs. Abhiraj was interviewed by the CEO of Haptik Chatbots, a company that was subsequently acquired for $100 million by Reliance. ET Campus Stars is an initiative for recognizing and rewarding India’s brightest engineering students. Currently into its second edition, this initiative is meant to encourage and nurture young engineers who will be driving the growth of this country as they join the corporate bandwagon.

Mr. Aditya Sinha (2015B3A70352G), a fourth-year student of Computer Science & Information Systems, is selected as a recipient of the Western Digital Scholarships for STEM for the amount of $2000. Up to 400 students from United States, China, Japan, India, Malaysia, Philippines and Thailand are awarded each year with this one-time scholarship. The scholarship is used for tuition fees, books, supplies and equipments required by the students.

Ms. Divya J Mathias (2017H1010022G), a ME Student of the Dept. of Chemical Engineering, has published her thesis work in the international journal of “Biocatalysis and agricultural Biotechnology”- 2019, Volume 20 (https://doi.org/10.1016/j.bcab.2019.101259). Ms. Divya has done her thesis under the supervision of Dr. Vivek Rangarajan, Assistant Professor, Dept. of Chemical Engineering. The article is entitled as ‘An investigation on citrus peel as the lignocellulosic feedstock for optimal reducing sugar synthesis with an additional scope for the production of hydrolytic enzymes from the aqueous extract waste’.

Mr. Harsh Raj (2017A7PS0942G), a student of Computer Science & Information System, along with Dr. Swapan Purkait, Director of NETTECH Pvt. Ltd. and Mr. Souryendu Das, Network Software Engineer, Intel Technology India Pvt. Ltd. and a BITS Goa Alumni, has co-authored a paper entitled ‘Human-Computer Interactions: The Way Forward,’ published by The IUP Journal of Information Technology.

Mr. Harsh Vijay (2018B5PS0859G), a first-year student of Physics, secured 21^st rank in the National Graduate Physics Examination (NGPE), conducted by The Indian Association of Physics Teachers (IAPT) in January 2019.

Mr. Harsh Vijay (2018B5PS0859G), a first-year student of Physics, has been selected for the National Initiative on Undergraduate Sciences (NIUS) (Physics) Camp 16.1, organised by Homi Bhabha Centre for Science Education (HBCSE), TIFR (Mumbai) from 10^th to 22^nd June 2019. With the thrust on promoting undergraduate research and learning, the NIUS programme has been contributing towards training of students and teachers in theoretical and experimental science, preparation of pedagogical material and R&D in science education/laboratory training. Harsh is the sole-representative of BITS-students amongst the 72 students selected from prestigious colleges / universities across India, who has participated in this programme.

Mr. Kaivalya Rawal (2015A7PS0005G) perused his study for a semester in the Politecnico di Milano, Italy, under the agreement of student exchange.

Mr. Mehul Mohan (2017A7PS0935G), a second year student of Computer Science & Information Systems, has been awarded a scholarship to participate in the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) 2019, scheduled from 3^rd to 7^th June at San Jose, California (USA). WWDC is awarded to around 250-300 students globally, among which 9 students from India were selected this time. The scholarship included a ticket to the conference, lodging for the week and one year membership in the Apple Developer Programme.

Mr. Rijul Arora (2014B3A30645G) was selected to participate in the 22^nd World Business Dialogue (https://www.world-business-dialogue.com/), one of the largest international student business conferences, held from 18^th to 22^nd February 2019. This year’s theme was Digital Zeitgeist – Time to Rethink Learning. Rijul was amongst 220 delegates selected from a diverse pool of about 2000 international applicants from around 60 countries.

He was selected to be a member of Creation Labs comprising of 90 delegates who worked to digitize the administrative and registration process for incoming foreign exchange students in Faculty of Management, Economics and Social Sciences of University of Cologne. Rijul offered his analytical and consulting skills to his team which finally won the competition.

Mr. Rijul Arora (2014B3A30645G) delivered a TEDx talk at Kristu Jyoti College of Management and technology (KCMT), Kerala, on 13th July 2019. The topic of his talk was ‘A 21 year old millennial’s journey from social media addiction to Joy of Missing out.

Mr. Sharad Chitlangia (2017A8PS0472G) was appointed Visiting Undergraduate Research Intern at Harvard University’s Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) where he worked on Deep Reinforcement Learning for the summer of 2019.

Mr. Sharad Chitlangia (2017A8PS0472G) completed Google Summer of Code 2019 with CERN-HSF for preparation of software to be used in mainstream particle tracking at the Atlas experiment, Large Hadron Collider.

Mr. Siddhant Vitthal Patil (2015A8TS0475G), a fourth-year student of EEE department studying ENI, has been selected for the International Linkage Degree Program (ILDP) START plus 2019, International Linkage Degree Program for Developing Innovators Transforming Advanced Technology to Social Goals. The program is scheduled from 24^th June to 30^th June 2019 at Hiroshima University. Siddhant will be financially supported by the Sakura Science Plan, Japan Science and Technology Agency (https://ssp.jst.go.jp/EN/index.html) and the Hiroshima University.

ILDP-START plus Program is an intensive short course, providing an introduction to the exciting and emerging field of cutting-edge technology of Hiroshima University, especially the laboratories relevant to ILDP target fields; smart infrastructure development, new energy, and environmental sustainability.

Mr. Suyash Gaekwad (2015A8PS0218G), fourth year student of Electrical & Electronics Engineering department appeared for the GATE 2019 examination this year and secured an all India rank (AIR) 13 in Instrumentation engineering discipline.
Till Semester I of 2018-19

Prof. Reena Cheruvalath, Associate Professor and Head, Department of Humanities and Social Sciences has been awarded ‘Data Collection Abroad’ fellowship by Indian Council of Social Science Research (ICSSR) for undertaking research on ‘Meta-Moral Cognition and Critical Thinking’ at the University of Kyoto, Japan. The assumption is that critical thinking and logical reasoning help to improve the process of moral decision making. It is a collaborative research by the faculty members from Universities of Waseda and Kyoto, Japan.

Under this Scheme, the ICSSR provides financial assistance to Indian Social Science Scholars who intend to visit abroad for the purposes of Data Collection or consulting Archival Material in connection with their research work.

Mehul Mohan (2017A7PS0935G), a second year student of Computer Science & Information Systems, has been awarded a scholarship to participate in the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) 2019 scheduled from 3^rd to 7^th June at San Jose, California (USA). WWDC is awarded to around 250-300 students globally and (9 students from India this time) offering free passes to attend WWDC in San Jose, California. Scholarship includes a ticket to the conference, lodging for the week and one year membership in the Apple Developer Programme.

Akul Gupta (2016B3A70298G), a third year student of Computer Science & Information Systems and Economics, has been awarded the prestigious MITACS Globalink Research Internship sponsored by the Government of Canada for the summer of 2019 (17^th May to 8^th August 2019). As part of his internship, Akul will be undertaking research on ‘Testing of Machine Learning Programs’ under Professor Hadi Hemmati at University of Calgary, Alberta, Canada.

The Mitacs Globalink Research Internship is a competitive initiative for international undergraduates Australia, Brazil, China, France, Germany, Hong Kong SAR, India, Mexico, Tunisia, United Kingdom, and Ukraine. From May to October of each year, top-ranked applicants participate in a twelve (12) week research internship under the supervision of Canadian university faculty members in a variety of academic disciplines, from science, engineering and mathematics to the humanities and social sciences.

Mr. Siddhant Vitthal Patil (2015A8TS0475G), a fourth-year student of the EEE Department studying ENI, has been selected for the ILDP START plus 2019, International Linkage Degree Program for Developing Innovators Transforming Advanced Technology to Social Goals. The program is scheduled from 24^th June to 30^th June 2019 at Hiroshima University. Siddhant will be financially supported by the Sakura Science Plan, Japan Science and Technology Agency (https://ssp.jst.go.jp/EN/index.html) and the Hiroshima University.

ILDP-START plus Program is an intensive short course, providing an introduction to the exciting and emerging field of cutting-edge technology of Hiroshima University, especially the laboratories relevant to ILDP target fields; smart infrastructure development, new energy, and environmental sustainability.

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Mr. Harsh Vijay (2018B5PS0859G), a first-year student of Physics, has been selected for the National Initiative on Undergraduate Sciences (NIUS) (Physics) Camp 16.1 organised by Homi Bhabha Centre for Science Education (HBCSE), TIFR (Mumbai) from 10^th to 22^nd June 2019. With thrust on promoting undergraduate research and learning, the NIUS programme has been contributing towards training of students and teachers in theoretical and experimental science, preparation of pedagogical material and R&D in science education/laboratory training. Harsh is the only BITS students amongst the 72 students from prestigious colleges / universities across India who will participate in this programme.

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Mr. Harsh Vijay (2018B5PS0859G), a first-year student of Physics, secured 21^st rank in the National Graduate Physics Examination (NGPE) conducted by The Indian Association of Physics Teachers (IAPT) in January 2019.

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Mr. Abhiraj Hinge (2016A7PS0053G), a third-year computer science student, was selected as one of the Economic Times Campus Stars - Class of 2018-19. This year, 91 students were selected from a pool of 35,000+ applicants from over 2,000+ engineering colleges in India. The selection was conducted over 4 rounds, the first two of which were psychometric and domain-knowledge tests. Third round involved a group activity to determine leadership skills. The last round was an interview conducted by a panel member from a panel of CXOs. Abhiraj was interviewed by the CEO of Haptik Chatbots, a company that was subsequently acquired for $100 million by Reliance.

ET Campus Stars is an initiative for recognizing and rewarding India’s brightest engineering students. Currently into its second edition, this initiative is meant to encourage and nurture young engineers who will be driving the growth of this country as they join the corporate bandwagon.

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Mr. Arnav Gupta (2015B1A30810G), a fourth-year biological sciences student, has been awarded the prestigious MITACS Globalink Reasearch Internship sponsored by the Government of Canada for the summer of 2019 (1^st May to 30^th June). As part of this internship, Arnav will be undertaking research on ‘Bioinformatics Technician in Genomics & Metagenomics’ under Professor Robert Colautti at Queen’s University – Kingston, Canada.

Mitacs Globalink Research Internship is a competitive program that pairs top-ranked international students with specific research expertise with faculty at Canadian universities for a twelve (12) week research project of mutual interest in the period of May to October.

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Mr. Rijul Arora (2014B3A30645G) was selected to participate in the 22^nd World Business Dialogue (https://www.world-business-dialogue.com/), one of the largest international student business conferences, held from 18^th to 22^nd February 2019. This year’s theme was Digital Zeitgeist – Time to Rethink Learning. Rijul was amongst 220 delegates selected from a diverse pool of about 2000 international applicants from around 60 countries.

He was selected to be a member of Creation Labs comprising of 90 delegates who worked to digitize the administrative and registration process for incoming foreign exchange students in Faculty of Management, Economics and Social Sciences of University of Cologne. Rijul offered his analytical and consulting skills to his team which finally won the competition.

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Two teams representing BITS Pilani, K K Birla Goa Campus bagged the first position in different categories in the Grand Finale of Smart India Hackathon, 2019 (SIH, 2019) organised by MHRD, Government of India. SIH, one of the world's biggest Hackathon, was held at 48 centres across India on 2^nd - 3^rd March 2019.

Team ZENIITH, comprising of Ahan M R, Vedashree Kulkarni, Gaurav Sangle, Aryan Agarwal and Sanket Badgujar, won a cash prize of Rs. 50,000/- in their problem statement under the Ministry of Railways at Nagpur.

Team APPTHLETES won a cash prize of Rs. 1,00,000/- in their problem statement under ISRO at Ahmedabad. The team comprised of Gargi Balasubramaniam, Adithya R., Abhiraj Hinge, Mayank Manuja, Pranav Agarwal and Samarth Jain.

Smart India Hackathon 2019 is a nationwide initiative to provide students a platform to solve some of pressing problems we face in our daily lives, and thus inculcate a culture of product innovation and a mindset of problem solving. Out of about 2 Lakh students across India, 300 Teams consisting of approx. 1500 students were declared Winner of SIH 2019 under their respective problem statements.

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Priya Sharma (2015PHXF0003G) (Department of Biological Sciences) Won BEST POSTER AWARD for One minute on water sanitation poster presentation in National Academia Conclave on Urban Sanitation held at CEPT University, Ahmedabad on 9^th and 10^th March 2019

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Ms. Muskan Taneja (2016A4PS0137G), a third year Mechanical Engineering student won the Student Innovator of the Year 2018 award hosted by Indian Automotive Technology and Innovation Awards by renowned magazine Autotech Review for the project "Design Optimisation of an Automobile Crash Box". She received the Award for the best student innovation in the automobile industry among applicants from hundreds of colleges all over India for which she received a cash prize of Rs. 50,000/-, a gift voucher of 350 Euros, a gift hamper, a framed certificate, and a trophy.

The award was presented to her in a conference held in New Delhi by the president of SAE India and the Sr. Executive Director (Engineering), Maruti Suzuki India Limited. At the event she was offered to continue her work on the project in BMW, Mercedes, Frost and Sullivan, and Maruti Suzuki Ltd. Later she received an offer from General Motors for the same.

The Jury for the event consisted of the major players of the automotive industry namely

·         Former Director Automotive Research Association of India (ARAI)

·         President, SAE INDIA

·         Managing Director, Michelin India Technology Center LLP

·         Scientist G, DHI-DST Technology Platform for Electric Mobility, Govt of India

·         Head - Automotive & Transportation Practice, Frost & Sullivan

·         Sr Executive Director (Engineering), Maruti Suzuki India Limited

·         Vice Chairman, Sun Mobility

·         Chairman, Sant Longowal Institute of Engineering and Technology and former MD & CEO, National Skills Development Corporation

·         Co-Founder, Expereal

·         Managing Director, Lumax Industries Ltd.

·         And head representatives of most Indian Automotive companies such as BMW, Volvo, Mercedes, Tata Motors, Maruti Suzuki, Honda, Hyundai, etc.

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Ms. Krishna Kumari Swain, Research scholar, working under supervision of Prof. Sunil Bhand, received the Best Poster Presentation award (second prize) at “Analytical Science at NCCCM: A Journey over 25 Years” organized by NCCCM, BARC Hyderabad during 29th Nov-1st Dec 2018. Title of the research paper was “Development of an enzyme coupled nanoprobe for analysis of Hg2+, Cd2+ and Pb2+ ions; applications to drinking water and fish” Authors: Krishna K Swain, Sunil Bhand. Project is funded by DAE-BRNS, GOI.

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Dr. Richa Singhal from Science and Engineering Research Board (SERB), Government of India for a research project entitled "Mechanistic from Department of Chemical Engineering has received the Early Career Research Awardapproach to design composite metal-carbon nanofiber oxygen electrodes for high-performance metal-air batteries".

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Mr. Rakesh Manuka, Research Scholar from Department of Biological Sciences received DST-SERB travel grant for attending the 16^th International Symposium on Rice Functional Genomics (ISFRG 2018) scheduled from 5^th to 7^th September 2018 at Tokyo University of Agriculture in Japan.

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5 Research scholars of Department of Biological Sciences were awarded ICMR & CSIR – Senior Research Fellowship. These scholars include – Rehan Ahmed Deshmukh, Chitra Nair, Starlaine Mascarenhas, Joseph Fernandes, Avijit Das. Their PhD is supervised by Dr. Utpal Roy, Dr. Dibakar Chakraborty, Dr. Anasuya Ganguly, Dr. Arnab Banerjee and Dr. Malabika Biswas respectively.

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2 Research scholars of Department of Biological Sciences, Anumeha Vats and Priya Sharma were awarded Summer School on Resource Recovery and Reuse for undergoing training in the by International Water Management Institute, Sri Lanka. Dr. Srikanth Mutnuri is the PhD supervisor of both these scholars.

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Jiss Maria Louis was awarded Women Scientist under WOSA scheme by DST. Her project entitled ‘TNF alpha mediated alternative splicing in type 2 diabetes; a genome wide approach’ is being mentored by Dr. Indrani Talukdar.

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Zantye Pranjita Ganesh was awarded the DST- CEFIPRA Fellowship For ESONN Programme 2018 for undergoing training in the field of Nano-sciences and Nanotechnology to be held at Grenoble, France (Aug-Sept 2018). Her Ph.D. supervisor is Dr. Meenal Kowshik.

Prajakta Patil was awarded the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation for undergoing training of Teachers programme in Sanitation at IHE Delft Institute for Water Education to be held at Delft, Netherlands (28^th May -30^th November 2018). Her Ph.D. supervisor is Dr. Srikanth Mutnuri.

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Dr. Bhakti Salgaonkar (CSIR RA), student from Prof. Judith Bragança’s group, received SRISTI (Society for Research and Initiatives for Sustainable Technologies and Institutions) BIRAC (Biotechnology Industry Research Assistance Council) Appreciation Award for her work entitled “Polyhydroxyalkanoates Production by Microorganisms from Sustainable Resources” carried during the 30 days Biotech Innovation Ignition School-3 (BIIS-3) on “Opportunity for Women biotechnology students to work on grassroots innovations and microbial diversity” at Ahmadabad, Gujarat, India from April 30 to May 29, 2018.

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Dr. Bhakti Salgaonkar (CSIR RA), student from Prof. Judith Bragança’s group, received First best Oral Presentation Award for the paper entitled “Polyhydroxyalkanoates Production by Extremely Halophilic Archaea from Sustainable Resources” at International Conference on "Microbial Technology for Better Tomorrow (ICMTBT-2018)”, Organized by Dr. D. Y. Patil Arts, College, Pune, Maharashtra, India in association with Microbiologist Society, India”, from 17-19^th February, 2018.

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Prof. Srinivas Krishnaswamy, Department of Chemical Engineering, BITS Pilani, KK Birla Goa Campus has been awarded Prof. I J Nagrath Faculty Excellence Award, for the academic year 2017-2018.

BITS Pilani Alumni Association (BITSAA) gives two awards annually to any full-time faculty member with experience of at least three years in any of the BITS campuses at Pilani, Goa, Hyderabad and Dubai. The award is instituted by the generosity of BITS Alumnus Mr. Karthik Krishna (1993 batch) in the name of Prof. S. Venkateswaran, former Director & Vice Chancellor, BITS Pilani and Prof. I. J. Nagrath former Deputy Director, BITS Pilani.

These awards aim to recognize BITS faculty for excellence in their teaching, research, and administrative achievements and commitment towards BITS Pilani. A few measurable parameters for selection of the awardees, while not exhaustive, include innovation in Instruction, professional achievements, contributions to BITS Pilani in activities outside the classroom, commitment to student success and contributions towards neighbourhood societal development. Both awards consist of a Rolling Plaque (with name of the winner inscribed), and framed along with a certificate and a cash reward of INR 100,000.

Prof. Anil Kumar, Department of Chemistry, BITS Pilani, Pilani Campus has been awarded Prof. S Venkateswaran Faculty Excellence Award for 2017 - 2018.

Congratulations, to both the Professors!!

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The Mitacs Globalink Research Internship is a competitive initiative for students from 10 countries of Australia, Brazil, China, France, India, Germany, Mexico, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia, and Ukraine. From May to October of each year, top-ranked applicants participate in a fully-funded 12-week research internship under the supervision of Canadian university faculty members in a variety of academic disciplines, from science, engineering and mathematics to the humanities and social sciences.

As a part of this program, Jaychandran will be pursuing a 12-week summer research project at the University of Sherbrooke, Quebec under the guidance of Prof. André-Marie Tremblay, on the topic, Spin fluctuations in Weyl semimetals.

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As part of this programme, Rachith will be pursuing a summer internship at the Centre de Recherches sur la Cognition Animale at Université Paul Sabatier, Toulouse, France. He will be working under the guidance of Dr. Guy Theraulaz in the field of Collective Behaviour.

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As part of this scholarship, Suparno will be pursuing a 12 week summer research project at the Technical University of Munich, Germany. He will be working with the Neuroelectronics Group to develop a portable device for screening nanoparticle impurities in water. This project has a larger scope towards developing better sensing platforms for neurodegenerative applications in vitro.

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Aman will pursue a 2-year masters degree in a course that is a unique multidisciplinary blend of design and engineering. The IPD Master’s programme provides an integrated approach to the disciplines involved: advanced studies in innovative design theory and methods, aesthetics, ergonomics, engineering, and sustainability.

Having a background in mechanical engineering from BITS Pilani, Goa Campus, extensive experience in graphics at his design firm Pixelworks, and a thesis in sustainable product design at National Institute of Design - Ahmedabad, Aman found a perfect fit in the design degree offered by TU Delft, which is one of its kind in the world.

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Nissim Gore-Datar (2014B1A40939G) has been awarded the prestigious Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship of the California Institute of Technology (Caltech SURF 2018).

Established in 1979, the annual SURF Program selects students from across the world though a competitive application process for a fully-funded 10-week research internship at Caltech. The program also includes seminars by faculty, student-faculty dinners, field trips and technical paper presentations by interns.

As part of this program, Nissim will work under the guidance of Prof. Michael Hoffmann from the Department of Environmental Science and Engineering at Caltech on a project titled 'Electro-Fenton Process for Decentralized Treatment of Municipal Wastewater', which aims to design and prototype on-site electrochemical reactors to treat wastewater for reuse.

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Honey Jain (2014B1A30875G) has been awarded the prestigious Mitacs Globalink Research Internship 2018 sponsored by Government of Canada.The Mitacs Globalink Research Internship is a competitive initiative for students from 10 countries of Australia, Brazil, China, France, India, Germany, Mexico, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia, and Ukraine. From May to October of each year, top-ranked applicants participate in a fully-funded 12-week research internship under the supervision of Canadian university faculty members in a variety of academic disciplines, from science, engineering and mathematics to the humanities and social sciences.

As a part of this program, Honey will be pursuing a 12 week summer research project at the Université Laval, Quebec. She will be working under the mentorship of Prof. Christian Landry on a project based on computational biology involving protein interaction networks.

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Heer Joisher (2014B1A30709G) has been awarded the prestigious Khorana Scholarship 2018 sponsored by the Department of Biotechnology, Govt. of India, Indo-US Science and technology Forum (IUSSTF) and WINStep Forward.

As a part of this program, Heer will be pursuing a two month summer research project at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, MA, USA. she will be working under the mentorship of Prof. Graham Walker at the Department of Biology, MIT on a project involving expressing antimicrobial peptides and peptides related to symbiosis from various sub cellular compartments of the cell.

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SARTHAK SINGH (2014B2A80710G) was selected as an official participant in Climate Force’s “Leadership on the Edge” program led by Robert Swan OBE

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Rohit Prabhudesai (2013PHXF0413G), PhD Scholar, and Dr. Ch V V S N V Prasad, Assistant Professor, from the Department of Economics, won the best paper award at the International Conference on Entrepreneurship and Family Business (ICEFB) conducted by University of North Texas and IIT Bombay from January 8th-10th, 2018

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Kishore Gopal Krishnan (2014B5A40523G) won gold medal in “The National Graduate Physics Exam” (NGPE). this exam awards scholarships to encourage students to take-up physics as a career. S. N. Bose National Centre for Basic Sciences, Kolkata, allows direct admission to toppers in NGPE, after an interview, in their integrated Ph.D. programme.

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Project Apeiro is led by a team of undergraduate students from BITS Pilani Goa Campus and is India's first student-led near space experiment. It aims to determine and analyse space radiation in the lower stratospheric regions over the central part of the Indian subcontinent. The results will be compared and further analysed with the NAIRAS model developed by NASA and is very similar to the Rad-X experiment. The project is being pursued with technical support from TIFR Mumbai and TIFR National Balloon Facility, Hyderabad.

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Hyperloop India

A Hyperloop is a mode of passenger and/or freight transportation proposed by Elon Musk in 2012, first used to describe an open-source vacuum train design released by a joint team from Tesla and SpaceX. A hyperloop comprises a sealed tube or system of tubes through which a pod may travel free of air resistance or friction conveying people or objects at high speed while being very efficient. Elon Musk's version of the concept, first publicly mentioned in 2012, incorporates reduced-pressure tubes in which pressurized capsules ride on air bearings driven by electromagnetic levitation and air compressors.

The Hyperloop Pod Competition is an incentive prize competition sponsored by SpaceX that is being held in 2015–2018 where a number of student and non-student teams are participating to design and build a subscale prototype transport vehicle to demonstrate technical feasibility of various aspects of the Hyperloop concept. The competitions have been open to participants globally, although all competitions and judging has occurred in the United States.

"Hyperloop One" is another international organization working on this technology. In 2016, Hyperloop One launched its Hyperloop One Global Challenge to find the locations for, and develop and construct, the world’s first Hyperloop networks. In January 2017, Hyperloop One announced the 35 semifinalist routes (spread over 17 countries) in the Hyperloop One Global Challenge. Hyperloop One held a series of events showcasing the semifinalists, Vision for India in February, Vision for America in April and Vision for Europe in June. On September 14, 2017, Hyperloop One announced the 10 winners for the Hyperloop One Global Challenge. The countries with teams that won include the US, UK, Canada, Mexico, and India. The winners will now be invited to work closely with Hyperloop One on viability studies to try and bring their respective loops from proposal to reality.

Founded in 2015 by a small group of students from BITS Pilani, Team Hyperloop India is a unique multi-disciplinary cross-campus think tank consisting of motivated student volunteers in the fields of engineering and business and design, interested in reinventing transportation by exploring the technical and economic feasibility of this technology in India. The team has been actively involved in developing the technology and business strategies for making Hyperloop a reality in India.

Achievements of the team:

1. The team has participated in the Hyperloop One Global Challenge, for which they proposed a feasible business model and implementation strategy for bringing the Hyperloop to India. The proposal is one among the 10 international candidates chosen by Hyperloop One as winners of the competition.

2. The team was one among the 24 finalists in the 2017 SpaceX Hyperloop Pod Competition for which they built an autonomous and fully functional Hyperloop pod capable of running at the mile long test track at SpaceX, California. The project is a massive interdisciplinary collaborative effort that involves work on every aspect of the pod, including structural simulations, fluid dynamics simulation, embedded electronics, real time systems, power systems and vehicle dynamics.

3. The team presented the pod and the Hyperloop concept to the Hon'ble Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Advisor to the President of the United States, Ivanka Trump at the Global Entrepreneurship Summit 2017, Hyderabad.

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Prof. Narendra Nath Ghosh, Associate Professor, Dept. of Chemistry has been elected as Fellow of Royal Society of Chemistry, UK recognizing his efforts in the field of the chemical sciences. RSC is the world’s leading chemistry community, advancing excellence in the chemical sciences.

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Prof. A V Kulkarni, Department of Physics is selected for the Visiting Associateship Programme at the Inter-University Center for Astronomy and Astrophysics (IUCAA), Pune. He will work on Gravitational Waves during the 3 year period of this Associateship starting Aug’2017

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Amit Agarwal 2014A7PS0403G awarded the IUSSTF-Viterbi India Program 2017 which is partnered by Viterbi School of Engineering, University of Southern California and the Indo-US Science and Technology Forum. The scholarship provided him the opportunity to pursue a 2 month summer research internship from May 16 - July 14. Amit worked on a Network Security project entitled "Virtually Isolated DETER Experimentation" under the mentorship of Prof. Clifford Neuman, Director of USC Center for Computer Systems Security.

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We are proud to announce that our student Devashish Vikas Gupta has been awarded the highly prestigious Aditya Birla Scholarship. Devashish is pursuing his Mechanical engineering degree at BITS-Pilani, K K Birla Goa Campus. Since his early childhood, Devashish was fascinated by Mathematics, Music and Science. While studying in the 11^th grade, he got intensely involved in research in the fields of Physics and Mathematics. He has the distinction of having published two research papers in international journals and is currently working on his third research paper.

In addition to academics, Devashish has several other feathers to his cap. He is a self-taught instrumentalist, music composer, producer and orchestrator. He has two international music collaborations with artists from USA and Canada, and has composed over thirty songs in two years (2015-2017). Devashish is also a Badminton player, and has played at the state level. He is a graphic designer as well. Devashish aspires to pursue further studies and research and make significant contributions in building our nations knowledge base.

Instituted in 1999, The Aditya Birla Scholarship Programme is the Aditya Birla Group's way of pursuing Mr. Aditya Vikram Birla's ideals of spawning leaders with a passion to excel. This is achieved through fostering outstanding academic excellence and humane leadership values, in partnership with select IITs, BITS Pilani, IIMs, and Law colleges.

This scholarship covers a large part of the academic fees as well as the hostel fees for the IITs / BITS stream. A total 160 students from the IITs and BITS (Pilani) were evaluated and short listed based on their overall achievements spanning academic and co-curricular excellence and the essays written by them. The shortlisted students were invited for a final round of interview conducted by an eminent panel of luminaries and academicians, which ultimately selects the best 16 students from - engineering and management and are named Aditya Birla Scholars.

https://www.bits-pilani.ac.in/uploads/Goa_Upload/DevashishGupta2017.pdf

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Prof. Angshuman Sarkar from the Department of Biological Sciences has been selected as the fellow of All India Cell Biology Society for the period 2017 to 2019.

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Rachit Gupta (ID: 2013A3PS201G) received the Mitacs Globalink Scholarship (2016) for an internship at the University of Manitoba. He worked at Nano-Systems Fabrication Laboratory under Dr. Cyrus Shafai of University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, Canada. His work primarily focused on designing of MEMS Sensors and Systems for High Voltage Infrastructure Monitoring.

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Heer Joisher has been selected to participate in the Ecole Polytechnique Federale De Lausanne Summer Research Program 2017. She will be working under the guidance of Dr. Daniel Constam from Swiss Institute for Experimental Cancer Research Group, School of LIfe Sciences, on project related to "Morphogenic Signalling in Stem Cells".

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Drone Nation, a team from BITS Pilani KK Birla Goa campus was selected for receiving incubation support and finance grant from Nidhi-Prayas, DST, Government of India to develop a Drone for Agriculture. Drone Nation is one of the 5 teams selected in the final round from among more than 2000 teams that participated from the entire country.

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The invention was about development of indigenous low cost hemodialysis membranes. The project involved development of biocompatible material, developing an indigenous process to spin clinical grade hollow fiber membranes using a self fabricated extremely low cost assembly and post processing of the membranes to enhance the biological response and mechanical performance of the membranes. It also involved developing a proper ecosystem, identifying the stakeholders and manufacturers to commercialize the technology. It was concluded that the cost of hemodialyzers could be reduced by 5 folds (Rs 300 instead of Rs 1500) using the complete technology developed.

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Urvashi Jain has been awarded the prestigious Khorana Scholarship 2017 being conducted in joint support by the Department of Biotechnology, Govt. of India, Indo-US Science and technology Forum (IUSSTF) and WINStep Forward.

Under this program, Urvashi will be doing a two month summer internship at University of California San Diego, CA, USA under the mentorship of Prof. Bing Ren at the Ludwig Institute of Cancer Research on a project involving "The study of epigenetic regulation in cancer stem cells".

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Kartik Satyanarayanan (2013A7PS037) secured an internship at INRIA, Rennes in France under the Charpak Research Internship Scholarship.

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Twenty five students from BITS Pilani K K Birla Goa Campus were selected for the Google Summer of Code 2016.The Campus had the second highest number of selections in India.

https://www.bits-pilani.ac.in/uploads/Goa_Upload/Google-Code.png

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Varsheeth Talluri (2013A7PS045G) was awarded the Viterbi-India Program which is partnered by Viterbi School of Engineering, University of Southern California and the Indo-US Science and Technology Forum. Varsheeth worked on a Computer Vision & Machine Learning project titled 'Blot Image Analysis and Extraction', and was mentored by Prof. Premkumar Natarajan, Vice Dean, Viterbi School of Engineering.

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Prof. Narendra Nath Ghosh has received Newton Research Collaboration Programme award jointly with Professor Gerard Franklyn Fernando University of Birmingham, UK. This award is funded by The Royal Academy Of Engineering (UK). Dr. Ghosh has also received Visiting Professorship from University of Leeds, UK.

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Prof. Srikanth Mutnuri has been awarded the Bill & Melinda Gates foundation project "Onsite electrochemical wastewater treatment and recycling technology", in collaboration with Prof. Michael Hoffman California Institute of Technology (Caltech), USA – 2016 -2017

Prof. Srikanth Mutnuri and Dr. Nitin Sharma are awarded the project "Analytics Sensor Test-Kit for Advanced Process Control" by the Bill & Melinda Gates foundation project in collaboration with Prof. Willaim Leon Cranfield University, UK. 2016 -2018.

Prof. Srkanth Mutnuri is also the recipient of the Reinvent the Toilet Challenge Grant 2014 from DBT BIRAC and Bill & Mellinda Gates foundation for the project "Empowered septic tank as decentralized treatment system". This project is in collaboration with Prof. Willy Verstrate and Prof. Korneel Rabaey, Ghent University, Belgium. Click here for Video

BITS Pilani

Awards & Achievements

Awards and Achievements

Semester II of 2022-23

Semester I of 2022-23

Semester II of 2021-22

Semester I of 2021-22

Semester II of 2020-21

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