The Scholars' Avenue

The coming weekend is all set to be abuzz with frenetic activity on campus, with not one or two but three major events scheduled for the 15th to 17th of January – barely a week before the Grand Fest Season is declared open. Here is a quick peek at what the weekend-before-SF has to offer us:

Regional Symposium on Mathematics

A debut venture from the Mathematics Department, RSM-2010 has a simple objective – to celebrate and revitalize maths as a discipline. It comes packing with guest lectures from three eminent academicians – Prof. MK Ghosh of IISc, an expert on Financial Mathematics; Prof. Seema Nanda of TIFR, specializing in Mathematical Biology; and Prof. D Banerjee of IIAP, a professor of Astrophysics. Aside from events like Cryptic (a cryptanalysis challenge), Mathlete (a mini-olympiad) and Algorithmik (a fast-paced code jam), the fest also features a Scientific Paper Presentation Contest and workshops on Cryptography and SAS (the latter appearing to be a major crowd-puller with almost 200 registrations).

Megalith

Another newcomer to the Dept-fest ring, the Civil Engineering Department’s Megalith ’10 aims to provide a platform for interaction between the industry and academia (and to that end, there’s a panel discussion to get the ball rolling). But that’s not all it’s about, with the fest playing host to a plethora of challenging events ranging from design (Coordinates) to algorithms (Darkode) to robotics (Civionics) to even your run-of-the-mill quiz (C-wiz). Other features to look out for – the Industrial Design Problem, Case Study and Criar, a bridge-modeling contest.

http://www.megalith.co.in

Global Entrepreneurship Summit

As E-Cell’s flagship event, GES is one of the biggest entrepreneurial platforms for academicians, new-age entrepreneurs, eminent business personalities, venture capitalists and the students to gather at one place and share their entrepreneurial endeavours and experiences, and to pledge to take entrepreneurship to greater scales. This year the competitions have increased with the Cleantech challenge being held for the first time in India along with Concipio, Envision, Negocio, Eclairez, Sales Pitch, Online Video Contest along with other on-the-spot events like Bizturks and TGIF. This year will see a lot of foreign as well as national participation in the events as well as in the International Conference on Entrepreneurship. Guest lectures by eminent personalities will be organised along with certified workshops held by CII and Novell. GES 2010 also brings the Startup Camp which is an invaluable opportunity for promising startups of the country to raise seed capital and hire college students as a full time employee or as an intern (as of now, Zice Holidays, Intinno, P2Power Solutions and Orangified have been confirmed in attendance). Wipro will be organising Wi-Camp on the 16th. You can register for Wipro’s Wi-Camp at http://barcamp.org/WiCampKGP/ .

http://www.esummit.ecell-iitkgp.org