None of us had expected 2020 to pan out the way it did. While the institute was busy ensuring that our academics must not suffer and that students should safely return to campus, it was alongside working to keep up with our education system’s changing patterns. Our institute realises that modern-day problems require solutions which are hard to reach using traditional methods. With NEP just introduced last year, IITK was already planning to develop various departments with the rationale of not just promoting streamlined, advanced and collaborative research, but also facilitating targeted educational problems.
We have compiled the new key developments happening in our institute for everyone’s benefit, let us take a look!
Department of Cognitive Sciences
IIT Kanpur has offered programs in Cognitive Sciences for quite some time now with a PhD program, MS by Research program at the Masters level and minors for undergraduates with a plethora of courses from various disciplines to choose from. In 2019, a Cognitive Science experts team visited the campus as a part of the National Advisory Committee and recommended the department’s formation.
The institute will be the first among the IITs to have a full-fledged department of Cognitive Sciences and will be headed by Professor Narayanan Srinivasan. Professor Narayanan brings 15+ years of experience in this field and is currently involved in the transition from the Interdisciplinary Program (IDP) to the department status. He says the current way forward for the department would be hiring of more faculty strength and development of robust research infrastructure at the institute for the conduction of experiments and extensive research. The department will slowly progress through these milestones and then introduce rigorous programs at the Undergraduate level. In the short run, the team plans expansion and introduction of more fundamental courses in Cognitive sciences for students to explore and take an interest in this relatively newer field of study in India. New course offerings are planned for as soon as the fall semester, but no new program offering is planned this year.
The department aims to train cognitive scientists from various aspects: computational, psychological, philosophical to name a few and provide a congenial environment for the study of the complexity of the human mind, apply it to real-world problems and build the future of technology. The students will be prepared for careers in artificial intelligence, business, data analysis, government intelligence, healthcare, human performance, information processing, law, marketing, product design, and software design.
Department of Sustainable Energy
For focused education, research, and indigenous technology development programmes related to India’s energy sustainability, primarily targeting clean, renewable, and alternative energy sources, IIT Kanpur has established a new academic department of Sustainable Energy Engineering. The Department’s academic and research programmes will nurture well-rounded energy engineers through an interdisciplinary curriculum providing a multiple skill set. The department graduates are expected to ably serve the growing industrial and R&D sector in energy sustainability. Aimed towards initiating distinctive sector specific academic graduate and undergraduate programmes, faculty members of various backgrounds will design the curriculum with relevant courses from core engineering disciplines blended with science and humanities.
This initiative comes at an opportune time when the Indian government has committed to source 40 per cent of its installed power generation capacity from renewable sources by 2030, as pledged in the Paris Agreement. While various faculty members at IITK have been engaged in research related to sustainable energy technology development, a dedicated department will help these efforts come together and fertilize collaborative research to undertake bigger challenges. The new Department’s important aim is to translate its R&D outcomes into systems and prototypes to open technology commercialisation avenues.
Prof Ashish Garg, appointed as the first head of the new department, said: “The current research focus of the new department will be on energy generation via solar, wind and other clean sources; energy storage, e.g. hydrogen storage, batteries and supercapacitors, electric vehicles, energy distribution, smart grids, carbon capture, clean alternative fuels, waste-to-energy, clean water and energy policy and economics. The research portfolio will further expand into new areas as the Department grows.” He added “having a department will further strengthen coordinated and impactful research and development, leading to the better national and international visibility of IITK in this field and resource generation.” Our institute has already partnered with Rice University, USA, for setting up a collaborative research centre as part of the new department in energy sustainability and other such collaborations are expected in the future.
Department of Cybersecurity
In the words of Prof Manindra Agarwal: “This is something we have been discussing for a long time. In India, there aren’t enough exporters in cybersecurity, and because of that reason, as well as increasing digitalization of the country, we’ve already reached a situation where the Cyber vulnerability is not getting addressed. We felt the need to train more human resources in cybersecurity, which led to this programme’s conceptualisation.
We expect to make a significant impact at the national level because the target is not limited to training a small set of people through this master’s programme. At present, we plan to start with a small set of students; even though we’d increase it subsequently, the number would remain small. But in parallel, we’re also working on starting an e-Master’s programme in cybersecurity, through which we’ll be able to reach out to a much larger body of professionals. We’re also running a programme which will be a certification programme in cybersecurity, and also intend to start an undergraduate training programme in cybersecurity from probably next year. We are expecting to train thousands of people every year in cybersecurity through all these programmes put together. And that hopefully would make a significant impact on the national level.”
Recently the department received substantial funding from the Department of Science and Technology to create a technology innovation hub in cybersecurity at IITK. This funding is of INR 170 crore spread over 5 years. Before that, they had already received funding of around INR 50 crores from various agencies in cybersecurity. Putting all these together sums up to a tremendous amount of money, some of which has already been invested and a lot of it is going to be invested at IITK for cybersecurity. This programme is being designed by Prof Manindra Agarwal and Prof. Sandeep Shukla, and they’ll be primarily responsible for running it as well. Of course, they are expecting that many more faculty will join in as they go along. To begin with, though, it’s just the two of them.
Diploma Program in Geodesy
Under the Department of Civil engineering, a diploma programme in geodesy, the science of measuring the Earth has been launched, which will focus on three core areas — geodesy, navigation and mapping, remote sensing, and GIS.
Prof Abhay Karandikar, Director, IIT Kanpur said: “Geodesy is an area where well-qualified technical human resources, research activities, and geodetic infrastructure are required at the national level for the fast-developing infrastructure requirements in the country today. The National Center for Geodesy (NCG) has been established to enhance expertise in Geodesy and allied areas.”
Dr Radhakrishnan, Chairman Board of Governors, IIT Kanpur said: “The D-IIT(Diploma of IIT) programs launched at IIT Kanpur will raise the national capability in Geodesy and Navigation & Mapping besides impelling advanced data analytics into Remote Sensing and GIS.”
The Geodesy has applications in monitoring earthquake, volcanic, landslide, and weather hazard recognition and response, soil health, water resources, and drought surveillance, climate change including monitoring the polar ice cover, oil spill clean-ups, GPS timing and autonomous vehicle development.
CryoEM Center establishment
The Science and Engineering Research Board (SERB) approved the establishment of a Cryo-Electron Microscopy (Cryo-EM) facility at IIT Kanpur along with IIT Bombay, IIT Madras, and Bose Institute. The centre will boast state of the art facilities for researchers to carry out a high-level study in structural biology, enzymology, ligand/drug discovery, and be a stakeholder at the national level in combating new and emerging diseases and other biological challenges. Sandeep Verma, Secretary at SERB, noted that Cryo-EM is a powerful tool that will assist researchers in visualizing high-resolution protein structures in various environments and researchers should be able to address high-level biology problems using this facility. He also has mentioned that the facility will be made available to other institutions and use and adequate workshops and programs would be conducted to train a requisite number of specialized human resources in the field of Cryo-EM and 3D Image reconstruction.
Through the launch of these programs and departments, IITK extends its attention to primitive fields of study in India and aims to be the pioneer in innovation and change for the betterment of society. With the announcement of the New Education Policy 2020, IITK realizes its duty as an institute of academic excellence to promote the coordination of various disciplines of study and to bring about holistic development in individuals that are part of it. As the world progresses and innovates rapidly, complexity increases and specialized fields like cybersecurity, cognitive sciences and sustainable energy become more and more essential, and IITK commits to imparting education and preparing more capable individuals who can make a mark for themselves and create impact.
Credits: Akshat Goyal, Dhruv Chhabra, Sandipan Mitra, Aditya R. Trivedi.
