Engineering Oscars

There is no dearth of availability of talent in engineering colleges of

India. But it is largely the lack of large scale initiative from the industry

that prohibits the youngsters in these colleges to showcase them at appropriate

forums. Unlike the universities in the US, where innovation is the underlying

theme of all engineering colleges, the Indian counterpart have somehow not lived

up to expectations.

Two recent initiatives, one by Google and other by IBM, are a welcome effort

to fill that gap. The two were large scale initiatives involving several

colleges across India. While Googles mission was to augment product engineering

skillsets, IBMs idea was to provide student programmers with an opportunity to

develop innovative solutions using open standards-based IT tools under testing

real-time situations.

Google Prodigy



Called The Google India Product Engineering Competition it was a four

stage process starting with students invited to submit white papers and synopsis

and basic codes and prototypes for each project submitted. This was followed by

shortlisted entries on the product development phase, submissions of final

products, and finally, evaluation.

Two recent initiatives, one by Google and other by IBM, are a welcome effort to showcase the talent of engineering college students. The prodigies were suitably honored

The idea was to provide a platform to college students to innovate, design,

and create products which are in tune with Googles main agenda of organizing

the worlds information and making it universally accessible and useful. There

were six themes around which students were expected to innovatemobile

solutions, reaching emerging users, leveraging geographical data and maps,

harnessing social networks, smart information retrieval, enabling NGO/SMB for

operational expansion.

The competition, which is into the second year, is aimed at computer science

students from the top seventy-five engineering colleges in India. The team size

in the competition was limited to two to five students. The selection of winners

was based on their innovation, feasibility, applicability, development, and

design elements such as user interfaces, extensibility. The winning team were

given an award of Rs 3,50,000.

IBMs Great Mind Challenge 2008



Nearly 50,000 students from 1,400 colleges participated. About 1,050

projects were submitted and twenty emerged as winners. A total of more than 400

workshops were conducted on the software products around the country in 2008.

The winning team from KLN College of Engineering worked on tools such as DB2,

Rational Application Developer, Websphere application server, Struts, Ajax, XML

and J2EE to develop a project named City without Crime. The winning team

developed an online crime reporting system to engage public, NGOs, police, and

government agencies to be more quick, proactive, and responsive to fight with

crime and criminals.

Simultaneously, IBM also announced The Great Mind Challenge for the year

2009. This competition is aimed at providing hands-on experience to participants

on IBM software products. IBM mentors will work together with the college

faculty and the students throughout the program. This years competition is

planned to be more extensive than previous years. The registrations for the

challenge started in May and will end by December 2009. TGMC 2009s website

(https://tgmc.in/ )has been revamped with more collaborative opportunities for

participating students. The top five project teams will have an opportunity to

present before key IBM India software lab executives. In case there is any

chance of any project with commercial viability, IBM intends to help the

students find sponsors for taking the selected projects live.

IBM Academic Initiative is also part of this exercise, wherein it will offer

workshops and certification programs on various technologies like SOA, XML,

Infrastructure Management, DB2, WebSphere, and IBM Community Edition Software.

Sudesh Prasad



sudeshp@cybermedia.co.in