High on Niche Placements

Bettering its performance over the last year, IIIT-Hyderabad climbed up the ladder and hit the top 5. That was good news for an institution which has emerged as one of the finest in the country in the realm of Computational Linguistics. IIIT-H has one of the largest research groups in the country working in Natural Language Processing (NLP), speech, and computer vision.

Other strong areas were parameters like academic environment and industry interface. Over the years the institutes emphasis on research has yielded good results.
According to Prof Rajeev Sangal, director, IIIT-H, We offer even for the undergraduate students a research-led curriculum and we are probably the only institution in India to offer research at UG level. This research focus enables students to expose themselves to a large number of research projects and gives them strong foundation.

The last 1 year has been very eventful for IIIT-H. One of the major achievements relates to the development of Sampark, the Indian languages machine translation system developed by a IIIT-H led consortium, is slated for national launch toward the end of December 2010. While the first edition of the system would provide automatic text translation in 10 Indian language pairs, the next version, to be released 6 months later, would feature 8 more Indian languages.

The consortium consisting of 11 Indian academic institutions has been funded by the Government of Indias Department of Information Technology (DIT).Meanwhile the institutes bachelors students of ECE figured among the top 3 teams to qualify for the finals of the World Embedded Systems Contest 2010 .

Yet another significant achievement was that IIIT-H was ranked first at the CanSat 2010, ahead of all other premier universities from across the world, at Amarillo, Texas, USA. The contest, organized by the American Astronautical Society and sponsored by NASA, required teams to design, fabricate, and launch into lower space an autonomous micro-satellite carrying a large raw egg of a hen intact, for the entire duration of the flightfrom launch to landing.

Being a specialty technology institution, its track record on placements last season was quite impressive, looking at the placement record over the year which saw many leading companies in the IT industry scouting for talent. The institute sources say that its placement has, over the past 4 years, been phenomenal. It attributes the success in this space to the world class faculty, students, and high research oriented academic programs. Most of the placements happen in the high-end niche areas which by and large are insulated from issues like slowdown. yz