As part of IIITH’s Silver Jubilee Celebrations, the International Institute of Information Technology(IIIT) Hyderabad celebrated its Founders Day here on its campus at Gachibowli in a late evening function on Friday. Ms. Debjani Ghosh. the President of NASSCOM joined virtually. Mr Jayesh Ranjan, Principal Secretary, Govt of Telangana graced the event along with Prof Raj Reddy, founding and present chairman of IIITH’s governing council. The event, which was attended by industry leaders included the felicitation of IIITH’s 6 corporate founding partners namely IBM, Oracle, Metamor, Microsoft, Motorola and Satyam, interesting conversations around research trends, and a showcase of emerging technologies. It was encouraging to see the presence of industry leaders from across tech industries from Hyderabad and across the country. The industry has played a key role through IIITH’s 25 years in funding research, and innovation and also hiring IT students.
Congratulating IIITH on its 25th milestone, Ms Debjani Ghosh said, “Nasscom partnered with IIIT Hyderabad, as a founding partner during its inception in 1998, to put the plan in place towards making India a true talent hub for the rest of the nation. The vision was to build a dedicated institute that would focus on technology learning and research with very strong industry partnerships. The pedagogy was designed to prepare students with experiential learning and entrepreneurship approach. Overall I think the lack of legacy combined with the innovative governance model that was available in the PPP model tremendously helped us. And while India now has 20 IIITs, IIIT Hyderabad is the only institution where Nasscom is a founding partner and we are very proud of this association, this partnership and the journey that we have been on together. It is just fantastic to see what this institute has achieved over the past 25 years under the leadership of Prof. Raj Reddy, Prof. P J Narayanan and the entire team”. Mr Jayesh Rajan while addressing the 250+ industry gathering said the State Government has also immensely benefited from IIIT Hyderabad. “It is a jewel in our crown”, he said. He added that Telangana has made tremendous progress in the last 9 years, unlike any other states in the country. He asked three things from IIITH. 1) Leverage your quality education for the benefit of 256 engineering and other colleges in the state. 2) Work with government on societal problems and solutions. 3) Make the excellency of your faculty available to other colleges, industry and society at large.
Prof Raj Reddy spoke about education and research. IIITH is known for project-oriented learning, learning by doing. This is going to be the centre of learning in future. The future of education is going to be the Waterloo Model. This model allows partly to study and partly to work. Mr. Srini Raju, Governing Council member spoke about Vision 2050. He said it is neither the government nor the private institute. It is truly a public institute. This education model had a ripple effect and a lot of institutions have come up with this model. IIITH has been successful in the past 25 years in giving good and quality engineers to industries he said. He urged corporates to join in its journey. Prof P.J Narayanan, Director said IIIT is a public institute. It is the institute by the society, for the society and of the society. It is governed by the enlightened board of the governing council. Speaking further he added that no software product can be produced in the world without India being in it.
The International Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad (IIIT-H) is an autonomous research university founded in 1998 that focuses on the core areas of Information Technology, such as Computer Science, Electronics and Communications, and their applications in other domains through inter-disciplinary research that has a greater social impact. Some of its research domains include Visual Information Technologies, Human Language Technologies, Data Engineering, VLSI and Embedded Systems, Computer Architecture, Wireless Communications, Algorithms and Information Security, Robotics, Building Science, Earthquake Engineering, Cognitive Science, Computational Natural Sciences and Bioinformatics, Education Technologies, Power Systems, IT in Agriculture and e-Governance.