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IITaV Newsletter
August 2016                                                                                         Issue No. 15



Message from the IITaV President

Dear IIT Alumni,
 
We have entered into 6th year since IITaV was incorporated as an organisation of like minded IIT Alumni. The organisation has grown steadily over these years through support of its members and tremendous hard work by past and present Executive Committee.
 
Our activities are driven by IITaV’s key objectives and we remain committed to enhance IIT brand equity in Australia through partnerships with academic institutions, professional organisations, Industry and the Government. I am pleased to report that Swinburne University of Technology, Envision IT and The University of Melbourne are now our Corporate Gold Members which is a testimony that IITaV is bringing value to these partnerships.
 
IITaV provides a networking platform to IIT Alumni through regular professional and social events. It is very encouraging to see that these events are being attended by our members with their spouses in increased numbers and the Executive Committee will ensure a better experience for our members in our future networking events.
 
This year our “Annual Diwali Dinner” will be held on Sat 15th Oct. Please hold the date and you will soon receive an invitation with complete details. We would love to see you there with your family.
 
A Professional Networking Event is also being planned on Tue 25th Oct in collaboration with Engineers Australia.  
I would encourage all the IITaV Alumni to attend this event and become part of building IITaV brand with Engineers Australia.  
 
If you are not a member yet, I would like to invite you to join IITaV and support the organisation in achieving its objectives. Membership details can be found at IITaV website (iitav.org.au). Feel free to get in touch with any member of the Executive Committee and discuss how you can get involved and contribute in various initiatives being implemented by the organisation this year.
 
Finally, I would like to take this opportunity to thank all the members of Executive Committee and their families for their dedication and hard work. Your efforts are much appreciated.
 
 
Ravi Singh
au.ravi.singh@gmail.com
Mob: 0401 216 422
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IITaV is working busily on organising the following special events in October 2016.
  • IITaV Diwali Dinner on Saturday, 15th October 2016
  • IITaV Special Feature Event in Collaboration with Engineers Australia On Tuesday, 25th October 2016.  
You will see the invites soon in your inbox. Please mark the dates in your diary. We look forward to your support and participation.


Annual General Meeting 2016 



The 2016 Annual General Meeting (AGM) for IITaV was held on Saturday, 7th May 2016, from 3:00 to 5:30 pm at ATC-Room 205, Swinburne University, Hawthorn, Victoria, Australia 3122.  Twenty IITaV members attended the event.

AGM2016_Brainstorming

Dr. Raj Rajakumar,  IITaV President for 2015-16, kicked off the meeting. The Minutes of 2015 AGM was approved formally before Dr Raj Rajakumar presented IITaV's annual report for 2015. He presented the initiatives taken and the activities held during the year 2015-16.  He further thanked the 2015-16 Committee and noted the increased attendance of IITaV Members in both Professional and Social networking events. Treasurer, Dr. Rachana Kaudinya, presented the Treasurer's report for the year 2015.  Reports of the AGM can be found here.

AGM_Group_Photo

Following the presentation of 2015-16 Annual and Treasurer's report, nominations received for the 2016-17 Management Committee were tabled by Dr. Raj Rajakumar. There was one nomination for each of the President, Vice President, Treasurer and the Secretary positions and five nominations for the five Committee Member positions. These were unanimously approved as elected by the members.  The elected members of the 2016-17 Management Committee are:
  • President – Ravi Singh
  • Vice President – Nikhil Kumar
  • Treasurer – Rachana Kaudinya
  • Secretary – Sridhar Karuppasami
  • Committee Member – Abaran Deep
  • Committee Member - Abhay Sinha
  • Committee Member – Ashok Sharma
  • Committee Member - Bala Kumble
  • Committee Member – Dilip Desai
More information on 2016-17 Management Committee can be found here.

IITaV 2016-17 President Ravi Singh took over the proceedings and thanked the past President, Dr. Raj Rajakumar,  and the 2015-16 Committee Members Rakesh Saraf and Vipin Gaindhar for their contributions. He then honoured Dr. Raj Rajakumar and Rakesh Saraf with a gift and IITaV's Certificate of Appreciation.  Vipin Gaindhar was  unable to attend the AGM and the Committee is looking forward to facilitate him in IITaV's upcoming Social event.

Felicitation_of_DrRajakumarFelicitationRakeshSaraf  .

Vice President Nikhil Kumar facilitated a brief discussion about the focus areas of 2016-17.  All participants provided their ideas, which the incoming Committee has collected, brainstormed and uses it as a template for scheduling the activities of IITaV this year.

Many thanks for all vounteers and participants in making this AGM a productive and successful one.








"The Value of a Six: Dissecting a Cricketer’s Worth"
 Prof Kayande, Director, Centre for Business Analytics,
Melbourne Business School
29th June 2016


With T20 acutions around the world fetching multi-million dollar contracts to cricket players for a few weeks of play,  many of us were curious on the strategies used by T20 franchises to win these auctions. Particularly, when a player bought with a multi-million dollar performing below par in comparison to a player bought for a bargain!!! 

Prof KayandeProf Kayande, from Melbourne Business School,  showed us a glimpse of the strategies employed by these franchises, and the predictive models using the players past performance data (which incidentally is widely available).  He shared some key research results based on work  done jointly with Prof. Stern,  the official custodian of Duckworth-Lewis-Stern (DLS) method used in rain curtailed cricket matches. The comparison between the results of the predictive models and the opinion based approaches to the player auctions was an eye-opener. (Continue Reading)






@Novotel, Glen Waverley, 28th July 2016


IITaV recently had its July informal networking event at Novotel, Glen Waverley. This is the first informal networking event where partners of IITaV members were also invited to attend. And it was equally reciprocated by our Members. Over 15 IITaV Members with their partners attended the gathering.  A late evening start and the venue location made it possible for many of the members to attend. It was nice to see the networking going well into 9PM, which is a great endorsement that the event was well received by our Members.

informal_july5

IITaV President Ravi Singh and Rakesh Saraf (IITaV 2014-16 Committee Member) discussed with the participants to collect their thoughts for IITaV's upcoming Diwali event.  (More  Photos)






IITaV members lend active guidance and support for Swinburne University’s Industry related projects.

Dr Dilip Desai


IITaV Members would have seen a recent email from IITaV (dated 12th July 2016) inviting them to express interest to participate in collaborative projects with our Gold Corporate Member, Swinburne University. The projects are part of Swinburne University’s Master of Professional Engineering course.

Sameer Babbar, Ajay Mehta, Rahu Tyagi, Rachana Kaudinya, Ravi Singh and Dilip Desai from IITaV expressed interest to participate in this opportunity.

The course is an initiative of Prof Ajay Kapoor (IITaV member) of Swinburne University. It started in the week starting August 1. There are about 50+ students in that course. They need to do a business related project over 12 weeks, and form groups of about 5 for each project.  (Continue Reading)



 


Scaling up of Million Solar Urja Lamp (SoUL) Programme from IIT Bombay : The completion of providing solar lamps to one million students in the past two years, had led to the upscaling of this programme  to the benefit of  another 100 million students by the Governement of India.  The Programme started in 2014 has been implemented by IIT Bombay with financial support from the Government, Corporates and NGOs. (Read More)

Pfizer and IIT Delhi Innovation Program : IIT Delhi and Pfizer have signed a MoU to create new intellectual properties (IP) and
promote new business and innovations based on those IPs in the Healthcare sector. One of these grants was awarded to  Valetude Primus Healthcare Pvt Ltd  for their diagonostics method to detect Typhoid infection and the other award was granted to a wearable air purification device designed by Standford India Biodesign 2015 fellows,  Debayan Saha and Shashi Rajan. (Read More)




We welcome Dr Pradeep Srivastava (IIT Delhi), Shuddhashil Dey (IIT Kharagpur) and Vijay Susarla (IIT Madras) to our family of IITaV members and take this opportunity to thank all members for their continued participation in and support of  IITaV activities.


corp_members

Swinburne Logo

Swinburne University of Technology is an Australian public university based in Melbourne, Victoria. Swinburne operates five campuses in two countries and has an enrolment of students across vocational, undergraduate  and postgraduate levels.

Swinburne houses advanced labs such as Design for Ageing, Smart Structure and Factory of Future labs. “Being a corporate member of IITAV, we benefit from collaborations and industry experts to create a new forum for engineering students,” Professor Ajay Kapoor, said. (More)


EnvisionIT


Established in 2002 in Melbourne, Envision IT develops software products for global markets. This includes Standalone, Cloud based SaaS, Enterprise, Line of Business and mobile applications.

Envision IT products are known for their ease of use, high productivity, efficiency and reliability. Typically, our products offer an ROI under 3 months. (More)


The University of Melbourne

The University of Melbourne has had a long standing involvement with India. During its formative years, The University of Melbourne received high recognition when Lord Curzon, the Viceroy of India (1899-1905), invited Professor Masson, Chair of Chemistry at The University, to India to advise on the establishment of the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore. (More)





We take this opportunity to thank everyone for their contributions.

To help us improve the newsletter, please send your feedback and contributions (news, views and memories) for the next issue to

 mail@iitav.org.au

Previous editions of the newsletter are available here.

Members are also requested to update their profiles at our website.


Thank you.
IITaV Management Committee





 
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Indian Institutes of Technology (IIT) are the premier institutes of engineering education in India.
IITaV is the Alumni Association for IIT alumni in Victoria.