ENNOVATE’19: The Final Chapter (Panjab University)

The final round of the ENNOVATE competition was concluded on 17^th November,2019. ENNOVATE was one of its kind region-wide competition that aimed to give a platform to budding engineers and technology enthusiasts to showcase their skills and grab for themselves an opportunity to collaborate with eminent brands and firms along with internships. The competition was conducted by the Design and Innovation cell of UIET, Panjab University, and Growvation, an app built by the students of the university to foster the agenda of providing ease to college students and a platform to design and display their projects.

The event started with a lamp lighting ceremony by the chief guests at the Mulkraj auditorium, Panjab University after which Dr. Y.P. Verma, start-up coordinator welcomed all the guests and briefed the audience about the theme of the competition. The chief guest for the event was Dr. Rakesh Tuli, Senior Research Advisor, UIET, Coordinator DIC who in his speech highlighted the various government schemes that have been introduced to help budding entrepreneurs and stressed on the role of students in bridging the gap between the industry and academic institutions.

Short speeches were given by the Jury members and mentors namely Mr. Nagaraja Prakasam, Mr. Dhruv Chandel (Education Technical Evangelist at MathWorks), Mr. Shesha Sai V(Director, IoT Business, CyberEye | Community Manager, TTN India | Vice President, IoT Research & Development at iB Hubs) , Mr. Vinod Mehra (Helping Startups Scale High-Value Sale, Investor, Advisor to the Board), Mr. Ashish Khare (Chief Operations Officer at IOT World Labs Inc.), Diptendu Pramanik(Senior Embedded Firmware Engineer-IOT at GAIA Smart Cities Solutions Pvt Ltd.),  Ms. Sarjana Shukla(Designation: Scientist /Engineer ‘SC’ Organization: ISRO/DOS) and Mr. Ashish Dubey (Designation: Scientist ‘ D’ Organization: DRDO). One of our jury members was Mr. Nagaraja Prakasam who is the founder chairman of Nativeland foundation and one of the board members of NSRCEL. He captivated the audience with a spectacular and motivational speech on entrepreneurship which included a range of knowledgeable facts to support his points. According to him, one should focus on the problems then look for technology and its solution rather than vice versa. The teams, mentors and judges were briefed about the schedule of the event and everyone proceeded to the ground for the interactive sessions of the teams, mentors, judges along with the companies which were present to provide internships to the participating teams. The teams and the organizing committee members too had conversations with the mentors and judges regarding their ideas on entrepreneurship and other career-related options along with a brief introduction about their projects.

The interactive session ended on a positive note followed by lunch. The teams, mentors and jury members proceeded to the auditorium where Mr Dhruv Chandel from Mathworks gave a short speech about the journey of his life which was then followed by the presentations of the projects by the teams. The 12 teams showcased their projects with a detailed presentation and the theme was to devise a cost-effective and optimized solution for air pollution. The tech enthusiasts put forward their varied opinions on the same-some focussed on stubble burning while others looked for an alternative filter that could be installed in vehicles that would not just be a way to analyze the air pollutants but also manage and reduce the pollution then and there. Teams also gave a sensors based approach that could prove to be an efficient way for the government organizations to look for the most polluted areas and act accordingly. The three prizes were won by Team Melodic Bits (Ankur Bhatia, UIET Dhawal Sharda, UIET and Ananya Duggal, UIET), Team Storm Breakers (Hemant Garg, UIET and Abhishek Gupta,UIET), and Team Code Red (Pallavi Singh, UIET Vidhi Gupta, UIET and Charvi Mehendiratta, UIET) respectively. A special mention was made by the judges about Lovish Kumar, UIET whose team backed out but he managed to present the ideation stage of his project. He was titled the “Lone Wolf”.

The event ended on a positive note with felicitation of the jury and the mentors followed by a token of thanks to the partners -DND (refreshment partner) , Geeks for Geeks (IT Partner) , BioQ (Stationery Partner) , Vapour Host and iTech Hacks (Technical Partner) and Bonn (Gifting Partner).