March 2019 Newsletter

FAIL! talks organised by E-Cell on 2 March was a roaring success with a turnout of over 350+ enthused people and a reach of 2.8k on the live stream. The message of celebrating failure was clearly sent across and the audience was moved by the personal stories of the speakers. Speakers included Aditi Avasthi- CEO Embibe, Ajay Siotra- Masterchef India Top 16, Viiveck Verma- Chief Strategy Officer Srinivasa Farms and Curator at TEDx Hyderabad, Dutee Chand- Silver Medalist Asian Games and Pankhuri Gidwani- Miss Grand India 2016 Started at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with professors from MIT and the Ivy […]

Over 50 participants attended ExOR (Excitement of Research) 2019 at IIIT Hyderabad on 16-17 March, 2019. This annual workshop fosters deep interest in research in the engineering community (current students and industry), and encourages them to pursue research both in academics and at work. Over the weekend ExOR displayed IIITH’s research activities in diverse areas of technology, engineering and sciences and gave participants an opportunity to interact with our researchers and know more about their on-going projects.

Dr. U Deva Priyakumar and his student Rohit Modee presented their research work at the 7th Indian Peptide Society conference from 28  February – 1 March at BITS Pilani , Hyderabad: Dr. U Deva Priyakumar gave a talk on New Insights on Urea-Peptide Interactions and Rohit Modee working under the supervision of Dr. U Deva Priyakumar presented a poster on Cosolvent effect on protein (Un)folding equilibrium Indian Peptide Society, a non-profit Scientific Society founded in 2006 provides a platform for researchers in this interdisciplinary field. It also facilitates communication, co-operation and collaboration with national and international forums in understanding of […]

Dr. U Deva Priyakumar gave a talk on Rise of the Machines: Chemistry with Machine Learning at OpenTox Asia 2019 from  1- 3 March at IICT, Hyderabad. OpenTox is the leading global open platform for predictive toxicology supported by open standards. OpenTox is a community-led effort sharing common values in the development of interoperability, transparency and extensibility in the OpenTox framework and its applications.

Dr. U Deva Priyakumar gave a talk on Molecular Understanding of Chemical Perturbations on Protein Folding Equilibrium  at Vellore Institute of Technology (VIT), Vellore from 7 – 9 March. The themes covered during the conference were Advanced Materials, Sensors, and Devices,  Nanomaterials, Synthetic Organic Chemistry, Drug Design and Medicinal Chemistry, Organometallics and Catalysis, Polymers and Supramolecular Chemistry, Analytical Techniques, Pharmaceutical Chemistry and Natural Products, Bioorganic, Bioinorganic and Biophysical Chemistry, Photochemical Phenomenon and Application, Green, Sustainable and Environmental Chemistry, Theoretical and Computational Chemistry and Electrochemistry

Dr. U Deva Priyakumar gave a talk on Machine Learning for DFT Quality Energies and for Analysing Biomolecular Trajectories at the Advanced Simulation Methods: DFT, MD and Beyond ASM (2019) at IIT Delhi from 6 – 10 March. His student Tanashree Jaganade made an oral presentation of their work on Unraveling the dynamics and energetic events involved in flipping process of Thymine Glycol lesion. ASM2019 is a first-of-its-kind event dedicated to advanced computational methods such as Density Functional Theory (DFT), Molecular Dynamics (MD) simulation techniques and their applications to solve various multiscale and multidisciplinary research problems. The event brought together […]

Dr. U Deva Priyakumar gave a talk on  Urea-Aromatic Interactions: Protein unfolding, urea transporters, damaged DNA, and protein-ligand interactions at the 43rd Indian Biophysical Society Meeting (IBS-2019) from 15 -17 March at IISER, Kolkata. The Indian Biophysical Society (IBS), founded in 1965 and registered under the Act XXVI of 1961 at Kolkata with its office at Saha Institute of Nuclear Physics (SINP), has grown over the years. It currently includes over 1000 life-members from all parts of the country. The interdisciplinary nature of the society attracts scientists from not only Physics, Chemistry and Biology, but also other related areas too […]

Prof. P Krishna Reddy participated in the following events and published a paper: Attended in the 86th  Board of Governors meeting  of Farm and Rural Science Foundation (FRSF) on 15 March as a board member at AV college campus, Hyderabad. Participated in the 4th convocation of Rajiv Gandhi University of Knowledge Technologies, Basara as a member of executive committee on 16 March. Alugubelly Mamatha, Polepalli Krishna Reddy, Gade Sreenivas, Seishi Ninomiya: Analysis of similar weather conditions to improve reuse in weather-based  decision support systems, Computers and Electronics in Agriculture 157: 154-165 (2019), Elsevier.

Sai Anirudh Karre, Neeraj Mathur, Dr. Y Raghu Reddy presented a paper on Is Virtual Reality Product Development different? An Empirical Study on VR Product Development Practices at the 12th Innovations in Software Engineering Conference, ISEC 2019 in Pune, India from  14 – 16 February. Innovations in Software Engineering Conference, ISEC (Formerly known as India Software Engineering Conference) is the annual conference of iSOFT, the India chapter of ACM SIGSOFT (http://isoft.acm.org/) under the umbrella of ACM India. ISEC  2019 brought together researchers and practitioners from across the world to share the results of their work.

Gender Sensitization Committee (GSC) organized a two day workshop on Gender Awareness from 18 – 19 March to increase gender awareness among students and other people of IIIT-H community and also to address challenges and problems faced due to gender identity. The workshop included various activities and panel discussions on various gender related issues. As the world today is progressing rapidly, it is imperative that this is reflected in our thoughts and actions. The best way to get introduced to ideas is through hands-on experiences and simulations, which draw a link between the body, feelings and emotions. Some of the […]

Jaganade Tanashree Santosh, a Ph.D student under the supervision of Dr. Deva Priyakumar participated in a one week workshop on Free energy calculations for chemical and biological systems at IIT Kanpur from  17- 22 March. The workshop focused on the methods for free energy calculations using molecular dynamics methods. The lectures and hands-on sessions by the experts were directed to train Ph.D students and postdoctoral fellows in free energy calculations. Theoretical background of various methods were covered in the lectures. Hands-on sessions were given using PLUMED and PIMD programs which are interfaced to large number of molecular simulation programs like […]

Lectures, Technical Meets and Workshop by Prof. Ramancharla Pradeep Kumar: Interacted with participants from government offices of various districts in Telangana who visited Earthquake Engineering Research Centre, explained to them about policies of building assessments & retrofitting and gave a talk on Earthquake Safety of Buildings in India on 13 March. Conducted three-day Introductory workshop on Human Values at IIIT Hyderabad from 14 – 16 March for  75 participants. Conducted two day Adhyayan workshop on Human Values at IIIT Hyderabad on 16 and 17 March. Participated in a three-day International Conference on Advances in Civil Engineering (ICACE-2019) from  21 – […]

Tarun Teja Kondraju and Dr. K S Rajan presented a paper on Excessive fertilizer usage drives agriculture growth but depletes water quality at Kyoto, Japan from 12 – 14 March. Recently, an increasing frequency of extreme climatic events has been observed. Hence there is concern that the impacts of global environmental change is increasing. It is reported that extreme weather such as strong typhoon, hurricanes, torrential rain, droughts and heat waves are taking places at various places in the world. These extreme weather caused by climate change are affecting to not only natural environment but also human environment. On the […]

Dharmil Baldev, Maharshi Joshi and Subhrajyoti Mandal,  first year M.Tech – CASE students working under the supervision of  Dr. Sunitha Palissery and Aniket Bhalkikar (Ph.D Scholar at EERC) will be presenting a project on Approximate Method for Analysis of 2-D Frames Using MATLAB at MATLAB Expo 2019 organized by Mathworks India Pvt. Ltd. at Hyderabad International Convention Centre Novotel & HICC Complex, Hyderabad  on 30 April. MATLAB EXPO brings together engineers and scientists from leading organizations, MathWorks experts, and partners to learn about the latest product capabilities in MATLAB and Simulink, exchange ideas, and share successful case studies.

Dr. Zia Abbas and his students published their research work in the following conferences: IEEE International Symposium on Circuits and Systems (ISCAS) 2019, Sapporo, Japan– PVT Variations Aware Robust Transistor Sizing for Power-Delay Optimal CMOS Digital Circuit Design – Prateek Gupta, Shirisha Gourishetty, Harshini Mandadapu, Zia Abbas 20th International Symposium on Quality Electronic Design (ISQED) 2019, Santa Clara, California, USA (6 – 8 March)  – Robust Transistor Sizing for Improved Performances in Digital Circuits using Optimization Algorithms – Prateek Gupta, Harshini Mandadapu, Shirisha Gourishetty, Zia Abbas ISQED 2019 is a premier interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary Electronic Design conference. It bridges the […]

Dr. Aftab M Hussain  organized a workshop on Hands-on LoRaWAN workshop for IoT applications on 23 March in collaboration with India-EU ICT standardisation collaboration. People from the industry like  Microchip, Senra, CyberEye, TCL etc participated in the workshop and shared their insights, which was attended by 19 student teams from colleges across India. Interested student teams from colleges across the country were asked to pre-register using a google form and submit a writeup on the importance of IoT and how it can change the way we live. The essays were vetted by IIITH faculty and selected teams were called for […]