Going beyond knowledge

BHARATI PAWASKAR

Knowledge does not know boundaries and if shared unitedly, everyone who participates in this knowledge sharing can enjoy the end product equally and include others too to avail the benefits. Mugdha Khatavkar, Nikita Salkar, Shravan Manerikar and Delstan D’Souza - all four who are final year students at Computer Engineering department of Goa College of Engineering, Farmagudhi (Ponda) are ideal examples of this. They showed that unity is a great asset and can bring in victories. This Goan team from GCE proved this in the recently held competition Anveshan where several teams from engineering colleges across India had participated. Organised by Association of Indian Universities (AIU) it’s an annual student research convention held to motivate students to take up research as a career.   

Mugdha recalls, “The project which we took for this competition is our BE final year project and we are four of us working on it but for the competition we could give maximum three names. So we decided to present Nikita, Shravan and myself as participants. However, all four of us, including our fourth partner Delstan, went for the competition because we knew the inputs from the judges or the panel would be very helpful in our further work of the project.”   

One the first day of the competition the team had to present their poster to the panel. “The fourth member from our project, Delstan who could not take part in the competition would go around with the judges and see how others present. He noticed that we are lacking in preparation part. But luckily because of our idea we qualified for the next round. So that day till one o’clock in the night we sat together and worked on our presentation because we knew it would not be an easy competition now onwards. I must admit, each and every team was brilliant. But finally our hard work paid off, we secured third place. Indeed, it was a team work and we four couldn’t have done without each other and our college support,” recalls Nikita.   

“We talked about some really nice ideas about each other’s process as well. So there was a lot of learning happening too. It was not just a competition where one team beat the other. It was an exchange of ideas and supporting each other in taking them forward,” Mugdha shares her experience.  

Association of Indian Universities (AIU) organises Anveshan: Student Research Convention every year. This convention aims at motivating students to take up research as a career and get more students involved in research field. The convention is divided into five categories, namely - agriculture, basic science, engineering and technology, health sciences, allied subjects, pharmacy, nutrition, social sciences, humanities, commerce and law.   

This is a nationwide competition held in two rounds. Round one is Zonal (which is again divided into five zones: North, South, East, West and Central) from which three from each zones, in all five categories were selected for national level.  

Round two is National wherein 75 teams from each zone competed for national level.  

“Both the rounds had two sub rounds. One was poster presentation in which we had to present poster of our project and then they selected top 10-15 teams for next level. The second was PPT presentation which had seven minutes for presentation and three minutes for QA from judges and audience,” briefs Nikita who was in the three who presented the poster.   

“I am glad that we, computer engineering students from Goa College of Engineering, won the third place at Zonal level in West Zone held at Pacific University Udaipur and now we shall be competing for National level in March at Ganpat University, Mehsana in Gujarat in the category of Engineering and Technology,” quips a happy Shravan.  

Adding that the West Zone competition was held on January 10 and 11, 2019 at Pacific University, Udaipur, Shravan informs, “We had taken our BE Final year research project named ‘Social Web for Disaster Management.’ Our project is about using social media mainly tweeter during crisis / disaster situation to help the victims using data mining techniques.”  

Nikita explains, “We had selections at Goa University in December, 2018 to choose best five teams for Zonal level. Each University is allowed to send maximum of five teams.”   

Excited Mugdha quips, “Now we are working for nationals to be held in Ganpat University, Mehsana in Gujarat from March 12 to 14. All this would not have been possible if we did not get support from our college. Our project guide, Dr Kavita Asnani, head of department, Dr J A Laxminarayana and the principal of our college Dr Krupashankara M S.”