Tag: India

Plastic waste is increasing day by day throughout the world. Where proper garbage collection system is not available, it creates a threat to the environment this polluting it to a greater extent. A large amount of plastic wastes are discarded which leads to the contamination of environment and air.

The large volume of materials required for infrastructure construction is potentially considered to be a major area for the reuse of waste materials. Recycling the plastics has many advantages since it is widely used worldwide and has a long service life, which means that the waste is being removed from the waste stream for a long period.

On the occasion of World Environment Day 2022, students of Heritage Institute of Technology from Department of Chemical Engineering had made a project where they had invented a technology to produce highly efficient and low-cost plastic blocks from waste plastics which have significant advantage over traditional bricks. This will not only reduce plastics waste but would save our environment and soil.

The cost of producing such plastic block is nearly 30% cheaper as compared to conventional bricks. Moreover, the developed plastic composite bricks are not just stronger and lighter than concrete blocks, but they hold twice the weight threshold of conventional concrete blocks. The plastic act as a binder and make the blocks more robust and less brittle.

“The project is now in the nascent stage but we are studying in depth the feasibility si that it can be successfully implemented. Technology related to this had been discovered but this one will make light weight bricks which is yet to be found in the market,” said Prof. Avijit Ghosh who is guiding the students in this project.

Students involved in the project were Debarghya Mukherjee, Soumyajit Mundu, Saubhik Malik, Ishita Samanta and Sanya Sharma from B. Tech Chemical Engineering.

“Tagore is in our blood. We should search for the unknown among what we know,” said Dr. Goutam Chattopadhyay, Senior Scientist, NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, California, USA during his address on 29th April 2022 at Heritage Institute of Technology, Kolkata organized by the Department of Electronics & Communication Engineering & IEEE Microwave Theory & Techniques Society in association with AP-MTT Kolkata Chapter.

Speaking on the topic ‘Mars Landing: Rover & Helicopter’ Dr. Chattopadhyay said, “We did not find any form of life outside the planet earth, not even a cell. But there could be life and it is yet to be discovered. There are trillions of planets in the universe and we are studying 5000 exoplanets which requires a huge amount of investment. To make life survive on any planet, it should have a rocky surface and there should be a probability of the existence of water.” Citing various examples he gave a detailed presentation to the students about the Perseverance Rover that has landed on Mars in the previous year along with the first launch of a Helicopter at Mars which was also done recently creating a breakthrough in science & technology.

The session was also addressed by Dr. Shiban Koul, Emeritus Professor, Centre for Applied Research in Electronics, IIT Delhi and Dr. Chinmoy Saha, Associate Professor, Indian Institute of Space Science & Technology. Both of them spoke about the latest technologies on Microwave Integrated Circuit & Satellite Tracking Applications respectively.

“IEEE has started to offer internship opportunities across India for the students. Moreover we are also doing some projects as a part of our social initiatives where students can actively participate,” said Dr. Saha during the session.

“We are helping students with some live projects and that too can happen under the IEEE student chapter. I assure that every student will have his own paper presented in research journals after becoming a member of IEEE,” said Dr. Shiban Koul encouraging the future techies to be a part of the IEEE network.

“We are planning to open a MTT-AP student’s chapter at HITK apart from motivating our students to actively become a member of IEEE. The benefits of opening a MTT- AP student’s chapter in terms of getting grants to organize conferences where the students can actively participate and learn, are huge,” said Prof. Prabir Banerjee, Head of the Department, Department of Electronics & Communication Engineering, Heritage Institute of Technology, Kolkata. It’s a matter of pride that Prof. Prabir Banerjee had been featured among the Top 100 scientists across the world for the year 2022 by AD Scientific Index.

“Students learn a lot from interacting with the experts and they should capitalize on such opportunities developing their skills and knowledge,” said Mr. P.K.Agarwal, CEO, Heritage Group of Institutions, Kolkata.

The utility of antibiotics to heal bacterial infections suffered a damage with the advent of multi-drug resistant pathogens, and it was high time for the researchers to develop other ways of curing such bacterial infections.

In this context, few scientists had developed a new biomaterial that can be used to heal the wounds and accelerate the process of healing. The same was used in mouse models for a trial run that proved to be successful. The research findings were published in the journal ‘Biomaterials Science’. The research work was done by a group of scientists from Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Mandi, IIT Delhi and National Institute of Science Education and Research (NISER), Bhubaneswar.

Proud to state that Dr. Amit Jaiswal, Associate Professor, IIT Mandi and an alumnus of Heritage Institute of Technology (HITK) B.Tech-Biotechnology, 2008 Batch had been a part of this research team which discovered such a wonderful way to disinfect wounds.

The newly made Biomaterial discovered by the scientists had been derived from polymer pullulan which is secreted by the fungus Aureobasidium pullulans. As told by Dr. Jaiswal that the use of biomedicine as an antimicrobial biomaterial had not been explored much.

Pullulan as a biomaterial is commercially used in food, cosmetics and pharmaceutical industry for its non-toxic, non-mutagenic and non-immunogenic properties. Moreover it is easy to manufacture as well.

The newly discovered biomaterial can be used in gel form as well. To get optimum result, the same can be used to make hydrogel-based wound dressings.
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On 29th April 2022, Department of Chemical Engineering, Heritage Institute of Technology organized its annual student programme on innovation & expert interaction ‘Chemspark 2022’ in association with Indian Institute of Chemical Engineering (IIChE), Student’s Chapter.

The inaugural session of the programme was addressed by Prof. Sekhar Bhattacharjee, Former Dean, Faculty of Engineering & Technology, University of Calcutta as the Chief Guest followed by Mr. S.K.Roy, Council member, IIChE and former GM, Balmer Lawrie as the Guest of Honour.

During the inaugural session, Prof. Bhattacharjee spoke about the interdisciplinary aspect of engineering where progress in chemical engineering is aligned with other streams of engineering. ‘A similar progress that of chemical engineering is witnessed in mechanical engineering as well,” said Prof. Bhattacherjee during his inaugural address.

“Chemical engineering is nothing but the alphabets of applied science. Today chemical engineers should be able to find solutions to the crisis we face daily like shortage of water. What water conservation measures can be taken to minimize the wastage of water even from the use of water filters should be the subject matter of study for today’s engineering education. Equipment daily used by us works on the principles of Chemical Engineering and how we can merge the theoretical aspect with the practical knowledge is all that matters,” said Mr. S.K.Roy, Former GM, Balmer Lawrie during his address at the inaugural session.

The session was also addressed by Prof. Basab Chaudhuri, Principal, Heritage Institute of technology and it was followed by a workshop on ‘Process simulation’ addressed by Prof. Sekhar Bhattacharjee.

“Every year we organize such events to give the students practical knowledge from the experts,” said Prof. Sulagna Chatterjee, Head of the Department, Department of Chemical Engineering, Heritage Institute of technology. The inaugural session was also contributed by Prof. Pinaki Bhattacharya, Dean, Research & Development, Heritage Institute of Technology and Prof. Sujit Kr. Barua, Registrar, Heritage Institute of Technology.

“The event is an eye opener to the practical field for the students,” said Mr. P.K.Agarwal, CEO, Heritage Group of Institutions, Kolkata

Today, internet-based education has undergone a big boom, thereby boosting the economy to a greater extent.

In a country like India, EdTech Startups have contributed not only to the job market, but also to the upliftment of the quality of education for the Indian students. However, there is a major loophole in the process of certification, in most cases, the companies; even the big players in the market, like, Coursera and Udemy only provide a certificate in PDF format.

Now this certificate can be easily forged or manipulated, the name of the student can be easily changed. Hence, there is a need for a proper authentication mechanism to check the validity of the certificate generated in a PDF format.

Finding a solution to this problem, a duo from Heritage Institute of Technology (HITK), Agnish Ghosh B.Tech- CSE 2nd Year and Rajarshi Paul B.Tech- ECE 2nd Year invented a web-based application DeCert which is based on the core-principles of blockchain, encryption and network security. Using the ideas of non-fungibility and tokenization, the students have managed to create an interface which tokenizes the PDF certificate data.

The idea of tokenization works in encrypting the PDF certificate’s data and distributing it over a decentralized blockchain network, in such a way that every time a user/organization wants to access the certificate data, there is a need to render the information from the network. In this process, the data undergoes an immense level of security, preventing copyright infringements, forgery and fraud.

The application had won at HackSVIT, a national level Hackathon organized by Sardar Vallabhai Patel Institute of Technology (SVIT),Vasad, Gujarat on 29th April 2022.

The Hackathon was sponsored and partnered by Major League Hacking which is a Talent-Acquisition division by Facebook (Meta Platforms). This was the only offline Hackathon, organized by Major League Hacking (Meta Platforms), in the Indian Subcontinent, for the year 2022.

There were 980+ selected registrations for the offline event, over 600 submissions of projects in their online platforms, and finally 115 teams competing in the final event with about 500 programmers from all across the country.

The Hackathon had duration of 36 hours at a stretch. Here the participants had to program and assemble their ideas into websites, applications and software prototypes. The organizers provided all the infrastructural support to the participants.

There were 3 rounds of mentoring, where computer scientists, startup-founders, and other company tech leads mentored the participants about the product and tech stack they used. In between those 3 rounds, there were 2 rounds of judging where the participants had to pitch and demonstrate their products in front of the judges.

In these rounds, the judges and mentors were quite impressed by the level of technology and product knowledge Agnish & Rajarshi possessed for which they were declared as the winner in the National event.

In the final round, there was entire jury of tech start-up founders and investors who asked various questions to the participants where the duo also proved their best with their unique idea of data security overtaking others.

“Usually, every other team had a strength of 3-6, but we had just two, myself and Rajarshi, but somehow we managed to work our souls out and get the product ready 3 hours before the final code push.

After our final pitch, I literally held the judges for another 12-15 minutes and drew and explained the entire web/app architecture, since they may not be interested in looking through the code anymore. I gave a final demonstration of the product after which they were amazed. Some spoke about investing in this product and there was one who literally gave a blank cheque offer and said he had links to Y-Combinator. We exchanged numbers, but I knew deep down that being placed was still hard, the other winning teams made products over Augmented Reality and Internet of Things,” said Agnish.

The winner of HackSVIT Agnish & Rajarshi won a prize money of Rs. 50000/- which they have decided to donate for a social cause.

“On this National Technology Day, on behalf of the entire Heritage Family, we recognize the valuable invention Agnish and Rajarshi had made which not only won the First Prize in a National level Hackathon but also will contribute in solving a major problem faced by the entire Nation,” said Mr. P.K.Agarwal, CEO, Heritage Group of Institutions, Kolkata.

Education is a wide topic that goes beyond classroom interactions. This is where mentorship comes in as another way of training students imparting them with the practical knowledge.

Nowadays well known IT companies have started Mentorship programmes apart from coding competitions and Hackathons to ignite the young minds and give them ample opportunities.

The motive of students being mentored in such programs is to connect them with experts who are skilled and knowledgeable in software programming and also to help them land up with internship opportunities.

This year students of Heritage Institute of Technology, Kolkata, Ishika Saha from B.Tech- IT 2024 Batch, Sayani Nandi, B. Tech CSE Batch 2024 and Ayesha Solanki, B.Tech- CSE 2024 Batch got selected for Microsoft Engage Mentorship Programme 2022.

Student engagement and mentorship program by Microsoft offers 1:1 mentorship to shortlisted students while working on a project, learning sessions specially curated for them and also a sneak peek into Microsoft’s culture and values.

“This gives me the right opportunity to hone my skills and prepare myself for the industry, ” said Ishika.

Recently Rituparna Padira from the same college secured a Global Rank # 28 in TCS codevita season-10 Round- 2 . She will be appearing for the Grand Finale on 14th May 2022.

Subham Raj from Heritage Institute of Technology had made to the Grand Finale at Hackwithinfy 2022 in this month.