15 JULY 2023 - 15 JAN 2024VOL 02 - ISSUE 01

NEWSLET TER

REFLECTIONS: FROM THE VICE CHANCELLOR’S DESK

As we usher in a new year of progress and

innovation, we center this edition of 1729

on the theme of ‘Tech for All’. In these

pages, we delve into the diverse and

impactful ways in which technology must

be harnessed to address societal challen-

ges and promote inclusivity.

These days conversations around us are

centered on data science and its transfor-

mative impact. But how many of us know

about the historical and scientiﬁc dimen-

sions of the subject? In the third issue of

1729, Professor Rajesh Gupta, a luminary

in the ﬁeld, gives us a refresher with exem-

plary insights.

Our campus is a microcosm of society

where we nurture young individuals and

prepare them to not only face real-world

challenges but also address them and make

a diﬀerence. Professor M Balakrishnan’s

journey in assistive technology and social

entrepreneurship serves as an inspiration

for all our faculty and students.

With such academic scholars and outstand-

ing faculty guiding our academic commu-

nity, our students are inspired and are

making strides in leveraging tech in addres-

sing societal problems. These tangible out-

comes highlight our rich academic tapestry

and embody Plaksha’s spirit of innovation,

inclusivity and meaningful impact.

I envision a future where technology serves

all, and Plaksha continues to lead the way.

Christened ‘1729', after Ramanujan - Hardy number, the Plaksha newsletter is a window into our

thriving, interconnected, and learner centered environment where Plakshans look beyond the

obvious, just like Srinivas Ramanujan did with the seemingly dull number ‘1729'.

Through this newsletter we share the contribution of each member of our vibrant community of

learners, researchers, leaders, innovators and problem solvers to reimagining technology education.

Prof. Rudra Pratap

Founding Vice Chancellor

Plaksha University

T E C H F O R A L L

Tech must address

societal challenges

and promote

inclusivity

Modeled after the visual cortex, the resulting

convolutional neural networks provided a

systematic means of optimization that auto-

matically identiﬁed spatial ‘features’ in images.

By early 2000, advances in computing hard-

ware demonstrated measurable progress in

the ability of convolutional neural networks to

classify images and handwritten text.

Driven by a standard set of benchmark chal-

lenges, the progress in automatic image classi-

ﬁcation was rapid and dramatic. While it is still

not very clear as to why these networks - the

so-called deep neural networks - worked, a

combination of happy coincidences, including

the availability of large amounts of labeled

images over the internet, cloud computing,

and signiﬁcant parallel processing using

graphical computing co-processors enabled

advances in pattern recognition that will soon

expand beyond recognizing images to speech

and text. In its latest incarnation, AI had literally

and metaphorically become synonymous with

the ability to see or the ‘eyes of the machine’.

In our attempt to understand images, mankind

had walked into replicating the processes by

which we understood images. Another branch

of research in neural networks put these into

the feedback loop, and challenged the network

to generate an image given the feature/label,

the outcome of this network was then fed to

another neural network that tried to classify it.

Thus, modeled as an adversarial game

between a generation and a discrimination

network, the roots of generative AI took place.

It was only a matter of time before the atten-

tion shifted from two-dimensional images to

one-dimensional input of text, speech. Machine

translation was, for instance, the task of trans-

forming one such serial input into a serial

output, the so-called, pre-trained transformer.

A signiﬁcant result about six years ago pointed

out that convolution was not needed for such

transformation on text, and a simpler mecha-

nism provided the necessary capability to

identify semantically relevant text pieces

regardless of their distance in the source text.

These advances are now at the root of the

continuing evolution of neuromorphic comput-

ing architectures in ‘generative AI’.

As we close the circle from images to text, we

also make another important transition from

engineering, which was all about numbers, to

text and symbolic processing. While numbers

DATA SCIENCE AND INTELLIGENCE: SEEING THROUGH THE ‘EYES’

OF HISTORY AND SCIENCE

The Bastille fell in 1789, 13 years after the

American Declaration of Independence, a period

marked by war and upheaval on both sides of the

Atlantic, one that demanded technological advan-

tages to win the war. Among the two areas that

Napoleon sought to overcome the British were

steel and the conversion of heat to work/motion.

He tasked a young Sadi Carnot to build these

capabilities in a small military school that gave us

the polytechnic legacy, a precursor to engineering

as a discipline perfected in the United States.

This led to the peacetime dividend of the 1840s,

a period also marked as the European Spring

before we entered the next phase of upheaval

between the two world wars. Our engineering

legacy deﬁned a century of enormous progress.

It raised a talent pool trained to be engineers

from the beginning, for no amount of scientiﬁc

knowledge alone would make an engineer.

A century after the rise of the ﬁrst engineering

schools in America, we saw the emergence of

computing as a discipline with its roots in engi-

neering and math and an early glimpse into

computation and computing machines. Almost

immediately, it gave a glimpse into how human

thought could be emulated and the vision of

‘thinking machines’. Thus, the ﬁrst forays into

artiﬁcial intelligence (AI) rose in the early 1950s.

In the six decades since, AI has seen three

generations of technological advances, each

with its own ‘winters’ as the early excitement

eventually led to disappointments in putting

these advances to meaningful use, at least in

competition to more targeted domain knowl-

edge. The vision of intelligent machines was

contrasted by the reality of failures: machine

translation, speech recognition, expert systems.

Yet, progress was being made, slowly and

steadily. Optical character recognition was being

put into practical use, and it became a driver

for limited image classiﬁcation eﬀorts such as

handwriting recognition on a network of

‘neurons’ as multiplicative weight elements that

updated their weights based on known outputs

by back-propagation of error correction, a

version of chain rule that eﬃciently computed

gradient of a loss function. In the meantime,

driven by discoveries by neuroscientists in how

the optical nervous system was organized, the

single-layer network of neurons in neural net-

works transitioned to alternating layers of

complex/simple neural networks interspersed

with normalization/non-linear functions.

T E C H F O R A L L

Plaksha Think Tank

T E C H F O R A L L

had important niceness - fully ordered and

continuous - language provides a bigger chal-

lenge and ﬂexibility in knowledge representa-

tion. Language is also the ultimate sensor

cross-modality, it captures experience seen or

heard or felt in another form, arguably the

source of human intelligence.

While it is early to tell exactly how the recent

and continuing advances will ﬁnd practical use,

there is no question that technology we have

arrived at is a new junction, just like the engi-

neering of 200 years ago, where no amount of

computing or math will be suﬃcient for the

new scientist, the data scientist of tomorrow.

The new curriculum is the Data Science, at the

intersection of pedagogy in computer science,

engineering, math and statistics, with innova-

tions in how we teach the practical and thinking

skills to the talent needed in this emerging ﬁeld.

Prof. Rajesh Gupta

Member, Academic Advisory Board,

Plaksha University

Professor and Qualcomm Endowed Chair,

Department of Computer Science and Engineering,

University of California, San Diego

ASSISTIVE TECHNOLOGY AND SOCIAL ENTREPRENEURSHIP JOURNEY

buses unassisted has gone through extensive

pilot testing on 25 BEST buses in Mumbai and

another 22 buses in Delhi. This year it is going

to be installed on 500 BMTC buses in Bengaluru

to make public buses accessible to the visually

impaired for the ﬁrst time. Raised Lines

Foundation (RLF), a non-proﬁt founded by me

with another colleague, is the sole producer of

tactile books in India. Based on the know-how

developed at IIT Delhi, RLF produces textbooks

focusing on STEM subjects and for the ﬁrst-time

thousands of blind children across the country

can ‘touch and see’ objects ranging from simple

geometrical shapes to anatomy of a human

body. Very recently, along with my students, I

have founded a startup named IWAYPLUS which

focuses on making indoor spaces accessible to

all. This is based on the indoor navigation work

of one of my PhD students.

In this transformation, three of my previous

experiences were extremely helpful. I started

my professional career as a scientist in IIT Delhi

where we were not only designing and building

systems for Indian Navy but were also involved

in installing and testing them on ships. In late

90s, I developed an embedded systems course

in CSE Department where the key deliverable for

a group of students was building an innovative

solution addressing some societal problem and

demonstrating the same as proof of concept/

prototype. Many of my initial AT solutions were

designed and built by third year students as

projects. Finally, I was one of the founders of

KritiKal Solutions and Vehant Technologies in

the 2002-04 period and experience from there

were extremely helpful in this later period of

my social entrepreneurship journey.

Finally, after 45 years of my teaching and

research journey what is satisfying is that

though I chose an unconventional path for an

academic, focusing on societal impact rather

than pushing state of the art through publica-

tions, still professional and academic institutions

have recognized my work through fellowships

and awards. I hope that inspires many more to

choose this path for their research.

A chance meeting with a visually impaired

person named Dipendra Manocha nearly 25

years back completely changed my profes-

sional journey. Introduced to me by a common

acquaintance, he approached me with a

simple problem of interfacing emacs editor

with a screen reader software. What began as

a student project slowly got converted into a

strong collaboration to look at technology

solutions for mobility and education of per-

sons with visual impairment (PVI). Note mobil-

ity and education remains as two key bottle-

necks in the inclusion of any disadvantaged

group in the society. Combine this with the

fact that the solutions produced in developed

high-income countries are either not suitable

or completely unaﬀordable to PVIs in India.

This became a passion and slowly completely

changed my research focus to Assistive

Technology (AT). Earlier, I worked primarily in

Electronics Design Automation (EDA) and

system level synthesis broadly within the

domain of VLSI Design.

SmartCane capable of detecting knee above

obstacle detection as well as non-contact

detection through ultrasonic ranging has sold

more than 130,000 units. OnBoard, a device

that helps visually impaired to board public

Prof. M Balakrishnan

Distinguished Visiting Professor,

Advisor - Faculty Aﬀairs and Career Advancement,

Plaksha University

Honorary Professor, CSE Department, IIT Delhi

T E C H F O R A L L

Plaksha Think Tank

The Center for Water Security (CWS) at

Plaksha is working on three major themes viz.

monitoring of water quality, advanced treat-

ment technologies and resource eﬃcient

wastewater treatment. The choice of our

research problems is motivated by the water-

related challenges that we see around us. For

example, our work using autonomous robots

for monitoring aquatic systems is driven by

lack of adequate and timely information on

water quality in our lakes, which eventually

decides human and planetary health. We are

working on IoT-enabled operation of water

treatment to address ineﬃcient operation

and maintenance of water treatment systems.

Our research on energy eﬃcient industrial

wastewater treatment using Forward Osmosis

(FO) is inspired by cost-intensive industrial

wastewater treatment processes that cannot

be adopted by highly polluting small and

medium enterprises. Similarly, development

of a hand-held optical sensor prototype for

chromium detection will be a cost-eﬀective

alternative to existing sensors for heavy metals

identiﬁcation at trace levels. Such trace level

detection could help avert harmful

bioaccumulation of impurities in humans

and animals.

Our projects are interdisciplinary and strive to

use the learnings from across our four BTech

majors. Overall, the goal of CWS is to develop

aﬀordable and scalable solutions to speciﬁc

water challenges in India through a combina-

tion of cutting-edge and translational research

that will have societal impact. We encourage

students at Plaksha to participate in our excit-

ing journey contributing towards making India

a water secure nation.

Prof. Malini Balakrishnan

Director, Center for Water Security

Professor, Plaksha University

CUSTOMIZED WASTEWATER TREATMENT SOLUTION

Reimagine Research

T E C H F O R A L L

Building a curriculum from scratch for a new

university is by no means a small task. But

building a curriculum that possibly no one or at

any rate very few institutions have attempted is

an even more challenging prospect. Especially

when it comes to combining or rather integrat-

ing the academic and disciplinary perspectives

oﬀered by the humanities, social sciences

together with science and technology.

At the outset one might ask why even venture

into doing something like this? What is the

value of an ‘integrated’, ‘multi’ or even ‘trans-

disciplinary’ curriculum? Is claiming that it is

‘unique’ suﬃcient reason for designing it?

Perhaps not on its own, however, to claim that

it is original because it begins to address and

respond to new and unique - in the sense of

unprecedented - circumstances that humanity

ﬁnds itself in today is what furnishes an

integrated curriculum with its deep, enduring,

social and educational value. Part of the

process of designing or inventing a distinctive

curriculum lies in the recognition that human

and non-human species, organic and non-

organic substances, natural and technological

occurrences all exist together on the Earth in

a state of profound interdependency.

Understanding the nature of this interdepen-

dency is one of the central concerns, for

example, of the Freshmore course at Plaksha

called - ‘Entangled Worlds: Technology and the

Anthropocene’ in which the simple realization

of this irreducible interconnectedness begins

to oﬀer students a novel context inside of

which to think and act on the immense global

challenges that exist.

Prof. Aditya Malik

Professor, Plaksha University

INTEGRATING ACADEMICS WITH DISCIPLINARY PERSPECTIVES

Success Spotlight

T E C H F O R A L L

S P O T L I G H T S S T O R I E S U P D A T E S I N I T I A T I V E S

In a world that is highly diverse in life situations,

perceptions and awareness, a well-crafted and

holistic higher education alone can build the

culture of conscious learning that should pave

way for an all-inclusive and sustainable human

growth, and planetary health. The Center for

Equitable and Personalized Healthcare (CEPH)

at Plaksha contributes via intersection of cut-

ting-edge research in molecular biology,

bioinformatics, disease modelling, biomaterials,

next generation diagnostics and measurement

techniques for a deep understanding of human

physiology in the Indian context. Going forward,

we aim to undertake epidemiology, epigenetic

studies and health informatics as most of the

existing genomic research addresses the needs

of barely 10% of the world’s population. Such

interdisciplinary research is the way to gain

insights into health trends, environmental

patterns, social dynamics, and enable evidence-

based decision-making to address early on, the

root causes of Indian health and the complex

challenges. The collaboration across disciplines

is also promoted to come up with innovative

technology solutions for aﬀordable and equita-

ble healthcare.

CEPH looks at how innovation, education and

research can come together to create a world

that is inclusive and focussed on improving

human and planetary health. And, how we can

build on our foundation by leveraging technol-

ogy to empower community. Center faculty

contribute to this vision by oﬀering varied

courses on bio-processes, system biology,

neuroscience, materials and biosensors.

Building on this commitment, CEPH faculty

currently hold three research grants

approved from the Department of Science &

Technology, Government of India. These grants

are on neuroscience of navigation to be

investigated by Dr. Subhasis Ray, DNA degra-

dation by MRE11 nuclease for therapeutic

responses to be investigated by Dr. Swagata

Halder and Dr. Monika Sharma, and Optical

sensor for Chromium detection in contami-

nated waters to be conducted by Dr. Chaitanya

Lekshmi Indira, Dr. Amruta Behera and

Dr. Sandeep Manjanna.

Dr. Chaitanya Lekshmi Indira

LEVERAGING TECHNOLOGY TO EMPOWER COMMUNITY

Director, Center for Equitable and

Personalized Healthcare,

Associate Professor, Plaksha University

Conscious learning

Cutting edge research

Interdisciplinary focus

Human Physiology

Epidemiology

Bio materials

Next GEN diagnostics

Environmental patterns

Community health trends

Bio & health informatics

Preventive healthcare

Social dynamics

Aﬀordable &

Equitable Healthcare

Innovation

Plaksha Initiative

T E C H F O R A L L

CENTER FOR EQUITABLE AND PERSONALIZED HEALTHCARE

focuses on.....

S P O T L I G H T S S T O R I E S U P D A T E S I N I T I A T I V E S

In India, where STEM education for visually

impaired (VI) students often relies on rote

learning, we address the challenge of making

science, particularly optics, more inclusive. Our

work describes the creation and preliminary

testing of an auditory-tactile prototype to teach

optics to VI students. Using a 3-D printed light

detector that signals with sound and tactile

feedback, we engaged VI students in hands-on

experiments. Initial observations and future

plans for video analysis and concept mapping

aim to assess the prototype’s eﬀectiveness and

the students’ conceptual grasp. This research

signiﬁes a step towards inclusive STEM

education, oﬀering VI students a more interactive

learning experience.

Dr. Rucha Joshi

Faculty Lead, Center for Innovation in Education

Associate Professor, Plaksha University

At the Center for Thinking Language and

Communication (CTLC) we have three key

objectives. Firstly, to teach our engineering

students to think about technology and inno-

vation from a broader planetary perspective

through a philosophical lens. In the process,

we train them to ask the tough questions and

interrogate our assumptions about technology

and its relationship to society. We call this

human-centered engineering. Secondly, we

develop their communication skills, both

verbal and writing skills, so that the engineer-

ing fraternity can communicate the technicali-

ties of engineering to the public at large and to

non-technical stakeholders. Finally, we cre-

atively use technology to increase the eﬃcacy

of engineering education. A recent course

was on helping our engineering students to

do research and write academic scripts. This

requires a skill set that is new for engineers

and therefore can evoke a variety of emo-

tions while doing this course. We installed a

trained AI model on their laptops which was

able to detect the emotional state of the

students by capturing their facial expres-

sions. This enabled the students to know

how they were feeling and their emotional

state even as they did their research and

writing. Students gave feedback that this self-

knowledge of their emotional state was

helpful for them to move past the hurdles,

and they were able to considerably increase

INCLUSIVE SCIENCE

HUMAN-CENTERED ENGINEERING

Stories of Impact

T E C H F O R A L L

S P O T L I G H T S S T O R I E S U P D A T E S I N I T I A T I V E S

There are many facets of a university campus -

the students who bring energy to the campus,

the physical infrastructure which inspires and

nudges behavior, and the software systems for

university operations. The question we're asking

at Plaksha is how to design technologies for an

enhanced campus experience. While we design

the tech enablement for the university, we're

curating each piece of software to drive our

cultural values and eﬃciency.

The student life is a jugglery between classes,

assignments, projects, extra curriculars and

more. How do we enable digital assistants to

manage this? How do we provide a personalized

experience to each student for their goals? How

do we derive insights about a student's natural

aptitude and nudge them to exploit it? To

answer these questions, we use state of the art

tools in AI, ML and data science, driven directly

through top researchers in the area. We're also

developing tools to do this in a privacy preserv-

ing and inclusive manner.

At Plaksha, technology is integrated to inspire

and inform the culture, and drive eﬃciency in

resource usage. Simple nudges - food wastage

per meal, water and electricity used - help drive

eﬃciency for campus spaces. We think of the

campus as a microcosm for the society.

For the software systems of the university, we

ensure that we have suﬃcient visibility into the

software stack we use such that we’re able to

derive key performance indicators (KPIs) for each

of our functions, identify bottlenecks in achieving

these KPIs and thus drive operational eﬃciency.

Our vision at Plaksha is to use technology to

greatly enhance student experience, campus

resources and operational eﬃciency. We want to

lead from the front and showcase the power of

technology to create a culture of excellence at

the organization.

Dr. Anupam Sobti

Faculty Lead, Tech Enablement

TECH ENABLEMENT AT PLAKSHA

Pic credit - Dall-e

Dr. Brainerd Prince

Dr. Siddharth

Director, Center for Thinking Language

and Communication

Associate Professor, Plaksha University

Faculty Lead, Human-Technology Interaction Lab

T E C H F O R A L L

Stories of Impact

Assistant Professor, Plaksha University

the eﬃcacy of their research and writing in

their own perception. The CTLC team wrote

a research paper on this initiative which has

been accepted at the 21st International

Conference on Smart Technologies &

Education (STE) and will be presented in the

Spring of 2024 at the Arcada University of

Applied Sciences in Helsinki, Finland.

S P O T L I G H T S S T O R I E S U P D A T E S I N I T I A T I V E S

Noyonica Chatterjee, Ankit Kumar, Surabhi Tannu

Alli Ajagbe, Divith Narendra, Soham Petkar

STUDENT-FRIENDLY CAB TRAVEL

To tackle the urban student woe of high cab

fares and unpredictable journey times, we

leveraged a dataset of 400,000 entries from a

leading cab service for details like cab type,

origin, destination, departure times and fares.

Our approach involved sophisticated data

pre-processing, utilizing tools like ‘Column-

Transformer’ and ‘OneHotEncoder’. We

employed three ML models to predict cab

fares: Linear Regression, Random Forest, and

KNN. Random Forest emerged as the star,

oﬀering the most accuracy in fare prediction.

This project is a stride towards making urban

cab travel more reliable and aﬀordable for

students. We’ve developed a user-friendly

application that predicts cab times and prices

at 10-minute intervals for any selected hour

and timeframe, making cab travel more

predictable and budget-friendly.

HANDS-ON LEARNING

One of the foundational goals of Plaksha

University is to leverage technology for

improving our quality of life and empowering

our community. To this end, several innovations

were introduced in the Machine Learning and

Pattern Recognition (MLPR) course taught to

third year undergraduate students by Professor

Siddharth. These innovations were nurtured

with the vision to take a more experiential

approach to learning:

• In every lecture, the presentation

component was followed by a real-time

demo exposing students to practical

applications of the concept.

• Students were taught to implement related

solutions every week in the lab to gain

hands-on learning experience.

• Student groups worked on utilizing machine

learning to solve real-world problems.

This brought about and a number 28 projects

of these would be taken further by students as

research projects in the following semesters.

T E C H F O R A L L

Student Speak

OPTIMIZING FOOD MENU

Our project involved optimization of the food

menu at Plaksha University through demand

forecasting. While existing literature relies on

conventional models and computer vision to

address the problem through a supply-side

outlook, it ﬁnds itself unable to answer any

uncorrelated surge in demands. We instead

utilize a demand-side approach to address

this problem by providing recommendations

based on demand forecasting for footfall

while addressing varying preferences.

The project ML workﬂow included data

collection (structured and unstructured)

from various sources, exploratory data

analysis, data augmentation, model selection

with existing ML techniques backed by

statistical tests, and recommendations from

our ﬁndings.

We also developed an interface for the

stakeholders to interact with our model.

Our ﬁnal model is a combination of Poisson

Regression and Gradient Boosting, yielding

a mean absolute error of ~32 with an R-

squared value above 80%.

S P O T L I G H T S S T O R I E S U P D A T E S I N I T I A T I V E S

A one-day workshop on ‘Emerging Frontiers of

Indian Knowledge Systems’ was conducted at

Plaksha on Nov 2 to throw light on some of the

interesting contributions from Indic systems of

thinking. There were ﬁve talks, each covering an

interdisciplinary area. In addition to internal

audience from Plaksha (students, VC, faculty,

Plaksha founders), there were attendees from

a few academic institutes.

Prof. RN Iyengar (Jain University, Bengaluru)

spoke on how the eﬀect of axial procession of

Earth has given rise to many textual references

to circumpolar stars in Sanskrit astronomical

texts that can be used for a chronological analy-

sis. Using references to the Dhruva star in Sans-

krit texts, he presented its stratigraphy as a ﬁxed

pole star over close to at least ﬁve millennia.

Prof. MD Srinivas (Center For Policy Studies,

Chennai) spoke on the foundational methodol-

ogy of Indic sciences. The talk discussed a prag-

matic and open-ended approach to scientiﬁc

theorization as expounded in the major source-

works of Nyāya (Logic and Epistemology),

Vyākarana (Grammar), Ganita (Mathematics)

and Jyotisa (Astronomy). The Indian approach to

scientiﬁc knowledge is very diﬀerent from the

quest for inviolable, universal laws which has

dominated the Greek and the modern European

scientiﬁc traditions, emphasizing absolute truth.

Sri Raghu Anantanarayanan (Rtambhara

Ashram, Kotagiri) discussed Citta Vidya as psych-

ology in the light of Yogic wisdom. After deﬁning

Citta Vidya as a conﬂuence of the Yoga Sūtra-s,

Itihāsa-purāna, theatre and dance, he observed

that Citta Vidya emphasizes introspection and

sādhanā as the key to personal transformation,

while Euro-American Psychology emphasizes

outside-in therapy as the key to transformation.

Prof. Sampadananda Misra (Rishihood University,

Sonipat) discussed how Sanskrit is not just a

medium of communication but a profound reposi-

tory of ancient wisdom, culture and philosophy.

The talk discussed unique qualities of Sanskrit,

highlighting its role in shaping human conscious-

ness and understanding underlying principles of

creation, natural laws and the science of living.

Prof. Deepti Navaratna (NIAS, Bengaluru) dis-

cussed the topic of ‘Raga Engineering’ and the role

of neuroscience in understanding the insights of

Indic thinking in the music and in art domains in

general. After the ﬁve formal presentations from

the speakers, she also conducted an interactive

session with live music on the same topics with the

students of the Plaksha Music club.

There was a panel discussion, anchored by one of

the founders, Ashish Gupta, on how to take for-

ward high quality research in IKS and its role in

engineering education.

The feedback on the workshop has been positive

and clearly indicates that further explorations are

necessary. The organizers of the workshop were

Dr. Sumita Ambasta (Plaksha founder) and

Prof. K Gopinath (Plaksha), using high-level inputs

from Prof. Rudra Pratap (Vice Chancellor) and

Ashish Gupta (Plaksha founder).

EXPLORING INDIC THINKING IN STEM

Prof. K Gopinath

Program Chair, Computer Science &

Artiﬁcial Intelligence

Professor, Plaksha University

Dr. Sumita Ambasta

Founder and Trustee, Plaksha University

Founder and Executive Director, Flowering Tree Inc.

T E C H F O R A L L

Plaksha Updates

Full-time

Faculty

363

Students

154

Executives

& Teaching

Fellows

Research

Fellows

Visiting

Faculty

S P O T L I G H T S S T O R I E S U P D A T E S I N I T I A T I V E S

Plaksha University

Alpha, Sector 101, IT City Road, Sahibzada Ajit Singh Nagar, Punjab 140306

Collaborate with Plaksha: We are keen to collaborate with

faculty members and researchers from both within and

outside Plaksha to leverage our collective expertise and

push the boundaries of knowledge.

Virtual Tour: Explore the vibrant campus of Plaksha

from the comfort of your homes. Take a virtual tour to

see our state-of-the-art facilities and collaborative

learning spaces.

PLAKSHA AT A GLANCE

Prof. Rajesh Gupta, Qualcomm Endowed Chair at UC San Diego, Prof. Nandini Kannan, Dean of

Academics and Director of Data Science Institute at Plaksha University along with Prof. Rudra Pratap,

Founding Vice Chancellor, Plaksha University, discussed the future and current trends of Gen AI and

Data Science during an enthralling ﬁreside. This knowledge series on decoding Data Science for

Transformative Impact got a houseful attendance by top CXOs of the country.

T E C H F O R A L L

*as of December 31, 2023