A Visit To IIT Delhi Open House

I recently visited the Open House of IIT Delhi. It was held on Saturday 23^rd April 2017. It is an event where they allow the public to visit the IIT Delhi campus, some of its labs and interact with the students. The students displayed their projects they had been working on.

It was a good experience for me. Since my interest is in robotics and programming, I visited the labs of the computer science department and the robotics show case projects in the Lecture Hall complex. Most of the projects on display involved the use of AI (artificial intelligence) and followed a similar pattern.

One of the projects that was slightly different was the Smart Notice Board. The idea was that in IIT, there were digital displays in every lab and only the appropriate data would be displayed corresponding to the lab. I found the project interesting. I gave the suggestion that they could put a sensor to sense that if someone comes in front of the board, only then will it display, else the display will switch off automatically. This will make the project far more energy efficient.

 When I gave this suggestion, I felt that the IIT students displaying the project were surprised. They probably did not expect a middle-school child to give such a suggestion. However, we all have the ability to think of improvements and suggestions should be invited from everybody even if they’re not an expert in the field or mere children.

Another project was a program that described an image that was given to it. When I inquired about how they pulled it off, they said that they made the program on the Anaconda platform using the Jupyter Notebook and the Python programming language. They were using the OpenCV and PIL library for the image recognition module. I was happy to see the familiar Anaconda platform which I use for some of my Python based projects was also being used by IIT Delhi students.

Overall, I loved the visit to IIT Delhi Open House. It was a wonderful learning experience for me. I have been visiting the Open House for a couple of years now and it is typically held in the third week of April. So in case you find it worthwhile, please do make a note of the schedule in your calendar.