A team comprising Jyotirmoy Guha, Arka De and Aditya Gupta — students of the private sector Heritage Institute of Technology (HIT), Kolkata — has won the TI Analog Design Phase I (TI ADC) contest 2012-2013. The trio of final year students reading electronics and communication engineering, were awarded the first prize of Rs.10,000 in the contest which attr-acted 350 entries from 102 engineering colleges countrywide. TI ADC is an annual pan-India contest sponsored by the Bangalore-based Texas Instruments India — a subsidiary of the US-based Texas Instruments (annual revenue: $13.75 billion) — to encourage students to develop innovations in electronics.
TI ADC 2012-2013 is the fourth edition of the contest in India. The rules require final year engineering students to submit You Tube videos of their inno-vations. All submissions were reviewed by a panel of experts who assessed their novelty, completeness, innovative use of analog components and attention to systems optimisation. Based on their recommendation, TI shortlisted 23 projects as winners in Phase 1, 40 projects as consolation prize winners, 12 projects for paper presentation and 34 for poster presentation. All these projects were showcased during the TI India Educators’ Conference staged in Bangalore in early April.
“Our project innovation was about water conservation. In housing comp-lexes, people tend to be negligent about turning off the pump immediately after overhead tanks fill up, resulting in huge water wastage. Our innovation ‘Water management for checking water usage and preventing wastage’ comprises an electronic switch which detects the level of water usage and turns the pump off automatically when the tank is full,” explains Aditya Gupta.
The award-winning techies were guided by Mousiki Kar, professor of electronics and communication engineering at HIT. “We received valuable assistance from TI India in devel-oping our automated electronic switch. The company also prov-ided us some very useful comp-onents such as the low power microcontroller MSP430, TLO82 OPAMP etc free of charge,” acknow-ledges team leader Jyotirmoy Guha.
Although serious about academic and professional success, the three friends are by no means dullards. Sports aficionados, they also share a passion for books and music. Jyotirmoy plans to press on towards an M.Tech degree. Arka has already been offered a job by Tata Consultancy Services and Aditya is preparing to enroll in a top-notch B-school for an MBA.
Fair winds!
Baishali Mukherjee (Kolkata)
Mahalakshmi Mugunthakumar
Unlike most girls her age, Mahalakshmi Mugunthakumar (14) doesn’t hang out with friends, watch movies or play outdoor games. She is content spending time honing her skills in the mind game of chess, which has won her an impressive string of national and international titles.
Recently (April), this class X student of Velammal Matriculation Higher Secondary School, Chennai, hit the headlines in the local press when she was conferred the Young Achiever award of the Rotary Club of Madras for bagging the under-14 World Youth Chess Championship held in Maribor, Slovenia last winter. To her great delight the award was presented by five-time world chess champion Grandmaster (GM) Viswanathan Anand. While felicit-ating Mahalakshmi, Anand named her the first awardee of the Rotary Club of Madras-Viswanathan Anand Chess Scholarship instituted in 2010 which will finance her coaching, travel and entry fee for chess play-offs in India and abroad.
The youngest of four daughters of P. Mugunthakumar who runs a plastics business and homemaker Geetha, Mahalakshmi took to the chessboard at age five by merely observing her elder sister Jagadambal — a former national player — playing and being coached to play the game. Putting her learning-by-observation to quick use in 2004, she won the Under-7 state championship. In quick succession she checkmated her opponents at the National Youth Chess Championship (U-8), Aurangabad in 2005; won a bronze in the World Youth Chess Championship (U-8), Georgia in 2006; a gold medal in the Asian Youth Chess Championship (U-10) held in Iran in 2008 and a bronze in the World Youth Chess Championship (U-12) in Greece.
Driven and completely committed to attaining excellence in this sharp mind game, Mahalakshmi averages seven hours of daily practice. “I am very grateful to the Rotary Club of Madras and ONGC for their support. I also owe my success to my coach, GM R.B. Ramesh, for giving me individual attention. My school has been fully supportive and has even sponsored some of my foreign trips, and my paren-ts have always encouraged my passion for the game,” she enthuses.
Despite the pressures of competitive chess, Mahalakshmi is an academic topper and adeptly balances her studies and chess practice. “Now my sights are set on the national, Asian and World championships in my age category, and acquiring a GM title. I haven’t decided on a career choice because right now I intend to scale greater heights as a chess player,” says this young achiever.
Way to go, Sister!
Hemalatha Raghupathi (Chennai)