Shaastra: Difference between revisions

Shaastra is the annual technical festival of the Indian Institute of Technology Madras (IIT-M), Chennai, India. The word ‘Shaastra’ means science and the festival accordingly consists of science and technology based competitions, lectures, demonstrations, video conferences and workshops. The festival is traditionally held over four days and five nights during the first fortnight in October, and has so far seen eight editions, having started in its current avatar in the year 2000.This year Shaastra is going to be held from the 30th September to October 4ht. It attracts participants from all over India, and seeks to provide collegiate students with a platform to showcase their scientific and engineering talents. Shaastra is entirely student managed and holds the distinction of being the first such event in the world to be ISO 9001:2000 certified for implementing a Quality Management System

The IIT Madras Symposium on Sustainable Development will unite fifty of the best young minds, from across the country, to draft smart policy recommendations that can make our markets, technologies and lifestyles sustainable.

The Symposium intends to give selected participants a platform to draft innovative policy recommendations in the focus-areas of Energy, Urbanisation and Finance and be heard by government agencies, leading corporates, prominent NGOs and think-tanks.These sessions will also be covered by live media.

This group of events involves engineering tasks that require innovative yet viable solutions. Some of them are-

• Blueprint: It is the open hardware and software design contest at Shaastra. The event does not have a problem statement, so participants are free to come up with anything as long as it is original.
• Industry Defined Problems: One of the most prestigious events at Shaastra, it consists of problem statements drawn up from varied engineering disciplines by major technology firms.
• InoX: This is a new event, introduced in this years Shaastra.The event requires the participants to come up with simple and innovative problems for a variety of problem statements ranging from everyday problems to major environmental issues.

These events tests practical skill and workmanship of participants in addition to their theoretical knowledge and designing abilities. Featured events include-

• Fire N Ice: This event focuses on the application of the principles of motors, IC engines in particular, in a given situation.
• Robotics: A staple at Shaastra, it provides participants a platform to showcase their talent at robotics. Events include Operation Delta,Gold Rush and Behind the Enemy Lines.
• Contraptions: The event, as the name suggests, requires complicated contraptions (Essentially Rube Goldberg machines) to be built to perform apparently simple tasks.
• Junkyard Wars: The event tests the ability of a team to churn out great designs from heaps of scrap.
• Project-X: It requires simple engineering products to be built using common everyday objects.
• Shaastra Circuit Design Challenge: This new event requires participants to come up with a elegant yet meaningful circuit design according to a problem statement given to them.
• The Rising: This is another new event, introduced this year.It is about constructing a small model of a hot air balloon satisfying a given set of conditions.

A number of Programming Contests feature prominently in Shaastra. They include:

• HackFest: As the name suggests,the event comprises of participants getting to know the fundamentals about FOSS from experts in the field .After that, they will have to apply the gained knowledge by hacking a variety of softwares.
• Frugal: Participants are required to code simple programs in even simpler methods.
• Online Programming Contest: The SOPC as it is popularly known is an algorithm intensive programming contest for collegiate students.
• Polyglot: The event expects you to write polyglots, a computer program or script written in a valid form of multiple programming languages, to solve some simple problems.
• Search 3.0: A preregistration event, where you process a present day HTML web page, non-semantic and purely presentational, to generate useful purely semantic information.
• SimChamp: The event is designed to test participants on their ability to simulate real world phenomena while optimizing the usage of computing resources.

These events transcend conventional engineering, venturing into Mathematics, Computer Science and beyond. Some of them are-

• Pentathlon: A team- based competition which tests the team members' skill in various spheres.
• Math Modeling: The event poses complex but interesting physical phenomena which are to be modeled mathematically.
• The Ultimate Engineer: A spin-off from the Shaastra Lone Wolf Challenge, this event test participants in theoretical and practical aspects of multiple branches of engineering.

Shaastra includes a large number of workshops conducted on a wide range of topics. They give the participants a working knowledge or experience of various topics, such as solving Cinematography, Embedded Linux or Tensegrity.

A number of quizzes such as the Shaastra Main Quiz (technology and science related trivia) and the How Things Work quiz, will be held this year around too.There is also a new business event called the Super Manager where participants will have to manage a fictional IPL team.The all time favorite set of events at Shaastra, which are meant primarily for unwinding, such as Videos and Movies, Puzzles, Science Fiction Writing and the Daily Events will be continued.Additionally, a variety of Online Events ranging from Programming to Puzzles are lined up, to involve all those who can not be present at Shaastra.

One of the new endeavors at Shaastra 2009 is Shaastra Sparsh. This undertaking intends to allow a large number of people to participate in the big events to be held at Shaastra, as well as increase the standard of competition in the actual competition at Shaastra 2008. This effort will kick off in Hyderabad and Chennai in its inaugural year. High profile events such as robotics and contraptions will be the highlights of Shaastra Sparsh.

The logo of the 2008 edition of Shaastra is a pair of dice having two dots on all its faces. This is a tribute to Albert Einstein's historic statement, "God does not play dice with the universe", which immortalized the concept of determinism. The logo is used by the organizers to signify that they leave nothing to chance. The dice will show the same number whichever way it is rolled. Even though the dice symbolize perfect order they don't have perfect symmetry. The two dots on the rightmost face of the right cube are not a mirror image of the same in the left cube. This is a tribute to Richard Feynman's statement, "I have approximate answers and possible beliefs and different degrees of certainty about different things, but I'm not absolutely sure of anything and there are many things I don't know anything about". However hard one may try to remove all uncertainty and induce perfect symmetry perfection is an impossible ideal that eludes humans. The Shaastra website says "the Shaastra logo embodies the essence of what Shaastra strives to achieve - innovation, quality and perfection."

Lectures, Demonstrations and Video Conferences: Shaastra has consistently drawn the world’s foremost experts in their respective fields for making guest lectures, either in person or via videoconference. These lectures and demonstrations introduce students to the cutting-edge research happening in various fields, and serve as educational forums that encourage interaction between collegiate students and the finest in academia and industry.

Some notable personalities who delivered lectures at recent editions of Shaastra:

• Martin Perl, Winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics, 1995
• Shrikumar Suryanarayan, President, R&D, Biocon
• Roddam Narasimha, Former Director, National Aerospace Laboratories
• Rajagopala Chidambaram, Secretary to the Govt. of India, Department of Atomic Energy
• Simon Singh, code expert and popular science author
• Stephen Wolfram, creator of Mathematica
• Kevin Warwick, the human cyborg
• Dilip Chhabria, Automobile Designer
• Gururaj Deshpande, CEO, Sycamore Networks
• Gene Frantz, Principal Fellow, Texas Instruments
• Krishna Bharat, Principal Scientist, Google Inc – Creator of Google News
• George Andrew Olah, Nobel prize winner for Chemistry in 1994
• Arno Allan Penzias, Nobel prize winner for Physics in 1978
• Bob Pease, Guru of Analog Circuit Design
• Harold (Hal) Abelson, Founding director of FSF, Creative Commons and Public Knowledge
• Dr. Arne Christer Fuglesang, ESA Astronaut – First Nordic citizen in space.
• Dr. Thamban Meloth ,Head, Ice Core Laboratory, National Centre for Antarctic and Ocean Research.
• Dr. Narendra Krishna Karmarkar, Indian mathematician - renowned for his Karmarkar algorithm in linear programming
• Ramanathan V. Guha, Computer Scientist, Google - He currently leads the development of Google Custom Search.
• Prof. V Balakrishnan, Professor, Department of Physics, Indian Institute of Technology Madras
• Dr. Apoorva D Patel, Professor, CHEPSE, IISc Bangalore.
• Prof. Raghavendra Gadagkar, Professor, Centre for Ecological Sciences, IISc Bangalore
• Harold Kroto, Nobel prize winner for Chemistry in 1996
• John Cromwell Mather, Nobel prize winner for Physics in 2006
• Tyler Cowen, A leading Economist and Writer
• Chris Adami, An Eminent Evolutionary Theorist

• Official website
• The Int'l Symposium on Sustainable Development
• Robotics competition at Shaastra
• Shaastra 2006 news report
• Official IIT Madras site