Friday, February 23, 2007

Student Project Contests

This news story is about an amazing set of competition ideas for those who love to design and construct machines and/or program them. National Institute of Technology, Suratkal in India, will be hosting an event named Engineer 2007 during March 7-11, 2007. Pity it is so soon. But don't despair; read on.

Visit the site

http://www.engineer.org.in/events.php

and read about the challenges set for contestents in Robotics, Computer Science events including one on applications for a three-degrees-of-feedom mouse named Mushaca see

http://ssl.serc.iisc.ernet.in/~manohar/Research/MushacaManif/mushaca.htm

and a "Kode Kombat". There is also an Electronics challenge involving the extraction of information from a video stream.

The ideas are thought provoking; and, who knows, you might decide to take up one of these challenges just for the fun of it.

Srinivasan Ramani

Wednesday, February 21, 2007

IEEE Student Paper Contest 2007

The deadline for an IEEE Student Paper Contest is March 15, 2007. You can find time to write a paper even at this stage. This has been announced as a Region-10 activity (Asia Pacific), but you can check with the organizers if they accept student papers from all over the world. They probably do that, but I am not sure. Visit

http://www.ieee.nus.edu.sg/index_files/Page1386.htm

I have been looking for information on the IEEE Student Design Contest 2007. You will get a feel for this by visiting

http://www.edn.com/article/CA605949.html?industryid=2814 describing entries in Contest 2005.

I have not been successful as yet in visiting the Student Design Contest 2007 website. If any of you know an accessible website for this do let us all know.

I have heard that the Student Design Contest is worldwide, and that it provides hardware and software to do a project of your choice on a theme announced by IEEE for the year. They do not expect you to spend any significant amount of money yourself on buying components, hardware or software. All this makes the Contest a very attractive one.

Srinivasan Ramani