IIT students corner maximum Qualcomm fellowships

Mumbai : Seven scholars from IIT-Bombay and IIT-Kharagpur are among 10 selected for six Qualcomm Innovation Fellow (QInF) programmes in India for the academic year 2017-18, an official said.

They will conduct research on five broad topics like Advances in Communication Techniques; Robotics and Drones; Computer Vision and Virtual Reality; Imaging; and Machine Learning.

Each of the six scholarships will carry an annual grant of around Rs 1 million for the researchers and are intended to encourage and support advanced engineering research, recommended by the respective winners' teachers/mentors.

Pratik Kalshetti from IIT-B has won for his proposal on 'A deep learning framework for hand tracking with personalized dynamics'; while Reneeta Sara Isaac from IISc (Bengaluru) for her proposed thesis on 'Novel selection algorithms to exploit spatio-temporal correlation in opportunistic wireless systems'.

There are three team winners from IIT-K:

Avisek Lahiri and Abhinav Agarwalla for their proposal on 'Domain adversarial networks for bridging cross domain semantic gaps in computer vision'

Preety Priya and Sucharita Chakraborty for their proposed thesis on 'Blind joint equalisation and detection in presence of non-linearity and synchronization errors for millimetre wave communications'

Sayandeep Saha and Sikhar Patranabis for their proposal on 'Automating fault-based cryptanalysis in secure embedded applications using machine learning'

Another winning team hails from the International Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad comprising Junaid Ahmed Ansari and Sarthak Sharma, for their proposal on 'Realtime monocular object slam system for dynamic road scenes'.
The QInF is an annual programme that was launched in India in 2016.

It invests in university doctorate students in order to cultivate new and forward thinking ideas and continue further overall research and development, said Dhananjay Gore, Senior Director Engineering and Head of Qualcomm Research India.

"We look forward to QInF India's continued success and growth in the coming years and hope each participating team will succeed in bringing their research goals to reality," said Gore.The US-based tech major Qualcomm's technologies powered the smartphone revolution.