Being inspired by him, I immediately went ahead and sent out the mail to the organizing mentor committee.In the process, I got selected as junior mentor.There are a total of 10 mentor teams and I was put into mentor team 10 with 2 of the ADI Engineer bigges - one from ISDG and one from MEMS.
Over the last few weeks, we as a team have had great experience evaluating the 10 out of the 250+ proposals alloted to us.
I feel lucky to have Mr.S.G and Mr.S.K as my team mates. They are cool guys with years of experience and made evaluations so much interesting , putting in so many different views in the process. Its really fun to be on other side of the table, acting as a pure critic.Well, when the prize money is inn lakhs, we better make sure that deserving ones get the opportunity.
Just to brief about what Anveshan is- its a system design competition in which students have to use atleast 2 ADI components.
Anveshan means Innovation, something which is laid utmost importance and value in our company.The intention of Anveshan is two fold.-Enabling the selected students with necessary funds to enable them to achieve their project alongwith the guidance of industry professionals and also in a way let the students explore the vast catalogue of High End Signal Processing solutions ADI has to offer and popularize it among the Indian students community.
There are 3 phases of competition:
1/ Inital Screening -> Here students send their ideas alongwith block level representation of the system , in which they chose probable chips from our portfolio which suits their need.
2/ Design Phase -> Here the students are given out some cash(I forgot the exact amount but I remember it was more than sufficient), to buy components and start off with designing the prototype. They will be guided by their college mentor as well as one of the Anveshan mentor teams, to help them in design and technical help.They have a period of 5 months to get ready with the prototype.Within the process, it is planned to have 1-2 student meets in person to review the progress.
3/ Show Time -> Well on ITD(India Technology Day - ADI), students get a chance to show off their prototypes at corporate level.They will get a chance to interact with other industry professionals.And infact , on this day, CTO's,VP's of various divisions from various ADI sites world over are generally invited as it is a exhibition. On the basis of inputs from the visitors and judges, the winner is chosen and gets the grand prize of around lakh+ , to take his project to a higher level.
Enough said about the competition, I just wanted to share something which we saw in most of the submissions.
Well,there is a new trend among the students it seems - Medical applications and Robotics.I will detail the submissions latter once the top 25 announcement is done next week.
But there were a few things which we felt were added "just for the sake of it" in many of the submissions.Apart from their solution to main idea, they are unnecessarily complicating it by putting in unnecessary addons .Few of these were:
1/ Trying to use Camera for applications which don't demand them
2/ Trying to make everything wireless, when its going to be handheld most of the time.
3/ Android app or web based access for anything and everything.
4/ Making robots which can do just anything and everything.They are agnostic to the complexity involved in implementation but still its good that they can come up with the exact requirements for such a solution.
Anyways, I don't judge them.Its tough to come up with an idea.We as such feel that even though solutions may be already existing, any additional improvement done to it should be appreciated and encouraged.But we had some metrics to judge, one of which we were concerned of was being able to give a demo.Some of medical applications are pretty hard to be a demo product.Some of the robotics one too. But we haven't just let them down with the limitation, we encourage them to come up with mathematical models in this case, which can infact be used by people latter in research too, where inputs might be difficult to get. So, if we feel the idea is good and thought through ,we have been generous in grading.
Well, just like a participant, I too am waiting eagerly for the results.The ones forwarded by us are going to be scrutinized by the oldies and the final 25 list will be out next week.
All the best to all the participants!!
Hope we make Anveshan 2014, a enjoyable learning experience for all of us!!!
Link to Anveshan:
#Anveshan2014
http://www.analog.com/en/content/anveshan_fellowship_2012/fca.html