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IIT Madras to host Defence Tech Summit as part of annual festival, Shaastra – BusinessLine


Students of the Indian Institute of Technology Madras will conduct a Defence Tech Summit from January 3 to 5, 2020, aimed at contributing to the indigenisation of defence technology in a big way.

The event will be part of Shaastra, the annual technical festival of the institute, organised by the students. The event, which has received ISO certification, receives an annual footfall of over 50,000 and serves as a platform for networking and knowledge exchange, a press release from IIT Madras said.

One of the main objectives of the summit is to provide a networking forrum for the defence start-up ecosystem and to inform the youth about opportunities in this field. Registrations for the summit are open at https://summit.shaastra.org.

Siddharth Aedavalli, Student Core Team Member – Shaastra, IIT Madras, said UAV and AI technology, among others, were changing the landscape of the defence industry. Shaastra aims to promote the participation of students in this untouched field and contribute towards national security. A four-month long Defence Innovation Challenge would be organised as part of the event to ideate and come up with tech-based solutions in the field of Artificial Intelligence, Robotics and Virtual Reality, to solve real world problems faced by the Indian Armed Forces.

The event is being conducted in consultation with the HQ Integrated Defence Staff and L&T Defence, L&T-Nxt, and Newspace Research and Technologies, the release said.

Lt Gen P R Shankar (Retd), Professor of Practice, Department of Aerospace Engineering, IIT Madras, who is guiding the students in organising the summit, said, “Shaastra 2020, with its main theme of ‘defence technology’, was a direct response to the Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s call to the IITs to contribute to the defence preparedness of the nation.

The Defence Tech Summit will also host a Defence Expo wherein defence manufacturers and start-ups would be able to showcase their products. The summit participants would also get a chance to undergo an educational visit to Kattupalli Shipyard, which manufactures ships for the Defence, the release said.





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