International Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad
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The International Institute of Information Technology (formerly Indian Institute of Information Technology), Hyderabad is an autonomous, self-supporting institution started in 1998 with seed support from the Government of Andhra Pradesh. A major goal of IIIT is to impart a uniquely broad and interdisciplinary IT education of the highest academic quality. This is achieved through an integrated curriculum that consists of a highly diverse set of IT courses, interdisciplinary IT research projects, day-to-day interaction with industry, preparation in entrepreneurship and personality development courses.
The institute lays emphasis on research at the undergraduate level. This is probably what makes it different from the other leading engineering institutes in India like the IITs. The institute has highly focussed research centers in Natural Language Processing, Computer Vision/Computer Graphics, VLSI and Communication, Databases, Robotics, etc. The speech processing lab in the institute is one of only 3 of its kind present in India. Under the leadership of its director, Prof. Rajeev Sangal, the institute takes pride in being one of the foremost research hubs in the field of Artificial Intelligence. Prof. Raj Reddy, a researcher in the field of Artificial Intelligence and the only Indian to get an ACM Turing Award, is the chairman of the IIIT board.
Located in Hyderabad, the Institute combines the freedom of an academic institution with the strength of the corporate sector. It enjoys the locational advantage of being close to the HITEC City (a centre housing software development centres of companies like Microsoft, Oracle Corporation, Motorola, Infosys and GE Capital) and the presence of IT majors from across the globe right on the campus through their schools and research centres.
The institute is situated on a campus of 62 acres (250,000 m²). It is fully residential in nature and hence is a self contained unit. There are 4 buildings that house the corporate schools. In addition to this, the academic building has the lecture halls, tutorial rooms, computer and electronics labs and offices of the administration and faculty.
All students are provided with individual hostel rooms. The institute has a Guest house with four air conditioned suites. Two hostels for men and one for women have a total of about 876 rooms. There is an optical fibre network connecting all buildings on campus including the hostels.
The institute has well-equipped air-conditioned computer laboratories which are allocated batch-wise to students. The labs are equipped with modern hardware and software. The PC to students ratio is about 1:2. All computers are part of an intranet (1 Gbit/s Backbone). The institute has high bandwidth (5 Mbit/s) Internet connectivity round the clock. Research students have 24 hours access to the computer facilities. The students administer their own computer systems. The research centres and corporate schools provide specialised equipment for research and development.
The entire campus boasts of wireless connectivity. Using 802.11g technology and multiple access points the entire campus is being converted into one giant hotspot.
Each year IIIT holds it's annual cultural and technical festival Felicity [1]. Since its inception four years ago, Felicity has gone from strength to strength and is now one of the most eagerly awaited college fests in Hyderabad. Felicity attracts students from all major engineering and degree colleges across the country. Renowned bands like Strings[2], Parikrama[3], MotherJane[4] and Bombay Vikings have performed at Felicity over the past few years.
IIIT Hyderabad is organising and co-sponsoring IJCAI-07, the biggest international conference on Artificial Intelligence. It is to be held from 6th - 12th January, 2007.
In the Dataquest survey of India's top Engineering Colleges for the year 2005, IIIT Hyderabad was ranked 14th - ahead of reputed institutions like BITS Pilani, IIT Roorkee and Delhi College of Engineering.
In the Dataquest survey of India's top Engineering Colleges for the year 2006, IIIT Hyderabad is ranked 10th, moving 4 places up from its previous position.
[edit] Curriculum
IIIT Curriculum can be said to be the best out of the engineering colleges in India specially on Under Graduate level.[citation needed] Students have a variety of options available for them to chose in their second year of engineering and since students are not forced to study the subjects not applicable to their stream so they have less number of courses in their third and fourth years so that they can pursue their research oriented interests.
