International Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad

The International Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad (IIIT Hyderabad) is an Information Technology Research University based in Hyderabad, Telangana, India. It is the first autonomous private institute of its kind to be established in 1997. IIITH is one of the top Computer Science institutes of the country.^[1] It emphasizes research from the undergraduate level. It has been a consistent performer from India in ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC); it has been sending teams to ICPC World Finals since last 7 consecutive years and finished at #18 in 2012.^[2]

The institute runs Computer Science courses and research projects and is focused on research. It gives the students interaction with industry, preparation in entrepreneurship and personality development courses. IIIT Hyderabad is the mentor institute to Indian Institute of Information Technology, Sri City^[3]

History

IIIT Hyderabad was set up in 1998. As Special Officer for International Institute of Information Technology (IIIT), Hyderabad, Mr Ajay Prakash Sawhney was responsible for shaping the conceptual model, setting up the Institute in 1998 and catalysing its emergence as a pre-eminent institute in IT Education & Research. The State Government lent support to the institute by grant of land and buildings. A Governing Council consisting of people from academia, industry and government presides over the governance of the institution. Rajeev Sangal, former Head of Department of Computer Science, IIT Kanpur, designed the syllabus. He was the director of the institute till 10 April 2013. P. J. Narayanan, the former Dean R&D and current President of Association for Computing Machinery (ACM India) is the current Director.

Raj Reddy, the only Indian to win the Turing Award, is chairman of the board of governors. Vint Cerf, popularly known as the father of the internet also a Turing Awardee joined the Board of Governors in February, 2015 to guide in IIIT Hyderabad's long term vision and research.^[4]

Location

The institute is in Gachibowli, Hyderabad, which is about 20 km from the old city and the central railway station. It is close to HITEC City, which houses Microsoft, Oracle Corporation, Motorola, Capgemini and Infosys.

Administration

Governing Council members

• Raj Reddy, Turing Award laureate and Moza Bint Nasser University Professor of Computer Science and Robotics, Carnegie Mellon University
• Vint Cerf, Turing Award laureate and Chief Internet Evangelist for Google
• R. Chandrashekhar, IAS (Retd) (ex officio), President, NASSCOM, New Delhi
• C. Srini Raju, Managing Director, Peepul Capital Advisors P Ltd.
• S. Ramadorai, Vice Chairman, Tata Consultancy Services, Mumbai
• Dr. Pawan Kumar Goenka, President, Automotive Sector, Mahindra & Mahindra Ltd.
• Prof. Narendra Ahuja, Director (International), IIIT Hyderabad, Donald Biggar Willet Professor of Engineering, University of Illinois, USA
• Prof. U. B. Desai, Director, Indian Institute of Technology, Hyderabad
• Prof. Ashok Jhunjhunwala, Professor, Indian Institute of Technology, Madras
• Prof. Rajeev Sangal, Director, IIT, (Banaras Hindu University), Varanasi
• Shri Vikas Raj, (ex officio), IAS, Secretary, Higher Education Department, Government of Telangana
• Shri Harpreet Singh, (ex officio), IAS, Secretary, ITE & C Department, Government of Telangana
• Prof. Rameshwar Rao, Vice - Chancellor, JNTU, Kukatpally, Hyderabad
• Prof. P. J. Narayanan, Director, IIIT Hyderabad
• Prof. Kamalakar Karlapalem (ex officio), Dean (Academics), IIIT Hyderabad
• Prof. Vasudeva Varma (ex officio), Dean (Research), IIIT Hyderabad

Academics

IIIT Hyderabad offers undergraduate, postgraduate and dual degree programmess. Undergraduate programmes award either Bachelor of Technology (BTech) or BTech (Honors) in Computer Science or Electronics and Communication Engineering, while postgraduate programmes award either Master of Technology (MTech), Master of Science (MS) or Master of Philosophy (MPhil). Dual degree programmes award BTech/MS The dual degrees offer MS in Computer Science, Electronics and Communication Engineering, Computational Natural Science, Computational Linguistics and Exact Humanities along with a BTech. PhD degrees and post graduate diplomas are also given. IIIT Hyderabad also offers MSIT program in collaboration with Carnegie Mellon University, USA. The institute lays a great importance on "Human Values" and professional ethics.

Admissions

Admissions for undergraduate and dual degrees were taken through JEE-Main i.e. CCB (Central Counseling board) counseling until the year 2009.

From the academic batch 2010, the institute revised the admission procedure and decided on independent selection students though still considering the merit achievements of JEE Main. The institute also selects students based on interviews and Kishore Vaigyanik Protsahan Yojana (KVPY).

Admissions for postgraduate studies are on the basis of the Postgraduate Entrance Exam (PGEE) conducted by IIIT Hyderabad.
Admissions to the MSIT programme run at this institute are based on a test conducted every year from April to May.

Ranking

IIIT Hyderabad has been ranked #3 in the list of top technical schools in India in 2012 and 2013 by Dataquest.^[9] It was ranked #20 by the India Today Best Engineering colleges 2012,^[5] #14 by Outlook India Top Engineering Colleges of 2012^[6] In rankings limited to private institutes it was ranked second by Mint Top 50 Private Engineering Colleges of 2009.^[8] In 2011 and 2012, IIIT Hyderabad was ranked first in Telangana, by Careers360, a magazine of the Outlook group.^[10][11] Deccan Chronicle ranked IIIT Hyderabad second in their 2012 survey of Top Engineering Colleges in South India.^[12]

Centers

The institute is divided into research centers:

• Language Technologies Research Center
• Speech and Vision Laboratory
• Signal Processing & Communications
• Search and Information Extraction Lab
• Centre for Visual Information Technology and Image Processing
• Centre for Data Engineering
• Cognitive Science Lab
• Center for Security, Theory & Algorithmic Research
• Robotics Research Lab
• Centre for IT in Building Science
• Power Systems Research Center
• Software Engineering Research Lab
• Centre for Computational Natural Sciences and Bioinformatics
• Agriculture & Rural Development
• Centre for Exact Humanities
• Earthquake Engineering Research Center
• Centre for VLSI and Embedded System Technologies
  • Computer Architecture
  • Compilers
  • Parallel/Concurrent Programming
• Lab for Spatial Informatics
• Center for IT in Education

Campus

The institute is situated on a campus of 62 acres (250,000 m²). There are four buildings that house the corporate schools and research centers. In addition to this, the academic building has the lecture halls, tutorial rooms, computer and electronics labs and offices of the administration and faculty. The buildings are named after the mountain ranges, Nilgiri, Vindhya and Himalaya.

All students are provided hostel rooms. First-year and second-year students, who have enrolled in a Bachelor's or Dual-Degree program, are required to share rooms (double occupancy) whereas from the third-year onwards, the students have single occupancy.^[13] The institute has a Guest House with four air conditioned suites. Two hostels for men and one for women have a total of about 1200 rooms. There is an optical fiber network connecting all buildings on campus including the hostels.

The institute has air-conditioned computer laboratories, allocated batch-wise to students. 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 (100 Mbit/s) Internet connectivity round the clock. Students undertaking research can access computational facilities 24/7. All the notices and information are sent over the campus email. From couriers to mess registration, everything is notified via specific portals(internal sites). Some areas of the institute,like a few parts of the Boys' Hostel, Nilgiri and Library are connected by Wi-Fi.

Recently IIIT-H has been announced to host T-Hub,^[14] which will be India’s biggest incubation centre in collaboration with Indian School of Business and Nalsar University of Law. It's aim is to provide a supportive environment, along with financial and mentorship support to new startups in the region.

Conferences

Some of the top international conferences in the fields related to Computer Science have been held in IIIT Hyderabad

• COMAD 2014 (20th Conference on Management of Data)
• PAKDD 2010 (Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining)
• IJCAI 2007, an international conference on Artificial Intelligence (an A+ grade conference)
• ACCV 2006 (Computer Vision)
• FSTTCS 2005 (Software Technology and Theoretical Computer Science)
• ICDE RIDE 2003 (Multi-Lingual Information Management)

Workshops

• IASNLP (IIITH Advanced Summer School on NLP) is annual two week school on Natural Language Processing with lectures and project guidance by internationally renowned researchers in the area.
• Robocamp is a national level robotics workshop conducted by IIIT Hyderabad Robotics Club (IRC) every year in summers since 2006. In 2011 one of the workshops was organised by the second year students of IRC.^[15][16] 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007 and 2006
• Tech Ease a national workshop for students and professionals on innovation, design and user experience, was organised in 2009, 2010 and 2011.
• R & D Showcase - The research and project exhibition showcasing the research work and projects carried out in the institute.^[17][18]
• ExOR Excitement of Research encourages students to take up research both in academics and in career.

Student life

With about 1400 students, IIIT Hyderabad has cultural and athletic activities throughout the year. There are clubs like Movie Discussion Club, Dramatics Club, Photography Club and Music Club.

The students are divided into four Houses upon their intake in the college. The houses are: Agni, Aakash, Prithvi and Vayu. All the cultural and sport competitions are based around the house system where the houses battle it out for the top position.

Felicity

Each year the institute holds its annual cultural and technical festival Felicity , in February. Felicity is one of the most eagerly awaited college festivals in Hyderabad. Felicity attracts students from all major engineering and degree colleges across the country.

Music bands like Strings, Parikrama, Motherjane , Indian Ocean, Ganesh & Kumaresh, Euphoria, Demonic Resurrection, Bombay Vikings, Sledge have performed at Felicity over the past few years.

There have been solo performances by Mohit Chauhan of Masakali Fame and Kumar Vishwas, a comic poet (hasya-kavi).

Sports

Sports are allotted two compulsory credits and students must take part in Physical Training for two semester to achieve these four credits.

IIIT Hyderabad has a gymnasium and facilities for sports such as cricket, football, basketball, volleyball, throwball, table-tennis, badminton and athletics. Inter-house sporting competitions are held every year with four houses, Aakash, Agni, Prithvi and Vayu. Other than the house-based competitions, there are inter-batch competitions.

Students Parliament

The student representatives of each batch constitute the student parliament of IIIT Hyderabad, which forms laws regarding student life. The constitution of the college was drafted by the students parliament. It is the governing body for the students. Student issues are addressed to the administration through the parliament.

Ping

Students run a monthly newsletter called PING Ping.

See also

• Virtual Labs
• Genome Valley

References

External links

• Official website