For Nandish Mehta, an Intel Scholar Program winner and an engineer aspiring for research, the Intel Scholar Program(ISP) has been “a platform which provides excellent opportunities to not only exhibit one’s own talent but also to hone skill sets”. His project, on medical implants for blind patients was on a research field which is in its incipient stages as yet and Nandish was very worried about ending up in a situation of “low input, high throughput and no output”.

With the help of his Intel mentor Mr. Shailendra Jain, Nandish learnt how to showcase the importance and novelty of his idea. Nandish recalls the lesson that he has learnt through the ISP “to generate ideas is crucial but more crucial is to express them in a way that a novice can understand them and this is how one receives appreciation”.

From submitting the proposal of 10 pages for the first round, to creating interest in the technocrats from Intel so that he could qualify for next round Nandish has come a long way with his project on “Analog VLSI for Neural Science”

Today a successful research scholar, Nandish has learnt to strike a balance between "Research" and "Development" and is on his way to creating history in innovation.

Nandish was one of the winners of the 23 students, who presented their research work to an eminent jury from the Industry and Academia at the Finals of the Intel Scholar Program, held on the 25th & 26th February,2009, at MS Ramaiah Institute of Technology, Bangalore.

At a grand function, the winners were felicitated by the Chief Guest Prof. H.P. Khincha, Vice Chancellor of Visvesvarya Technological University. A host of Intel Technologists like Dr. Sunit Tyagi, Gautam Doshi, Kalyan Muthukumar, Ajay Bakre alongwith Anshul Sonak and Satish Narule from the Education team were also present at the award ceremony.

The ISP is a unique program because it brings together the Industry & Academia and highlights how collaboration with the Industry would catalyze research and innovation among young students.

As Vanishree, another winner at the ISP says “ISP has meant a lot. Besides providing a platform for ‘Secret Sharing Goes Live’, my project at ISP, it has encouraged me for further research work on cryptography. I am preparing for my next proposal on cryptographic protocols at the forthcoming conference, CRYPTO-’09, thanks to the encouragement of being mentored by Prof. Koshy George. I owe it to ISP!

To further promote this collaboration of industry and Academia, Intel Higher Education Program also hosted a panel discussion “Building Research Pipeline in Technical Education in India” Prof. H.P. Khincha inaugurated the Intel Multi Core Lab at MS Ramaiah Institute of Technology on the same day, while also announcing a Champion Contest 2009 on Multi Core Technologies.

Details of the Program

The Intel Scholar program is a research contest for engineering students and has been developed to inspire research in key technology areas relevant to Intel India. The objective of this contest is to promote scientific attitude, research and innovation at an early stage in the student’s career and expose students to industry relevant technology areas while broadening their vision from application and industry perspective.

Launched in March 2008, the ISP is a collaboration of Intel Higher Education team and Intel India staffing team with various business units and Tech MRC of Intel India to seek guidance on technology areas relevant to Intel.

Three main research areas were identified for this year; platform validation, software solutions and silicon and system design203. Student teams from 33 reputed engineering colleges registered for the Intel Scholar Program and 102 student teams submitted their detailed proposals under category A (B.E/B.Tech) and Category B (Post Graduate)

These research proposals were evaluated by Intel technologists and only 32 projects were short listed for semi-finals. Before the semi finals Intel Technologists mentored the 32 student teams for a period of 2 months. In the semi-finals, which were poster presentations, an eminent jury of 8 Intel senior technologists finalized on 12 projects.

These projects were showcased to a jury panel consisting of academia and industry. The Jury consisted of eminent scholars like Prof. Ananthashyana and Prof. Ashwath Kumar from MSRIT, Dr. Shrisha Rao from International Institute of Information Technology, Bangalore, Dr. Atanu Rakshit from International Institute of Information Technology, Pune, Gautam Doshi, Kalyan Muthukumar, Ajay Bakre from Intel India, Dr. V.S. Ravindra from Motorola and Prashant Joshi from Free Scale Semi Conductor.

The students first made presentations in front of all the jury members on their research projects, after which they had an interactive discussion with the judges. A Judges Conference was held to decide on the winners of Intel Scholar Program 2008

Apart from cash prizes (Rs. 50000 each to the 3 best teams in category A & B) 10 students will receive scholarships from Intel to pursue Higher Education in Technology areas suggested by Intel and would be provided with financial assistance for pursuing M.TECH in engineering institutions prioritized by Intel India. The award of scholarships is based on the terms and conditions of the contest that students would seek admission to M.TECH courses based on their own merit at Intel desired engineering institutions.

The list of winners and mentors for Intel Scholar Program 2008 is given below.

SL. No Names of the Participants Institute Name Research Project Intel Mentor Category A Winners 1 Komal Kapoor Saral Jain Snigdha Gupta Mohammad Kazi Birla Institute of Technology and Science, Pilani-Goa Campus Personalization of Web Search Results - A Server Side Implementation Mr Nithiyanandan Bashyam 2 Vanishree H PES Institute of Technology Novel Publicity Verifiable Secret Sharing Schemes Dr. Lakshmi Santhanam 3 Ashish A Lakshminarayanan Iyer Vivek Anand National Institute of Technology Calicut Elimination of Visual and Spatial Redundancy to transmit Video over Scarce Resources Mr. Jaya G Krishna Category B Winners 1 Nandish A Mehta Indian Institute of Science Energy Efficient Neuro-Stimulator for retinal prosthetic device Mr Shailendra Jain 2 B.V.N.Silpa Indian Institute of Technology, New Delhi Low Power Texture Cache Architecture Mr. Ashok Jagannathan 3 Abinesh Ramachandran Akshaykumar Salimath Bhargava Rajaram International Institute of Information Technology-Hyderabad A Scheme for Low Power Transmission of Buffered Data Mr. Deepak Tanna