Founder's Message

• Posted on: 7 September 2017
• By: admin

From Garages to Campuses 

The most talked about mega enterprises that have transformed the world had their beginnings in the car garages. Google, Amazon, Disney, Hewlett-Packard, Apple, and others incubated their business plans in those small places. The places where cars were parked turned into the laboratories, and that's where technological innovations were sparked! Garages or basements, the world has seen the humble beginnings of many of the some of the giant IT companies, who later entered into the world markets and homes of billions of the people. The message they now give is loud and clear. It's not about where you start. It's where you end up. And more importantly, it's how transformative your idea is. IoT (Internet of Things) and AI (Artificial Intelligence) are now making their humble but determined beginnings at the university's premises. AI businesses like DeepMind, Wolfram Alpha and Improbable - had all started at the University campuses. These modern technologies, that have taken roots in campuses, have now positioned themselves as new accelerators for fundamental and applied scientific research carried out in the Universities. The numerous complicated findings in research done by the students or the groups of students and faculties could be analyzed by AI and decide the future direction of the remaining research and experiments. Even the possible results of the research could be predicted by AI. The time required to arrive at the proof of hypotheses could also be drastically reduced. Universities collaborating on the research would stand to gain through Big Data analytics. It is reported that a robotic system at the University of Aberystwyth, in the UK, carried out an entire sequence of the research process on its own: formulating hypotheses, designing and running experiments, analyzing data, and deciding which experiments to run next. The routine, and sometimes not so exciting, activities for the faculties like responding to the queries by the students, rating the coursework, guiding the students for the projects can be automated. The technical University of Berlin, in Germany, is already employing AI for such regular work. Apart from improving quality, AI can make education 'inclusive'. Those hitherto were deprived of learning the subjects of their passion but could not do so due to limited access and capacity of the colleges they can do so due to AI. The recent development of MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) hundreds and thousands of youth, adults and even seniors can learn the variety of the subjects. Keeping pace with IoT and AI has become an essential element of the modern-day education systems. Universities would turn into the ghost- campuses if they do not keep pace with such developments and as a result of their irrelevant and archaic methods of imparting education. When American car manufacturing did not keep pace with the emerging technologies, city of Detroit, once hub for auto manufacturing, turned to miserable ghost town Smart Campus Cloud Network-SCCN helps universities to keep agile with the transformative tools to ensure that they are not 'Detroited'. It promotes the deployment of IoT and AI for the enhancement of energy and water efficiencies within the campuses to spark off the ecological resource efficiency through the use of modern IT. It goes even further. It helps students to contribute to the Sustainable Development Goals. Transformative technologies that were germinated in University campuses are now transforming the campuses and even education itself.