IIT-Delhi plans to make campus waste-free, eco-friendly

The Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi
(IIT-D) has decided to roll out initiatives to
make the campus more environment-
friendly this academic session. The institute
plans to take measures in this direction by
addressing three major aspects — energy,
water conservation and minimising waste.
These “green initiatives” include setting up
of two solar power projects in the campus.
A 20 KW power system at the residence of
the director is underway and another 1
MW solar power system will be installed in
the academic area. IIT-Delhi dean
(infrastructure) Dr Ashok Gupta said this
would take care of 40 to 50 per cent
electricity requirement in the academic
areas.
Water harvesting is being taken up in a big
way to improve the drainage system and
groundwater. The institute will set up a
water harvesting unit along with a new
sewage treatment plant (STP) on campus as
part of the green initiatives. “We are
expecting that at least 70 per cent of the
water from the STP can be used for
horticulture purposes on campus,” Dr
Gupta said.
IIT-Delhi has converted toilets in the
academic area to a waterless system and
“looking at the success of these” in terms of
water conservation, it plans to convert
toilets in the hostels and residential area to
the same system.
The Ministry of Human Resource
Development has been emphasising that
need for “minimising the institute’s impact
on the environment and its carbon
footprint.” Each institute has been advised
to constitute a dedicated and independent
green office consisting of members
knowledgeable in environmental issues and
green technologies and practices, besides
student representatives. The purpose of the
green office would be to “track, monitor
and steer the institute towards green
practices”.
Gupta said although the measures are in
compliance with the MHRD guidelines, the
institute had already started working on
these measures. There are plans to
segregate organic waste from residences
and hostels on campus and convert it into
manure.

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IIT, Delhi, forms committee to coordinate with world ranking agencies

NEW DELHI: As part its efforts to position itself
among the top in the global ranking list, IIT, Delhi,
has set up a four-member body to coordinate with
ranking agencies and provide appropriate
information and data sought for.
The move comes in the backdrop of the HRD
Ministry setting up of an 18-member committee to
review existing arrangements, develop a strategy and
a framework for research evaluation to drive up
research activities, the lack of which is hampering
Indian institutions from featuring in the global
ranking list.
A group of IIT Delhi professors would be engaged in
a more focussed activity, understand the relevant
information sought by the ranking bodies and
provide inputs in proper format, IIT, Delhi, Director
R K Shevgaonkar told reporters here.
Coordination among the peers, the faculties and
alumni is the other objective of the group as
providing correct information is important for the
rankings, he said.
According to Times Higher Education's (THE) World
University Rankings list 2013-14, IIT, Delhi, along
with IIT, Kanpur, IIT, Kharagpur and IIT, Roorkee,
are clubbed in the group of institutions between
351-400.
The QS world university ranking puts IIT, Delhi, at
222. Concerns over absence of any of India's
institutes among the top has been flagged several
times by President Pranab Mukherjee who would be
attending IIT Delhi's 44th convocation function
tomorrow.
The institute, considered among the best in the
country, would be having a Centre of Policy Studies
to evolve policies for science and technology. It
would be set up under the Department of
Humanities.
It would also set up a Centre for Cyber Security in
collaboration with the University of Nebraska , an
MoU for which is expected to be signed early next
year.
"The Centre wanted that we should have research on
cyber security given that it is a big challenge in the
coming days for national security of the country,"
the IIT Director said.
Ministries of Home and HRD are supporting the IIT
in this endeavour.

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IIT-Delhi signs MOU with Bihar Bridge Corporation for traffic models

PATNA: IIT-Delhi today entered into an agreement
with the Bihar State Bridge Corporation for use of
high speed traffic models in Patna to decongest the
city's main roads of heavy vehicular density.
A Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) was signed
today between the Foundation for Innovation and
Technology Transfer (FITT) of IIT-Delhi and the Bihar
State Bridge Development Corporation (BSBDC) in
this regard, sources said.
As per the MOU, BSBDC can use Swap Based Traffic
Interchange (SBTI) and GSUI (Grade Separated U-
turn Interchange) models developed by IIT-Delhi,
which will be used here for the first time in the
country, BSBDC chairman Sanjeev Hans told
reporters.
The two models will be applied at three busy
intersections on Bailey Road within a distance of 1.7
km from the Lalit Bhawan to the Patna High Court.
Hans, accompanied by Anup Chawla, Professor of
Mechanical Engineering, IIT-Delhi, who represented
FITT, said the design models are apt for a city like
Patna where there is paucity of land.
The SBTI design, which will be applied at the
intersection near the busy Punaichak, will ensure
free right turn and not require deployment of any
traffic police.
Hans said the designs, a presentation of which was
given to Chief Minister Nitish Kumar , was found
efficient.
Chawla said innovative traffic designs will ensure
traffic signal free movement of vehicles along the
stretch which is presently choc-a-bloc, particularly
in the day time.
Hans said the foundation is going for a patent of the
models and in future if somebody wants to opt for
them, it has to approach the BSBDC.
According to a survey, the traffic density on this
stretch of Bailey Road, which houses important
government offices and where an international
museum is also coming, is presently 2000 passenger
car units.

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IIT-Delhi's sensors to check jumbo deaths

KOLKATA: Science could save elephants where
political will has failed. IIT-Delhi has designed heat-
and-motion sensors that can be fitted on railway
tracks to act as an early warning system on
movement of animals.
The device will be field-tested for the first time on
the 165-km tracks between North Bengal's Jalpaiguri
and Alipurduar, where 18 elephants have been run
over by trains this year alone. Last week, an express
train crushed six elephants at Jaldhaka, ramming one
of them through the rail bridge where the mangled
carcass hung for days as train and after train passed
over it. Fifty-two elephants have died in this
corridor since 2004.
An official of the ministry of environment and
forests confirmed receiving the proposal from IIT-
Delhi. "The institute was given the go-ahead in July
and there were plans to field-test the early-warning
device in Uttarakhand's Rajaji first. But keeping in
mind the rising jumbo deaths on North Bengal's
killer tracks, we might run the pilot test in the
Dooars forests ," the official told TOI.
The early warning system is being developed under
the leadership of professor Subrat Kar of IIT-Delhi.
It consists of a series of heat and motion sensing
devices that can be placed at different points of the
railway tracks. These can detect body heat or the
movement of animals that come too close to the
tracks and the information will be relayed from one
device to another in microseconds so that the
authorities can take evasive action to stop animal
deaths.
"More than 100 such devices, with heat and body
sensors and cameras, can be installed on a 4-km
stretch of the tracks. As soon as it detects the
presence of an animal, it records the message and
sends through the network of devices. The
information is transferred to the officials at the
nearest station or signal post in real time," said
Wildlife Trust of India's (WTI) Sandeep Tiwari, who
has held discussions with the IIT-Delhi team on
using the device at Rajaji National Park.
Anil Kumar Singh, head of WTI's conflict mitigation
department, believes the device needs to be tested
urgently, considering the rise in elephant deaths in
this corridor. He, however, cautions that it is not
foolproof. "The device can't be installed on the
entire stretch. So, the risk persists. The ideal move
should be to try and discourage elephants from
coming on the tracks," he suggested.
Most such accidents take place near curvatures,
where visibility is poor, he pointed out. "If some
vegetation can be removed, it will improve visibility
and also discourage elephants from moving into the
area. The possibility of fencing both sides of tracks
can also be explored," he said, adding that the
Indian government can take tips from the road
animal detection (RAD) system used in countries like
US and Switzerland to check animal deaths on the
roads.
Ministry officials are meeting their railway
counterparts in Delhi on Tuesday to discuss ways to
prevent elephant deaths . "Installing this device will
take some time. Till then we will push the railways
officials to restrict the speed limit to 25kmph
through such corridors," an official said.

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IIT-Delhi alumni creates first map of neural circuitry

LONDON: Women have sharper memory while
men coordinate things better.
An Indian Institute of Technology-Delhi alumni
has created the first ever map of neural
circuitry inside a human brain which has
confirmed that women's brains are designed
for social skills and memory while men's are
for perception and co-ordination.
However, there is one field in which women
beat men hollow - multitasking, finds the study
that looks at brain connectivity.
A new brain connectivity study from Penn
Medicine published on Monday has found
striking differences in the neural wiring of men
and women that's lending credence to some
commonly-held beliefs about their behaviour.
In one of the largest studies looking at the
"connectomes" of the sexes, Ragini Verma, an
associate professor in the department of
radiology at the Perelman School of Medicine
at the University of Pennsylvania found greater
neural connectivity from front to back and
within one hemisphere in males, suggesting
their brains are structured to facilitate
connectivity between perception and
coordinated action. In contrast, in females, the
wiring goes between the left and right
hemispheres, suggesting that they facilitate
communication between the analytical and
intuition. Ragini who completed her masters in
mathematics and computer applications
followed by a PhD in computer vision and
mathematics from IIT Delhi says "These maps
show us a stark difference — and
complementarity — in the architecture of the
human brain that helps provide a potential
neural basis as to why men excel at certain
tasks, and women at others".
According to Verma, on average, men are more
likely better at learning and performing a
single task at hand, like cycling or navigating
directions, whereas women have superior
memory and social cognition skills, making
them more equipped for multitasking and
creating solutions that work for a group. In
the study, the researchers found that females
displayed greater connectivity in the
supratentorial region, which contains the
cerebrum, the largest part of the brain,
between the left and right hemispheres. Males,
on the other hand, displayed greater
connectivity within each hemisphere.
By contrast, the opposite prevailed in the
cerebellum, the part of the brain that plays a
major role in motor control, where males
displayed greater inter-hemispheric
connectivity and females displayed greater
intra-hemispheric connectivity.
These connections likely give men an efficient
system for coordinated action, where the
cerebellum, which involves perception, and the
front of the brain, which involves action, are
bridged together, according to the authors.
The female connections likely facilitate
integration of the analytic and sequential
processing modes of the left hemisphere with
the spatial, intuitive information processing
modes of the right side.
The authors observed only a few gender
differences in the connectivity in children
younger than 13 years, but the differences
were more pronounced in adolescents aged 14
to 17 years and young adults older than 17.
Past studies have shown sex differences in the
brain, but the neural wiring connecting regions
across the whole brain that have been tied to
such cognitive skills has never been fully
shown in a large population.
In the study, Verma and colleagues
investigated the gender-specific differences in
brain connectivity during the course of
development in 949 individuals (521 females
and 428 males) aged 8 to 22 years using
diffusion tensor imaging (DTI).
DTI is water-based imaging technique that can
trace and highlight the fibre pathways
connecting the different regions of the brain,
laying the foundation for a structural
connectome or network of the whole brain.

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