The first edition of RESEARCHx was held on October 20th, 2019. The all-day event was organized by IITB Research Park and the Undergraduate Academic Council. The event comprised more than 15 exhibitors from the IIT Bombay student community who exhibited their research and technical projects carried out under professors guidance or during internships. The exhibition also had some industrial representation in the form of stalls by Applied Materials and Tata Power SED.
Apart from the exhibition, two competitions were organized for students which involved solving problems faced in IIT Bombay, such as the water shortage problem and the unorganized traffic problem outside Main Gate. Two keynotes were delivered by speakers, Mr. Vishal Bhasin, Senior Vice President, Viacom18 (titled Digital Transformation), and Dr. Nitin Kale, Co-Founder, Nanosniff Technologies (titled Microsensors and Instrumentation for detecting chemicals and biochemicals).
A successful Panel discussion on the topic ‘Industry and Academia’ was conducted with two IIT Bombay professors, Prof. B. Ravi, Department of Mechanical Engineering and Prof. Rajesh Zele, Professor-in-Charge, IITB Research Park, representing Academia and two industrialists Dr. Raghavan Muralidharan, Chief Technology Officer, Tata Power SED, and Mr. Rahul Singh, Co-Founder & VP-Engineering, ideaForge representing the Industry perspective respectively. Another talk on Transforming Technology to Business was also delivered by Sust Labs incubated at SINE, IIT Bombay.
The overall aim of the event was to bring the student community and the industry to one common platform and to showcase the pioneering research carried out by both.