CHENNAI : More than 30,000 students from over 700 colleges across the country are expected to visit IIT-Madras's technical festival "Shaastra 2006," which was formally inaugurated on Wednesday evening.

Over the next five days, students will pit their engineering skills in various contests ranging from robotics to programming. IIT-M's student council, which is organising the event for the eighth year in running, has included some innovative new events. The events including junkyard wars - where students will construct machines out of junk - and a "swat the bug" contest to debug software glitches.

There is also a contest organised by online search major Google where students are challenged to design a website that will top the search on a given keyword.

While addressing a press meet, Tushar Ujjwal, Co-curricular Affairs Secretary, said the new contests were in tradition with coming out with new challenges every year.

Apart from various contests, he said another highlight would be the video-conferences with prominent scientists from across the globe, including George Andrew Olah (Nobel prize for Chemistry, 1994), Arno Allan Penzias (Nobel prize for Physics, 1978), Parviz Moin (Founder-Director of Center for Turbulence Research, Stanford University), Harold Abelson (Founding Director of FSF Creative Commons and Public Knowledge), William Schneider (TransHab Developer) and Bob Pease (Staff Scientists, Semiconductor Corp).

There will also be lectures by Prof. Ashok Jhunjhunwala of the Department of Electrical Engineering, IIT-M, Dr. M. Natarajan, scientific adviser to the Defence Minister, Dr. Biswasdip Mitra, Managing Director, Texas Instruments - India, Christopher Charlest Benniger, renowned architect and Prof. Yash Pal, Padma Vibhushan awardee.

Students praised

M.S. Ananth, IIT-Madras Director, congratulated the students on their organisational skills in putting together the event.

The festival is organised by a team of over 650 students, who handle the event in its entirety — from finding sponsorships to organising the contests.

For more information, visit the website www.shaastra.org.

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