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APOGEE 2006
By Sukanya V [’02 Civil] and Vernon Fernandez [’04 EEE] with special thanks to the English Press Club
The APOGEE 2006 Inaug
inspirting speech given by the Chief Guest, M.S.Ananth, Director, IIT
Madras. The speech, studded with amusing anecdotes and deep insights,
managed to entertain and enlighten the audience at the same time. His
views on education, in general, and student-teacher interactions in
particular, were thought provoking and brought a restless and fickle
audience to some stability.
Sponsorship generated is around Rs. 3.65 lakh this year. ALTERA, a
leading manufacturer of programmable logic devices, agreed to be the
title sponsor for Apogee-2k6 and Apogee-2k7 for an amount of Rs. 2.7
lakh (Rs. 2.35lakh-sponsorship amount, Rs. 35,000-prize sponsor) each
year. They plan to hold a nation-wide design contest called INNOVATE
which is going to be held during Apogee-2k7. INNOVATE is a nation wide
multi-disciplinary engineering design contest open to all graduate and
under-graduate students. It not only tests the designing capabilities
but also the market value of the product designed. With the winning
team getting two laptops and a fully paid trip to an embedded systems
design conference to be held at San José, CA in
April 2007, it ought to boost participation levels during
Apogee-2k7. Keane sponsored the holy grail of all quizzes in BITS
–BOB, OHT, et al.. The software major Wipro and Infosys complete
the list. Wipro sponsored Cyberfiesta for Rs. 30,000 while Infosys
sposored the Computer Science Association events for Rs. 25,000.
OVER HEAD TRANSMISSION
The first big Audi event of APOGEE 2006, Overhead Transmission (OHT)
started off at 7.45pm.Turnout was impressive: 130+ teams including 20
outstation teams. It is worth noting that after a gap of few years ELAS
managed the event. The Quizmaster was Anustup Dutta. The winners were a team named the “Stalwarts of BITS”.
FOREX
FOREX – a game conducted by ECO-FIN assoc on the first day
started on time. The game tried to simulate the actual currency market
by having booths for the capitals of different countries (Delhi, New
York, European Union, London and Japan). At the start of the game, all
teams were given an initial fund of 2 lakh INR equivalent each in five
different currencies (Rupee, Pound, Yen, Dollar, Euro) making it a
total of 10 lakh INR. Each round was preceded by a small bit of news
which would have affected the currency rates. The participants were
allowed to trade one currency for another and thereby attempt to
increase their total holding as the currency rates fluctuated. Arun, Prashant and Vikram from BITS won the event.
VLSI DESIGN CONTEST
It was time for the nerds to rack their brains at the VLSI Design
Contest organized by the EEE association. The participants were asked
to solve a mixture of design problems and answer a few objective
questions related to Digital VLSI in a time limit of half an hour. The
questions were set by Mr. Ninad Kothari and Ms. Shipra Bahl. The
organizers said that they had followed a campus interview style in
setting the elims paper. Though initially announced that 8 teams would
qualify for the finals, they ended up taking 11. The finalists
consisted of 8 BITSian teams and 3 Outsti teams. In the Oysters Lab
they were asked to simulate and synthesize one design problem in HDL.
The participants were evaluated on their approach to the problem,
coding skills in HDL, synthesis and viva.
Madhusudhan Sardha and Bharadwaj emerged as the winners, followed by Harshit and Abina.
MITHALI
A confluence of creativity, coherence, imagination and talent, Mithali-
2006 was a huge hit with all the three clubs, Music, Dance and Mime
putting their best feet forward. The evening was an expression of
brilliance, inspiration, confidence and perfection. An overflowing audi
perfectly summarizes the show. People fought for places inside and when
the stairs and entrances were also crowded, the rest of them had to
retract to FD-2 QT to watch the show.
The CCTV presentation for Mithali had brilliant animation as usual.
Music club’s first piece was an instrumental fusion with a nice
blend of western and classical music. Popular numbers from movies like
Dil Se, Bunty Aur Babli, Taal received good response. A brilliant
co-ordination and scintillating performance from the Music Club marked
the beginning for the night, which only seemed to be getting better.
The mime club’s performance started with a small presentation
about a school reunion plan. Dance club put up a dazzling show with
four dances. They danced brilliantly to numbers like “Radha kaise
na jaale,” “MumBhai,” a medley consisting of a song
from “Bluffmaster,” and two Janet Jackson songs, they ended
the show with the song “Chandralekha.” All the dances had
new concepts with well-choreographed steps and props were used for
certain dances. Overall, Mithali managed to meet the expectations of
everyone.
CYBERFIESTA
“Unveiling potential“seems to be the catchphrase this
APOGEE and CYBERFIESTA 2k6 -an event conducted by the department of PEP
was a strong testimony to this. Apart from the one-hour delay and
a poor turnout, the audience did witness a few brilliant
projects. The competition had 7 entries including an outstation
one. First year enthu was very much evident from the fact that a few
projects were entirely conceived by them. Take for instance the
VIA VOICE-which would go a long way in helping visually impaired people
control a computer. In fact this would also aid a person in controlling
the computer while eating or driving. Another project worth mentioning
is the MACINTOSH OS X TIGER ON AN X86 PC (oops that’s what
it’s called!!!! ) which runs faster than Windows on any hardware
with only generic drivers. GARBAGE COLLECTOR for .NET was a novel
attempt- can be used to implement garbage collection algorithm in the
.net environment. The MAVERAK AV PLAYER was simply outstanding!!
It boasts of in-built functions like lyrics synchronizer, mood mode
recognizer and Hindi mode operation. CRYPT MAIL, SOURCE CODE PLAGIARIUM
and HIDE N SEEK.JPG were other innovative projects. The event was
judged by a panel of three judges. The results were on expected
lines. Karthik Ramgopal-a first year compsciite (MACINTOSH OS X TIGER
ON AN X86 PC) walked away with the first prize. The second place
went to Yuvraj Patel (GARBAGE COLLECTOR FOR .NET.)
BRAIN OF BITS
An amazing response from the junta left the organizer(ELAS) stunned-
nearly 600 answer sheets were distributed, unprecedented in the history
of the event. The previous BOB Jayendran Srinivasan was introduced with
all his previously unknown credentials being revealed to an enthralled
audience
The stage had cartoon characters like Garfield, Tweety and Mickey Mouse
– structures made by the department of backstage- and PAP put up
an awesome, colourful backdrop having Winnie the Pooh and friends. As
the Audi plunged into darkness, Jay walked in, to the tune of his
favourite song “Hallowed be thy name”.
C.B.K maintained his lead. Aravind did not do enough.
The Trophy: This time around, ELAS had a few innovative ideas for going
about their events, one of them being the revival of the acclaimed BOB
trophy. The old plaster model of the clock tower (which was
incidentally never returned by BOB '99, K.L. Arvind, after he won it)
has been replaced by a glimmering 23" silver coated trophy. It has the
words "In terminus, Illic est uno" inscribed on one of the faces of the
octagonal base - meaning "In the end, there can be just one",
rightfully so. Also inscribed is a list of BOB’s starting from
1985 right up to 2005.
Stimuli
Stimuli, the biology trivia conducted by B1, was a treat for all the
bio enthusiasts. The quiz consisted of a written elims, followed by the
finals for the selected six teams. The questions in the finals were
well set. The finals was spread over four rounds which included the
typical finite bound round, audio visual round, connect round and rapid
fire round, which brought the proceedings to an end. A special round of
applause goes to the quiz master Akshaya V L who was very professional
in conducting the event. In the end Aashish Rao and Rahul
Bharadwaj of MGR college, Chennai finished first, closely followed by
Ashok Prasad and Ayshwarya Subramanyam of BITS.
Gamophilic
“Stick together team!” rang the call on the headphones. The
enthusiasm was high and the tension rang even higher during the latter
phase of the gaming event, Gamophilic. Over 50 teams took part in the
preliminary round, which were followed by pre-quarters, quarters, semis
and a final round. The winners of the event were The Cannibals: Ishan
(havoc) Bhanu, Tarun Michael Johnson (tnt) , Vishwajit Gaikwad (aka
serpent) and Vivek Krishnan, who shall be winning original
Counter-Strike CDs along with the prize money.
MyIndia Quiz
The much-feted India Quiz was hosted by final year students Renju John
and Kavitha Karthikeyan, the event was sponsored by the BITSunami
programme. The team named THE FINAL CUT comprising Rachit Parekh, R
Vijay and Jayendran Srinivasan from BITS Pilani winning. The team WHO
MOVED MY QUIZ? consisting of Arun Sethuraman, C B Krishna and Vernon
Fernandez came second.
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