ICT Academy conducts 45th Edition of BRIDGE at Chennai

ICT Academy has been organising its flagship Conference BRIDGE since 2011 in various parts of the country. The conference addresses the pressing issues faced by the academia and the industry is striking a balance with the talent demand-supply chain. ICT Academy has organized the 45th edition of ICT Academy BRIDGE® on 25th and 26th of February 2020, at IITM Research Park, Chennai.

The event was attended by more than 1000 academic leaders, Industry experts and Government officers from across India.

M Sivakumar, Chief Executive Officer, ICT Academy set the context for the conference emphasizing the need for augmenting skills to accelerate the growth of the nation. He thoughtfully thanked all the stakeholders of ICT Academy who have been with the Academy in building this vibrant platform. He said that ICT Academy has been the strongest bridge between Industry and Academy with more than 10 years of service to the Nation.

 

Addressing the conference Lakshmi Narayanan, Emeritus Vice Chairman, Cognizant and Chairman, ICT Academy spoke about the role the government is playing in the nation-building, taking a special interest by encouraging the deployment of the latest technologies within the Government departments. Further, he pointed to the serious indulgence of the Government in using the blockchain for the transactions. Moreover, the Government has also brought drones into serving the state.

Finally, he pointed to the fact that the State of Tamil Nadu is at the top in terms of healthcare and education utilizing the latest technologies. He also emphasized on the work done by ICT Academy in building the talent of India.

"The transformative power of ICT makes a tremendous transformation in the lives of the people. On these lines, the Government seeks the participation and coordination of the society at large in making its initiatives successful," said Hans Raj Verma IAS, Additional Chief Secretary (FAC) - IT, Government of Tamil Nadu.

ICT Academy organized three pre-conference summits. ICT Academy Leadership Summit 2020 was a knowledge sharing and networking meet exclusively for the Chairman, Presidents and Secretaries of member institutions of ICT Academy.

The conclave brought eminent leaders from Industry, Academia and Government together to share best practices and innovation in the development and leadership of world-class institutions. Expert sessions on the theme were delivered by Jayaramakrishnan - TCS, Dr Viswanathan - VIT University, Dr Arun Kumar - IIT Madras, Arun Bharath IRS - Commissioner of Income Tax, Dr Ashok Korwar - School of Design Thinking, M P Vijayakumar - Sify Technologies and KK Raman - KPMG.

ICT Academy Talent Summit 2020 was a platform for the HR professionals from the industry and Training and Placement Directors of academic institutions to discuss on the strategies to bridge the skill gaps that are disproportionately affected by the technological innovation and develop the competencies of students in line with the most rapidly evolving work environments. Two power panel of experts deliberated on the theme.

The speakers were senior HR leaders from Industry including - Krish Ganesan - Tata Consultancy Services, Venkat Viswanathan - Wipro, Murali Padmanabhan - Virtusa, Rajeev Menon - Cognizant, Sreeram Radhakrishnan - Atos Syntel, Dr Subramani Ramakrishnan - IBM, Satish Rajarathnam - Mphasis, Uma Srinivasan - Larsen and Toubro, Ayshwarya Srinivasan - Barclays, David Rajasekar - Banca Sella. The panellists emphasized the skills required by the fresh graduates and listed down action items for industry and academia to work on to develop skilled manpower for the industry.

ICT Academy Research Summit 2020 was a major attraction for researchers, academicians, and practitioners belonging to various domains of computer science and information technology for sharing their research work and experiences related to theories and applications of technology-based frameworks.

The experts included Dr Sainarayanan - HCL Technologies, Aburba Das - TCS, Prasanna Venkatesh - HCL, Dr Mukund Madhavan - CMI, Dr Sethuraman - CSIR, Dr Govindaraj - CSIR and Dr Viju Ravindran - Mathworks. The speakers pushed hard on the need to research centric academic environment in India.

The main conference featured industry keynote speeches from Dr S Prakash - Star Health, Navaneeth - The Hindu, Karaiadi Selvan - Cadd Centre, Christian Fabre - Christian Fabre Textiles, Satoshi Taketani - Komoto Coliving and Pattabhiram - Author and Public Speaker, Pramod Aggarwal - Automation Anywhere and Sunil PP - AWS. The keynote speakers broadly emphasized on various aspects for the industry and academia in preparing for the future world. The role of Industry in talent building was discussed in detail.

MoU was exchanged by ICT Academy with DXC Technologies with an announcement of implementing a CSR project on launching "SKILL BUS" that is all set to travel across rural parts of Tamil Nadu, aimed at providing career guidance to the rural youth. An MoU was signed and exchanged between ICT Academy and NimbleBox, a startup that helps data science teams, developers, and students work and collaborate on their deep learning projects on the cloud to invigorate AI knowledge with the academia.

An expert power panel was conducted on "Augmenting Skills for the Future Technologies", where experts deliberated on the action points for the academia to work on to develop students for future technologies. The panel was moderated by Dr B Anbuthambi - ICT Academy with experts in panel including Rajan Sethuraman - Latent View, Naveen - TCS, Bharath Cola - Oracle, Arun Subash - Vmware, Saurabh Gupta - World Assessment Council and Deepankar - Autodesk.

ICT Academy every year confers the "ICT Academy India Icon Awards" to successful leaders who have done some outstanding work and excellence in their domain. This year, ICT Academy as a gesture of celebrating Women Leadership conferred upon the ace people who have made a positive impact in their respective industry. The recipients of this prestigious award for this year included Dr V Shanta, Chairman, Adyar Cancer Institute & Padma Vibhushan Awardee, Dr Akhila Srinivasan, MD, Shriram Life Insurance Co. Ltd., Dr Elizabeth Verghese, Chairperson, Hindustan Group of Institutions and Dr Sudha Seshayyan, Vice-Chancellor, The Tamil Nadu Dr MGR Medical University.

ICT Academy in partnership with Automation Anywhere announced the BOTLAB for 6 member institutions, in partnership with CISCO announced NETACAD for 10 member colleges during the occasion. ICT Academy recognized the national winners of AWS Cloud Literacy Drive conducted in partnership with AWS and the national winners of National Communications Skills Challenge conducted in partnership with The Hindu.

ICT Academy also recognized 10 of its member institutions as "Partners of the Decade" who successfully travelled together with the Academy for a decade actively empowering the faculty members and developing an industry-ready talent pool for the nation. The details of the winners are published in ICT Academy website

"India with its young population is now all set to be a stronger contributor to the entire world. Hence we have to work on such vibrant programs to help academic institutions to collaborate, learn and educate both their teachers and students, thereby making India a stronger talent destination for the nation. We believe ICT Academy's BRIDGE is one such event that complements the efforts of Academia and Industry in developing future-ready talent pool," said Dr Anbuthambi B, Executive Vice President, ICT Academy.

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