Chandigarh: 12th March, 2024: Punjab Engineering College (Deemed to be University), Chandigarh is organizing Industry-Academia Expert Lecture Week from 11th to 15th March, 2024. Various Departments will organize Lectures in a variety of fields as of Communication, AI, ML, Power Generation, Electronics, and Industry as a whole, inducing an amalgamation of academia and Industry. 
1. On Monday, March 11, 2024, the Chemistry Department Seminar Hall at PEC (Punjab Engineering College) buzzed with enthusiasm as Dr. D. P. Singh, a distinguished alumnus from the 1972 batch of the Metallurgical and Materials Engineering Department, took the stage to deliver an expert talk on "Industry-Academia Partnership." The event was part of the Industry-Academia Interaction Week, aimed at bridging the gap between academia and industry by providing students with insights from seasoned professionals.

Dr. Singh, with over 40 years of experience in industry and academia, having served as the Former Chief Manager at Swaraj Mazda Ltd., brought a wealth of knowledge and practical wisdom to the discussion. His journey from being a PEC alumnus to holding key management positions in both industry and technical institutes in the Chandigarh region lent credibility to his insights.

The focus of Dr. Singh's talk was on the importance of skill development for engineering students, particularly those in their first year of the B. Tech program. He stressed the dynamic nature of industry demands, highlighting the necessity for students to continuously update their skill sets to remain competitive in the job market. His message resonated strongly with the audience, as they recognized the importance of staying abreast of emerging technologies and trends in their respective fields.

2. On the same day, an Online Expert Lecture was also organized by the CSE Department. The speaker Mr. Avalpreet Singh Brar delivered the lecture on “AI based Autonomous Fleet management”, focusing on three sub problems that solve using AI Optimization to mitigate supply-demand imbalances in Autonomous fleet management.
The expert began the first is the Demand forecasting problem formulated as a time series and solved using supervised learning approach by eXtream Gradient Boosted Trees(XG Boost)techniques. Second part is focusing  on how to solve the Vehicle Rebalancing problem by using a mathematical approach with Linear programming using sequential implementation. In Third part, we discussed how to use the UCB algorithm and enhance the sequential decision making and also discussed the charge scheduling solution architecture in fleet management.  

The expert concludes many things in this discussion. First motivation, Autonomous systems such as the Robo-Taxies have the potential to enhance safety and improve operational efficiency. Using the AI based predictive and prescriptive approach leverages on the strength of classical mathematical optimization methods as well as recent data-driven machine learning models, and lastly, validation of the proposed model discussed in this presentation shows the potential improvement in terms of Fleet management services.

3. Today, on 12th March, a lecture on 'Coal of Electricity' by Expert Mr. Ashish Kundu, (Ex. ED, NTPC), was organised by the Electrical Engineering Department. His talk was mainly focused on power generation in a thermal plant. Its' operation & maintenance(ONM), the collaboration of Solar & thermal generation. Solar plants can provide electricity during day time, it's a cheaper source and helps in smooth transmission. Thermal Plants can provide electricity at any time of the day. He also motivated students to join the core streams and Public Sector as well. While sharing his insights on the proper site selection, he discussed the site selection, geology, cooling towers, switchyards, store yards, station building, PPA and disposal of effluents. Lastly, he said that 'one unit saved is two units generated, so we must save electricity.'

4. Another Lecture organized by ECE, based on 'Legal Challenges around Block Chain, AI and ML Technologies' by Mr. Gobinderpreet Singh was very interesting and insightful in itself. He shared his valuable knowledge in this field, including how to enter into the right web environment, the security measures, the general introduction to specific laws related to cyber security and cyber space protection. He had 18 years of experience in this field of computers, AI and law. He also has a US patent credit to his domain, a testament to his proven expertise. 

5. An Industrial Academic Expert talk on the topic “A deep dive into ML Ops” was conducted for the students of Batch 2022 Computer Science and Engineering on 12 th March, 2024 for providing them insights into Machine Learning Operations which are executed in industries. The resource person for the talk was Mr. Anoop Dobhal, Data Scientist and ML Engineer, Nagarro. The session coordinators for the talk were Prof Sudesh Rani and Ms. Pavneet Kaur. More than 100 students attended the session. He briefly describes the different levels of ML Ops maturity from manual process, reproducible training, CI/CD framework, Canary Deployment to Automatic deployment. The expert further focused on ML Ops framework collaborators which highlights the role of Data Engineers, Data Analysts, ML Ops Engineers, DevOps Engineers and Cloud Engineers.