Abu Dhabi campus will help UAE's research and academic ecosystems, says IIT Delhi Director

New Delhi: IIT Delhi's Abu Dhabi campus is envisioned as a research-centric campus of the institute that will contribute to the research and academic ecosystems of Abu Dhabi and the UAE, IIT Delhi Director Prof Rangan Banerjee said on Thursday.

A temporary campus for IIT Delhi-Abu Dhabi is already assigned, and work for customisation of the existing facilities to IIT Delhi’s requirements has already started, he added.

Banerjee said that the UAE campus will formally start its operations in a few months, and academic programmes are expected to commence in early 2024. In due course, the institution will migrate to a permanent campus. The campus is expected to offer degrees at the UG, PG, and doctoral levels in a diverse range of programmes covering Energy and Sustainability, Artificial Intelligence, Computer Science and Engineering, Healthcare, Mathematics and Computing, and other disciplines of engineering, sciences, management, and humanities, he added.

He also said that IIT Delhi's 54th Annual Convocation ceremony will be held on August 12. Over 2,350 graduating UG and PG students will be awarded degrees during the convocation ceremony. During the convocation degrees with the University of Queensland, Australia, will be awarded too.

Professor Banerjee said that, Sorbonne University, Paris, and IIT Delhi have also signed an MoU to establish a strategic partnership. They jointly submitted a project under the French government’s Franco-Indian Campus for Health initiative. The partnership involves research projects in cancer studies, neurosciences, biotechnology, and biomedical engineering.

Student mobility will begin in the next academic year, with two Master’s students from Sorbonne University going to IIT Delhi and four postgraduate students from IIT Delhi visiting Sorbonne University, he said.

About placements, he said that the number of job offers, unique selections as well as PPOs were at a record high during the placement season 2022–23. As many as 368 companies visited the campus with 659 job profiles to hire IIT Delhi students. The students received 1,417 job offers with 1,270 unique selections (including 267 PPOs).

A total of 221 companies made 806 internship offers (with around 701 unique selections) to the students, he added.

About IIT Delhi's Jhajjar campus he said it will be working in the areas of Performance Enhancement for Paralympians and Sports Injury Prevention and Rehabilitation, Medical Implants, Diagnostics, Device Design and Development; and Application of AI/ML in Digital Healthcare along with Medical Imaging with new courses and manpower development.

About the IIT's initiatives to strengthen the armed forces. He said that Bullet-resistant jackets, ABHED (Advanced Ballistic High Energy Defeat), are indigenously designed and developed by IIT Delhi at the DRDO Industry Academia Centre of Excellence (DIA-COE), which is offering the lightest possible solution globally in the field of bullet-resistant jackets.

He said that the ABHED: BIS Level 5 and ABHED: BIS Level 6 comply with the Indian Army’s latest requirements and are capable of defeating eight AK-47 HSC and six Sniper API bullets, respectively, on 1000 square cm panels after ageing with minimum back face deformation.