Hope to have all first-year students back on campus by mid-December: IIT-Delhi Director

“From November 29, we hope to start onboarding students and hopefully by the middle of December, we will have all students back on campus. So hopefully by mid-December, first-year classes may go back to regular offline mode. For all other students, we want to hold physical classes beginning from the first week of January,” Rao said in a press conference.

Dean Academics Shantanu Roy said the classes will still be online.

“Onboarding will be a “slow, graded process”. Once we see that everything is stable and government orders also enable certain things… that’s when we’ll start moving back to (offline) classes. Not all classes will move offline, the more important core courses will go offline first and the elective courses for which the registration of students is less will continue online. We do plan that the examination will be offline. But at any given point, we will make sure that no classroom has more than 50% capacity. On January 3, the semester reopens for everyone else. There also the same model is going to be followed,” he said.

Speaking about Yardi’s donation, Rao said Yardi’s gift would “enable IIT-Delhi to create state-of-the-art laboratories and attract talented students and researchers to its newly established School of Artificial Intelligence (ScAI)”.

“The future progress of a nation will depend on its AI capability. This generous gift will catalyse cutting edge research in AI and related areas and propel ScAI and IIT-Delhi in their quest for building better solutions for the benefit of our society, environment, industry and nation,” he said.

In a recorded message, Yardi said, “Artificial Intelligence technologies are driving global transformations, and playing a pivotal role in industrial, social and environment change. We look forward to the ScAI strengthening education and research in AI, Machine Learning and Data Science, to enable commercial and societal applications. I am pleased to contribute to the School of Artificial Intelligence and help IIT- Delhi continue its outstanding work in the field of academics and engineering.”

At the convocation, Saturday, Alumna Padmasree Warrior, Founder & CEO of Fable, will be the Chief Guest. She’s also a Board member at Microsoft and Spotify.

A total of 288 PhD students, 843 undergraduate students, and 986 postgraduate students will be receiving their degrees Saturday. IIT-D will conduct the convocation in parallel venues – all visible to each other – keeping in mind Covid protocol.