The Indian Institute of Technology in Kanpur (IIT-Kanpur) and the Indian Air Force (IAF) recently inked a memorandum of understanding (MoU) to build robust aerospace technologies. The partnership aims to establish a long-term relationship for academic and research-based interactions and to exchange technical knowledge to foster knowledge development and promote breakthrough innovations in aerospace technology.
The partnership will create a pool of think tanks with strategic knowledge and intellectual skills among IAF officers. This partnership is significant as IIT-Kanpur and IAF will create new forefronts and strengthen the Atma Nirbhar Bharat Mission (Self-Reliant India). IAF will promote teaching, research, and technology development in aerospace technologies, aircraft structural integrity, aircraft health monitoring, and other allied subjects in the fields of aeronautics and aviation.
It will help demonstrate new technology intervention and create awareness among IAF officers to address their problems through interactions with IIT-Kanpur faculty members. The agreement will facilitate the development of training programmes for IAF personnel, which will provide platforms for the dissemination of knowledge to innovate new technologies, according to a news report.
This engagement will leverage the access of immense experience and knowledge of IAF officers among IIT-Kanpur faculty, researchers, and students. It will also provide research grants to PhD scholars of Aerospace Engineering in IIT-Kanpur working in these areas. The Research Scholar Programme (RSP) will establish a framework for mutual co-operation between two participating organisations of national importance, wherein the qualified serving officers from the IAF will be eligible for direct admission for PhDs, MTechs, and eMasters Programmes at IIT-Kanpur. The officers will get the opportunity to undertake time-bound research in the various departments of IIT-Kanpur. It will aid the exchange of ideas and independent research towards achieving national objectives.
Apart from collaborating with government departments to boost technology innovation and improve academia-industry partnerships, IIT-Kanpur and other public educational institutes are offering courses in emerging technologies to digitally upskill the Indian workforce to meet the growing demand of the industry. IIT-Kanpur has invited applications from interested students and professionals for an online course on an introduction to artificial intelligence (AI) that can be completed in six weeks. The course provides participants with an understanding of the basic techniques for building intelligent computer systems and an idea of how AI is applied to problems. The course covers the introduction to formal logic, types of logic, the properties of logic systems, proposition logic, syntax, semantics, and entailments and models.
Participants will be subjected to a final assessment along with assignments. Only students who successfully complete all the assignments and pass the assessment will be given certificates of completion from the E&ICT Academy at IIT-Kanpur, which is a joint initiative of the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) and the Institute. The course will explore definitions and the history of AI, basic ideas in representation and reasoning, the physical symbol system hypothesis, important features of intelligent agents, an introduction to formal logic, and propositional logic: language, semantics, and reasoning.
