The Chief Minister, Mr V.S. Achuthanandan, will lay the foundation stone for the new campus of the Indian Institute of Information Technology and Management (IIITM-K) in the up-and-coming Technocity here on Thursday.

Announcing this here on Wednesday, an official spokesperson said here that Mr M. Vijayakumar, Minister for Works and Law, will preside over the function. Mr Oommen Chandy, Leader of Opposition, Kerala, will deliver a special address.

The keynote address will be given by Mr Kris Gopalakrishnan, Chief Executive Officer and Managing Director, Infosys, and Chairman, Board of Directors, IIITM-K.

The institute is currently operating from a 13,000-sq ft space in the Nila Building of Technopark. Its own campus of 35,000 sq ft is nearing completion inside Technopark.

The new facility, coming up in 10 acres in Technocity, is expected to help the institute develop itself as a full-fledged campus.

The new campus will house four schools – School of Computer Science and Engineering; School of Computational Science; School of Informatics; and School of Humanities and Social Sciences.

The new residential campus at Technocity will focus on high-power computing and information system management. The courses have been designed to evolve in an ecosystem provided by academic, research and industry requirements.

SOCIAL SECTOR

It will also seek to develop and apply IT in the social sector as also further the cause of science and technology, the spokesman said.

The institute is expected to position itself as a catalyst for the creation of next-generation industries through entrepreneurship development programmes.

Various domains ranging from education, agriculture, ecology, cloud computing, embedded systems, networks, modelling to computational linguistics could benefit from advanced lab facilities in computer science, electronic devices, computational sciences, information systems services and e-governance.

Given increasing opportunities in manufacturing and design in hardware and electronic chips, fresh investments would become inevitable in churning out electronics engineers in VLSI, embedded systems, image processing and robotics.

MASTER'S PROGRAMMES

Therefore, it is proposed to have undergraduate and integrated master's programmes in VLSI (very large scale integration), embedded systems, image processing and robotics with the base as electronics and computer engineering, the spokesman added.

The core undergraduate programme will be offered in the two streams of computer engineering and electronics and VLSI.

The first year of the programme in both streams is similar and is intended to ensure a common grounding in the core concepts of computer science and engineering, electronics and communications, exposure to humanities, skills and human values.

The second year is aimed at strengthening knowledge in chosen areas with courses as electives depending on the particular stream. Also, the core programme allows students to switch to the dual-degree in any of the sub-areas.

The targeted student intake is 600 to 700 for the Masters, M Phil and PhD programmes and 100 to 200 undergraduates.

The institute has actively involved itself in research and technology development for implementation of several projects.

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