Highlights
B.Tech Admission 2022:
The B.Tech admission process took place during the first week of November 2022. More than 1000 students were newly admitted to NITK. The IRIS Team provided extensive software support and guidance to the newly admitted students to complete their admission formalities and hostel allotment processes, together with the Student Council and the Taskforce.
B.Tech Minor Degree and Focus Area Allotment:
The minor degree and Focus Area allotment process for the B.Tech 2025 batch took place during the month of October 2022. The IRIS Team coordinated and carried out the entire allotment process based on instructions provided by the academic section.
Convocation 2022:
The 20th annual convocation of NITK took place during the month of October 2022. The registration for the convocation took place through the IRIS convocation module. The IRIS Team wishes luck and success to all the students who recently passed out of NITK.
Code-In 107 Recruitment:
Code-In is the annual internship drive of the IRIS Team. The Web Development and App Development divisions of the IRIS Team recently recruited few interns. Congratulations to Harshit Gupta, Aditya Agrawal, Abhishek Satpathy, Shashank G and Wale Yuvraj Ravindra for getting selected.
Integration of SBI ePay:
A new payment aggregator, SBI ePay, has been integrated with the IRIS website. IRIS users can now make payments using SBI ePay as well as Billdesk.
Release of IRIS Android App v1.1.8 and v1.1.9:
The IRIS mobile app now includes the Timetable and CEMS modules. A separate points table module was created for the batches participating in the Freshers Cup to track the performance of different participating teams in different sports. The app also includes various interesting features such as the Favorite screen. (Download/Update the IRIS App here)
Meetings With Stakeholders
- Office of the Dean Academic: To discuss and implement changes in the branch change and minor degree allotment modules
- Chief Security Officer: To discuss, plan and collect requirements for the development of an online portal to generate vehicle stickers for the faculties and staff of NITK
- Hostel Office: To decide the course of action for the hostel allotments of the newly admitted B.Tech students; to discuss further improvements to the hostel module
- Centre for System Design: To initiate discussion related to various projects that could be potentially taken up by the IRIS Team
Web
Convocation Module:
- Prepared for Convocation 2022
- Added a new field to store whether a student is working for a startup or not
- Introduced a validation in the registration form to ensure that the number of attendees accompanying the student is less than 2
B.Tech Minor Degree Allotment
- Introduced changes to handle the recently-introduced minor degree programs in Economics, Machine Learning, etc.
- Made necessary changes to convert the minor degree allotment process from a two-round system to a single round system, and hence removed the options for student actions
- Converted all the date-time settings in the module to Indian Standard Time (IST)
- Simplified the process of submitting the application, thereby improving the User Experience
Branch Change:
- Changed the form label to make it more descriptive
- Made changes to display the common GPA in the admin-user module dashboard
CDC Module:
- Added a tooltip to inform and alert students to enter their Grade X and XII percentages (and not CGPA) in their placement profile
- Changed the front-end limit for resume file size to 2 MB
- Completed other minor fixes
- Updated CDC API endpoints
Others:
- Added a confirmation dialog box in the NITK EDU account creation page to prevent accidental creation of Google accounts with undesirable names
- Completed the restructuring of the employee website profile including the introduction of some improvements
- Provided software support for admission to the M.Tech (Sponsored) and PhD programs
- Made changes to display hyperlinks in IRIS announcements in blue color font
- Updated the student user groups to manage the Koha library accounts of the UG and PG students admitted in 2022
- Worked on the Non-Teaching Staff Recruitment portal
Mobile
- Successfully completed the enrollment into the Apple Developer Program
- Configured development settings and notifications for the iOS app
- Started the process of cleaning up the codebase – a regular maintenance activity
- Added an “Open” button in the CDC module to open the downloaded resume directly from the app
- Fixed the scroll bar issue in the daily timetable screen
Systems
- Updated Gitlab runners
- Started work on the new staging server – multiple experimental setups have been tested and multiple prototypes have been built as proof of concept
- Containerized the CDC website
- Completed the setup of CDC website CI/CD
- Updated Sentry version
- Performed containerization of IRIS development setup
- Explored high availability database
- Added 2 factor authentication to various services, containers and virtual machines
Product
- Provided full-fledged software support during the B.Tech admission 2022
- Carried out extensive testing of the minor degree allocation module in view of changes requested by academic section
- Created and circulated a form to collect feedback about the IRIS mobile application
- Performed testing of the Freshers Cup module
- Prepared wireframes for the upcoming Service Requests module
- Various other modules such as CEMS, PG Research, CDC, Gyan are in different stages of identification of new requirements/changes, development and testing
- Updated the list of FAQs
- Handled Tell IRIS tickets
Labs
Gyan Summarization Project:
As the name suggests, it is a project aimed to condense a large number of Gyan reviews and sum up the important information contained in them. The work done is as follows:
- Performed data cleaning for the purpose of data visualization (removed relatively unrelated verbs, prepositions, etc. using Natural Language Tool Kit)
- Explored few metrics, especially those which work without human inference (SUPERT and Kullback–Leibler divergence metric)
- Also looked into a Q & A model which can be used by the user to answer questions specifically for him/her; such a model can also be used to derive statistics
- Manually summarized few reviews
- Researched about the different data visualization methodologies and implemented a rudimentary text extraction model
Urja Project:
This project aims to provide software support for the Urja charging station.
- Created a design document that describes the flow of the Application Program Interface (API), and explains the software requirements for the same
- Prepared a document that provides specific details of each request/response
Distributed Denial of Service Unban Automation:
- Identified a suitable open source dataset
- Developed a pipeline for obtaining and cleaning data from activity logs
- Worked on a random-forest based classification model
Upcoming Events
IRIS Bootcamp:
The IRIS Team conducts a bootcamp annually to train students in the software and programming skills used by the IRIS developers to build one of the largest student-led ERP portals in the country. It consists of online recorded lectures, live doubt clarification sessions and a variety of tasks and assignments for the students to get a hands-on learning experience. The Web Development Team offers the Ruby on Rails track and the App Development Team offers the Flutter track. A new product management bootcamp has also been planned. Stay tuned for further updates regarding the bootcamp.
Product Team Recruitment:
The IRIS Product Team Recruitment is expected to begin soon. Earn a chance to become a part of the Product Team, the division of the IRIS Team primarily responsible for testing the products, handling user-side documentation and designing good User Experiences, among others. Stay tuned for the announcement regarding the pre-recruitment talk.
Contact & Support
- In case of any issues, queries, suggestions and feedback, please raise a Tell IRIS ticket from the IRIS website or mobile app.
- Log on to https://forum.iris.nitk.ac.in/ – the one-stop discussion platform for all the students and alumni of NITK to discuss academics, student life, career opportunities and much more…
- Please follow the IRIS team’s Instagram and LinkedIn handles for regular updates.
