What began as a student-led initiative over a decade ago has now matured into the digital backbone of the institute, and this year, IRIS shifted its focus toward strengthening the employee side of the ecosystem. With key module completions, meaningful technical upgrades, and a recognition-worthy showing on the national stage, we continued building on the strong foundations laid over the years as IRIS steps further into its second decade.
IRIS Web Portal
New Launches
Payroll Module
The module allows the tracking of Employee Payroll related information and processes through IRIS including salary heads, reports, pay profile, etc. Validation and testing has been carried out over several months parallely to ensure accuracy
Developer: Sanjeev Holla S
Alumni Module
Many new features and improvements were added such as Alumni Donations, Memory wall, Directory.
Developers: Nikhil Kottoli, Sanjeev Holla S, Shouryadip Chakraborty & Aditi Pandey
HCC Module
Aimed at enabling an online appointment scheduling and record keeping system for all patients of the HCC that are onboarded on IRIS. Extends support for Doctors to write prescriptions and for pharmacists to track inventory as well.
Developers: Aditya Raj Pandia & Surya Srinivas
Vehicle Sticker Module
Digitization of the vehicle sticker for on campus vehicles via Service Requests.
Developer: Nikhil Kottoli
Procurement Module
Digitizes and streamlines college purchasing by replacing rigid paper processes with customizable, automated workflows. Based on price and GeM availability, it dynamically assigns required documents and signatories, routes requests to committee dashboards for digital approvals, and efficiently generates final purchase orders.
Developer: Nikhil Kottoli, Utsav Singh Bhamra & Shouryadip Chakraborty
Product Manager: Penakacharla Harshith
Mess Change Module
Digitization of the mess change procedure for students, eliminating the need for students to visit Hostel Office to apply for mess change and processing everything at the click of a button
Developer: Abhimanyu Kapoor
Mess Closing Module
Students can now close their mess allotment at the end of the semester through IRIS
Developer: Sanjeev Holla S
Job Notification Form
A company-facing form with OTP-based authentication for secure submission
Developer: Nikhil Kottoli
Annual Property Return
Employee facing module to enable filing of Annual Property Return Forms on IRIS
Developer: Harshith Vellapha
Enhancements and Fixes
IRIS Forms UI/UX Revamp
Delivered better experience when creating IRIS forms including the handling of response permissions.
Developer: Mayank Tiwari
IRIS App
During the past year, the IRIS App scaled its user base to over 7,000 monthly active users and introduced several key product enhancements. Engagement with the App Team reached a new milestone, with the recruitment drive participation exceeding 130 candidates
New Launches
UI Revamp
The IRIS App underwent a complete UI overhaul, keeping in mind functionality and aesthetics. It now follows a clean, modern and uniform design throughout the app. Standardized components have been developed to allow developers to ship new features faster while staying true to the design language of the rest of the app with ease.
Developers: Entire App Team
IRIS Forms
The IRIS Forms module, our in-house forms utility linked to the users’ IRIS profiles, has been brought to the IRIS App with users being able to fill out forms and view responses to the forms they have created.
Developers: M Vishak Kamath & Mohnish Hemanth Kumar
Deeplinks, Routes and Roles and Permissions
Deeplinks have been set up for the IRIS App, allowing a user to click on a URL and have the exact corresponding page open in the app instead of on a web browser. Routes have been standardized across all modules and the Roles and Permissions setup on the app has been refactored to support deeplinks.
Developers: Shashank G & Nishant A S
Alumni Donations Appeals
Alumni Donations Appeals lets alumni review donations requests on the app. It allows users to review details like the description, investigators, donated amount, supporting documents and so on, all within the app.
Developer: Akshat Bharara
Parents Dashboard
The parent’s login and dashboard has come to the app, allowing parents to view their ward’s details like their attendance, academic progress, announcements from the college and is a quick reference lookup to some useful links on the IRIS and NITK websites.
Developer: Chirag S
Guesthouse Booking
The Guesthouse Booking module allows users to view available guesthouses and pricing details. Users can create a new booking request, search, filter, review and manage their past requests, find detailed booking details and summary, upload relevant supporting documents. On the admin side, admins can approve and reject booking requests, forward requests for approval, allocate and deallocate rooms.
Developers: Prabhav P & Shriya Bharadwaj
Feature Toggle
The feature toggle system using Firebase Remote Config, allows us to dynamically show or hide features or modules without requiring an app update. This supports phased rollouts, feature flagging, and rapid configuration changes, providing greater flexibility in managing application functionality and releases.
Developer: Shashank Jain
Alumni Directory
The Alumni Directory is the alumni network feature on IRIS. On the app, alumni can review their own profile, choose to show or hide their profile photo and lookup other alumni on the platform, their branch, graduation year, experience updates and contact details.
Developer: Udbhav Naveen Kumar
Enhancements and Fixes
Flutter Version Upgrade
The Flutter SDK version has been upgraded from v3.27 to v3.35. These upgrades brought improved performance, better stability, ensuring the app stays up-to-date with the evolving Flutter ecosystem.
Developers: Entire App Team
Manager: Nishant A S
Native Password Manager Integration
We integrated Credential Manager into our Flutter application to provide a seamless and secure authentication experience across platforms. On iOS, the app leverages Keychain and Passwords, while on Android it integrates with Google Password Manager and other compatible password managers. This enables secure credential storage, autofill, and streamlined sign-in, improving both user convenience and account security.
Developer: Nishant A S
CI Improvements
The app CI pipeline is now a full-fledged multi stage pipeline with multiple safeguards and checks that help ensure maintenance of code quality and safety. Lint and code review checks ensure merge requests follow the configured standards before any code is merged. Changelog automation has been integrated which builds the changelog automatically from the standardized commit messages. The check release tag stage ensures proper versioning is being followed. Build android and ios stages build packages for deploying to the playstore and also uploading to our in-house device farm frontend staging. The deploy to playstore stage pushes a build to Play Store Connect for Android releases.
Developer: Nishant A S
Flutter Flavors
Flavors helps us to create builds for different instances of our app. We have 2 flavors setup – a production flavor, used by general users, and a staging flavor used by developers to test the app in a staging environment. It allows users admin access in a staging environment, allowing users to securely test all features of the app, ensuring reliability across the platform.
Developer: Prabhav P
Animations
An exciting new loading screen and other fun, tasteful animations make the app a little more lively and fun to interact with.
Developer: Mohnish Hemanth Kumar
Developer Contributions
A nod to the developers who worked on a particular module, with hyperlinks linking to the developer’ LinkedIn profiles.
Developer: Udbhav Naveen Kumar
Product Manager: Aryan Narang
Attendance Timeline
The Attendance Timeline feature allows students to review their attendance data in detail. Students can view the days and timeslots on which they were marked present or absent with both a calendar view and a timeline view.
Developer: Udbhav Naveen Kumar
IRIS Systems
Infrastructure and Networking
Infrastructure Migration (Nutanix, server p4, server p5 to Proxmox 10)
Moving critical services from older nodes (Nutanix, server p4, server p5) to Proxmox 10 in phases. This improves hardware usage, capacity, and overall system architecture with minimal downtime.
Developer: Abdul Wasey
VPN and DNS Setup
Set up WireGuard for secure remote access, managed through the WireGuard Dashboard. Added Berkeley Internet Name Domain software for internal Domain Name System resolution to improve network connectivity.
Developer: Abdul Wasey
Hypervisor and Storage Upgrades
Upgraded the Proxmox Virtual Environment and the Ceph storage cluster. This keeps virtual machines highly available and prevents storage issues.
Developer: Abdul Wasey
Mailer Infrastructure Modernization
Replaced Zimbra with a new mail setup using Postal, Proxmox Mail Gateway, and Mailu. Separated the inbound and outbound mail pipelines to improve security and email delivery rates.
Developer: Shanjiv A
Database and Storage
Database High Availability
Currently testing MySQL Group Replication and InnoDB Cluster setups. Configuring MySQL Router and ProxySQL in a test environment to handle traffic and check failovers before moving to production.
Developers: Shanjiv A & Abhyuday K Hegde
Query Profiling and AWS Backups
Analyzed slow database queries to improve performance. Working on pushing backups to a cloud environment in AWS.
Developer: Abhyuday K Hegde
Staging Environment Refactor
Set up reusable database containers for staging. This makes development and staging environments match better and speeds up new deployments.
Developer: Mohanish Khatri
Monitoring, Logging, and Security
Load Balancer and Secure Sockets Layer / Transport Layer Security Automation
Cleaned up old load balancer rules. Switched certificate renewals to DNS challenges for streamlined and automatic updates.
Developers: Abdul Wasey, Shanjiv A & Akshay Revankar
Log Aggregation and Analysis
Moved log data into ClickHouse to process millions of logs. Analyzing these logs for network analytics and user traffic patterns.
Developers: Shanjiv A & Akshat Chaturvedi
Load Testing (Hostel Allotments)
Ran k6 load tests on the Hostel Allotments Module to simulate peak traffic. This helped identify bottlenecks and ensure system stability.
Developers: Shanjiv A, Sanjeev Holla S & Abhyuday K Hegde
Application and Continuous Integration / Continuous Deployment Operations
Service Upgrades
Upgraded Portainer and Zabbix to the latest stable versions for better security and monitoring.
Developers: Shanjiv A & Akshat Chaturvedi
Automated Alerting
Set up custom Discord bots to send real-time upgrade alerts to the team.
Developer: Mohanish Khatri
TinyFileManager Setup
Set up a lightweight web interface for easy server file management without needing to use the command line.
Developers: Shanjiv A & Akshat Chaturvedi
Platform Upgrades
- Sentry: Upgraded to the latest version for better error tracking, with a background monitor to keep services stable.
- Autolab: Upgraded the student assessment platform to the latest version.
- Moodle and BigBlueButton (Work In Progress): Currently testing upgrades in a clone environment. This includes database updates and checking Scalelite and video recording connections before a full rollout.
Developers: Shanjiv A & Nishant A S
IRIS Labs
Hardware
Hardware Debugger using Microwatt core (OpenPower Hardware Design Hackathon)
This project implements a minimal on-chip hardware debugging platform built around the Microwatt SoC. The design integrates essential system interfaces, including SPI for external flash support, UART for serial communication, and a JTAG slave interface for standard debug access, to integrate the functionality of OpenOCD and a debug probe into one single SoC. This design showcases the integration of an OpenPOWER-based general-purpose CPU with a dedicated debug infrastructure, allowing the CPU to actively control, monitor, and debug external or on-chip hardware targets. The design was taken from RTL to GDS using the OpenLane flow and successfully taped out with the sponsorship from IBM OpenPower through Chipfoundry.
Developers: Kushal Gowda C R, Syed Abubaker Bin Junaid, Ahan Prasannakumar Shetty, Adithya A & Adithya Santhanam
NetStream: Programmable Network Packet Processing Accelerator
NetStream is Iris Labs Hardware’s own end-to-end design. It is a programmable hardware packet-processing accelerator designed for edge networking and industrial IoT applications. The project focused on developing a complete hardware match-action pipeline capable of performing packet parsing, classification, and policy enforcement with deterministic latency. The design was taken through the complete ASIC design flow, from RTL development and verification to physical implementation (GDS). This was followed by developing the PCB design for it to complete an end-to-end product. It has successfully been selected for tapeout as a part of the Silicon to System Contest.
Developers: Kushal Gowda C R, Syed Abubaker Bin Junaid, Ahan Prasannakumar Shetty, Adithya A & Adithya Santhanam
Kria KR260 Edge AI Deployment using PetaLinux, Vitis AI and DPU
A parallel project focused on establishing a complete FPGA-based AI deployment framework on the AMD Xilinx Kria KR260 platform using Vivado, PetaLinux, Vitis AI, and the DPUCZDX8G accelerator. The developed framework was used for real-time plastic sorting through RGB-NIR sensor fusion. The established deployment framework was first used to implement a real-time plastic sorting system combining RGB imaging and Near-Infrared sensing for polymer classification. Building upon the same hardware and software infrastructure, the platform was later adapted to deploy YOLO-based object detection models, demonstrating the flexibility of the developed edge-AI pipeline for multiple computer vision applications.
Developers: Kushal Gowda C R, Syed Abubaker Bin Junaid, Ahan Prasannakumar Shetty, Adithya A & Adithya Santhanam
Software
Gyan Summarizer (In Progress)
Designed the end-to-end AI summarization pipeline for the Gyan module to generate concise summaries of student internship and placement experiences. Evaluated LLM-based summarization approaches and finalized the overall workflow. Identified improvements such as section-wise summarization and prompt optimization, Current Status: Pipeline design completed; production implementation is under development.
Developers: Pranav Vinod & Pranav Bhat P
IRIS Academic Chatbot (In Progress)
Developed the first Proof of Concept (PoC) of a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) chatbot for answering academic queries using official NITK documents. Implemented semantic document chunking, hybrid retrieval (BM25 + FAISS), and citation-based response generation. Validated the feasibility of the solution and established the core architecture.
Next Phase: Improve retrieval quality, response accuracy, user experience, and expand document coverage before production deployment.
Developers: Rudra Nikunjkumar Gandhi & Akhil Sakthieswaran
Profanity Checker
Developed a profanity detection microservice for moderating user-generated content in the Gyan module. Integrated the service with IRIS Web to automatically validate Gyan submissions before publication. Built using Django REST Framework with JWT authentication, Docker, and Nginx for production deployment.
Developers: Pranav Vinod, Pranav Bhat P, Pranavee Chinmayee Harish & Shruti Ramesh Hegde
Miscellaneous
Bootcamps and KSS
Hardware & Systems Team: KSS at FOSS Mangaluru covering Staging Server, Clock Domain Crossing (CDC), Static Timing Analysis (STA), and the OpenLane RTL-to-GDSII ASIC flow were conducted. These sessions introduced fundamental concepts in digital design and physical implementation, and were supplemented with assignments to reinforce practical understanding.
Contributors: Ahan Prasannakumar Shetty & Adithya A
Media & Publicity
Socials
This year, the IRIS team kept things focused on Instagram, dropping a curated batch of 14 posts. We experimented with new content formats, shared updates, and gave the student community a closer look behind the scenes of our work.
Contributors: Mayank Tiwari, Shrinivas Shiddharoodha Hongal, Penakacharla Harshith & Akash Gowda H U
Statistics
The above graph represents the Controller-wise Hits over the past year. The top modules were:
1. Students with 7M+ hits
2. Courses with 4.5M+ hits
3. Roles (actions required to check access and roles of users) with 3.5M+ hits
4. Placement/Companies 2.5M hits.
Core Team
| Sl. No. | Name | Position | Batch | Branch |
| 1. | Sanjeev Holla S | Tech Lead | 2026 | Information Technology |
| 2. | Akash Gowda H U | Admin Lead | 2026 | Mechanical |
| 3. | Aditya Raj Pandia | Head of Maintenance | 2026 | Electronics & Communication |
| 4. | M Vishak Kamath | Head of Development | 2026 | Electronics & Communication |
| 5. | Abdul Wasey | Systems Lead | 2026 | Metallurgy |
| 6. | Chirag S | App Lead | 2026 | Computer Science |
| 7. | Nishant A S | App Lead | 2027 | Electrical & Electronics |
| 8. | Bharath N | Web Lead | 2026 | Information Technology |
| 9. | Nikhil Kottoli | Web Lead | 2027 | Information Technology |
| 10. | Arjun R | Product Lead | 2026 | Computer Science |
| 11. | Kushal Gowda C R | Labs Hardware Lead | 2026 | Electronics & Communication |
| 12. | Anush Dattanand Revankar | Labs Software Lead | 2026 | Artificial intelligence |
| 13. | Pranav Vinodh | Labs Software Secretary | 2027 | Information Technology |
Web Team
| Sl. No. | Name | Batch | Branch |
| 1. | Pranav Simha N | 2026 | Electronics & Communication |
| 2. | Agnirudra Sil | 2026 | Civil |
| 3. | Utsav Bhamra | 2026 | Computer Science |
| 4. | Nilansh Gupta | 2026 | Mechanical |
| 5. | Aditi Pandey | 2027 | Information Technology |
| 6. | Abhimanyu Kapoor | 2028 | Computation and Data Science |
| 7. | Shouryadip Chakraborthy | 2028 | Electronics & Communication |
| 8. | Harshith Vellapha | 2028 | Information Technology |
| 9. | Mayank Tiwari | 2028 | Civil |
| 10. | Malla Anirudh Karthikeya | 2028 | Artificial intelligence |
| 11. | Harsh Malviya | 2029 | Civil |
App Team
| Sl. No. | Name | Batch | Branch |
| 1. | Shashank Jain | 2026 | Information Technology |
| 2. | Akshat Bharara | 2027 | Computer Science |
| 3. | Mohnish Hemanth Kumar | 2027 | Computer Science |
| 4. | Abhijith Sogal V | 2027 | Civil |
| 5. | Udbhav N | 2028 | Computation and Data Science |
| 6. | Prabhav P | 2028 | Information Technology |
| 7. | Shriya Bharadwaj | 2028 | Artificial intelligence |
| 8. | Anirudh Nayak | 2028 | Computer Science |
| 9. | Siri Konda | 2029 | Computer Science |
| 10 | Jeevan Raj G | 2029 | Computer Science |
Systems Team
| Sl. No. | Name | Batch | Branch |
| 1. | Akshat Chaturvedi | 2026 | Information Technology |
| 2. | Shanjiv A | 2027 | Computer Science |
| 3. | Abhyuday K Hegde | 2028 | Computer Science |
| 4. | Mohanish Khatri | 2027 | Electrical & Electronics |
| 5. | Damian Jude Mascarenhas | 2028 | Mechanical |
| 6. | Nipun Attri | 2029 | Computer Science |
| 7. | Manraj Singh | 2029 | Computation and Data Science |
| 8. | Amogh S Nadig | 2029 | Electrical & Electronics |
Product Team
| Sl. No. | Name | Batch | Branch |
| 1. | Shashank Gupta | 2026 | Information Technology |
| 2. | Penakacharla Harshith | 2027 | Chemical |
| 3. | Surya Srinivas | 2027 | Electrical & Electronics |
| 4. | Siddharth Srivastava | 2027 | Mining |
| 5. | Aryan Narang | 2027 | Mathematical and Computational Sciences |
| 6. | Sumit | 2028 | Civil |
| 7. | Arya R Shedbal | 2028 | Electronics & Communication |
Labs Hardware Team
| Sl. No. | Name | Batch | Branch |
| 1. | Ahan Prasannakumar Shetty | 2026 | Electronics & Communication |
| 2. | Syed Abubaker Bin Junaid | 2026 | Electronics & Communication |
| 3. | Adhitya Santhanam | 2027 | Electronics & Communication |
| 4. | Adithya A | 2027 | Electronics & Communication |
| 5. | Shamit Hoysal Bhanu Prakash | 2028 | Electronics & Communication |
| 6. | Parthip Dev K K | 2028 | Electronics & Communication |
| 7. | Chetan S K | 2028 | Electrical & Electronics |
| 8. | Krish Hitesh Mehta | 2028 | Electronics & Communication |
| 9. | Chavada Vishva Anilkumar | 2028 | Electronics & Communication |
Labs Software Team
| Sl. No. | Name | Batch | Branch |
| 1. | Pranav Bhat P | 2027 | Information Technology |
| 2. | Rudra Nikunjkumar Gandhi | 2027 | Electronics & Communication |
| 3. | Pranavee Chinmayee Harish | 2027 | Electronics & Communication |
| 4. | Shruti Ramesh Hegde | 2027 | Electronics & Communication |
| 5. | Akhil Sakthieswaran | 2027 | Computer Science |
| 6. | Pranav V Pogal | 2028 | Information Technology |
| 7. | Siddhanth Saha | 2028 | Computation and Data Science |
| 8. | Yash Roshan | 2028 | Information Technology |
| 9. | Debarun Saha | 2029 | Civil |
Media Team
| Sl. No. | Name | Batch | Branch |
| 1. | Manish M Dev | 2028 | Civil |
| 2. | Soma Svanik | 2029 | Information Technology |
Alumni Mentors
| Sl. No. | Name | Batch | Branch |
| 1. | Akshay Revankar | 2018 | Electronics & Communication |
| 2. | Sushanth Satesh Rao | 2023 | Electrical & Electronics |
| 3. | Vedant Anup Tarale | 2025 | Electronics & Communication |
| 4. | Fahim Ahmed | 2025 | Information Technology |
| 5. | N Dhruva | 2025 | Electronics & Communication |
| 6. | Parth Mittal | 2024 | Electronics & Communication |
| 7. | Danish Juneja | 2024 | Electronics & Communication |
| 8. | K A Gaganashree | 2024 | Electronics & Communication |
| 9. | Gaurang Velingkar | 2023 | Information Technology |
| 10. | Salman Shah | 2019 | Information Technology |
| 11. | Harsh Vardhan Jain | 2022 | Electronics & Communication |
| 12. | Guhan Sidharth M | 2023 | Mechanical |
| 13. | Vithik Shah | 2021 | Information Technology |
Faculty
| Sl. No. | Name | Role |
| 1. | Dr. Mohit P Tahiliani | Faculty Advisor, IRIS, NITK |
| 2. | Dr. Shyam Sreenivasa Kamath | Professor-in-Charge, MIS Office |
| 3. | Dr. Anand Kumar M | Former Faculty-in-Charge, MIS Office |
| 4. | Dr. K V Gangadharan | Head of Center for Interdisciplinary Studies (CIDS) & Coordinator, Centre for System Design |
MIS Officers
| Sl. No. | Name |
| 1. | Mr. Gangadhara B (Ex) |
| 2. | Mr. Arun Kumar |
| 3. | Harshitha Shetty |
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