There is nothing like adversity to boost ingenuity. As we battle our way through this pandemic to strive and improve IRIS, it’s only fair to reminisce and never forget how we got here. It’s been a little more than six years since IRIS started out. From humble beginnings to solidifying our position as the Institute’s Enterprise Resource Management System, IRIS has become a necessity in times like these, especially during the pandemic. From Course registration, the very first module that we introduced, to the array of modules we introduced during the pandemic to ease our way into the current virtual environment, IRIS has been instrumental in the functioning of our Institute. Though the modules introduced last year were massive in the healthy functioning of the institute, it would be unwise not to credit the importance of the work done by the IRIS team in the past six years because the modules introduced then are reaping the rewards of acknowledgement and appreciation now. With Covid 19 forcing us into our homes, IRIS Team introduced BigBlueButton, used for video lectures; Microsoft Teams Integration, to mimic a classroom environment and is exploring other avenues to complete the virtual experience.
As unpredictable as the year was and the future unbeknownst, it was absolutely important to digitise other offline processes and complete the package. We worked on virtualizing offline procedures like the PG Research module, University Information Management System, Academic Certificates, Library Book recommendation, application for various admission programs, club certificates, Projects Portal and many more. It was a proud moment for us as we unveiled the first version of the all-new IRIS mobile application developed on Flutter while mentoring the future app developers of NITK. Since numerous NITK academic activities were on IRIS, the Systems Team dived into industry-standard research and implementation to ensure the resilience of the systems and successfully set up a scalable deployment of Moodle on Kubernetes. To bridge the gap between an offline and online environment, the team worked on research and implementation of many exploratory projects like Smart Proctoring System, Virtual and Augmented Reality based Convocation completely from Open Source Tools. Nurturing future developers of NITK, IRIS initiatives like Code-In Bootcamp for Ruby on Rails (RoR) and Flutter was immensely popular among students as it attracted around 500+ participants.
It requires a great bunch to achieve the feat that we, as a team, accomplished last year and thus the significant proportion of credit goes to the developers, product managers and respective team managers who have put in countless shifts to maintain the standards in place and push the boundaries of innovation. The Core team was paramount in the execution and functioning of IRIS and our many modules. Last but not the least, the help and support we received from the Centre of System Design (CSD), Central Computing Centre (CCC), the MIS Office and various influential individuals who helped us push our boundaries, was significant. We will be forever grateful to Professor Ananthanarayana VS (Deputy Director and Chairman, MIS), Professor Ashvini Chaturvedi (Associate Dean UG), Prof K V Gangadharan (Coordinator, Centre for Systems Design) and Prof Mohit P Tahliani (Faculty Advisor, IRIS) for their ceaseless backing which championed us forward and being the pillars of support for the IRIS Team. The team will always be grateful for the guidance and support provided by former IRIS leads: Akshay Revankar, Salman Shah, Manish Kumar, Govind Jeevan and Pavan Vachhani. We also take this opportunity to thank the Institute’s Director, Deans, HoDs and Faculties of various departments or NITK, the student council and the students of NITK for entrusting us with this responsibility and supporting us throughout the year.
As we look ahead, we are more optimistic than ever of the enormous opportunity ahead of us. Innovation and Technology continue to be at the centre of change globally and we are among the best-positioned institutes to lead this change and accelerate our digital journey to realise our ever-changing objectives.
Warm regards Shashank S & Vithik Shah
Web
– Completed, – Under Development
Project
Contributors
Status
PG Research
Abhishek Kumar, Nadeer Ali
University Information Management System
Ishaan Singh, Gaurang Velingkar
Push Notification Service
Ishaan Singh, Gaurang Velingkar, Guhan Siddharth M
– Completed, 
– Under Development
