IRIS, NITK Annual Report 2023-24

As we reflect upon the journey of IRIS into its eighth year since its inception in 2016, the past year has been a testament to its continued evolution and impactful expansion. In the year 2023-24 too, IRIS demonstrated its unwavering commitment to excellence, innovation, and service enhancement across various dimensions.

IRIS Website

New Launches

Testing and Consultancy Module

Traditionally, managing consultancy projects at NITK involved a cumbersome process with extensive paperwork and administrative complexities. However, the introduction of the Testing and Consultancy (T&C) module on IRIS has transformed this experience.

NITK faculty can now submit project proposals effortlessly in just six steps via IRIS, specifying affiliation, co-investigators, collaborating companies, project charges, and uploading essential documents. The module also includes functionalities for requesting additional information, generating client payment forms and proforma invoices, and monitoring project funds. Admins benefit from features like setting recommenders, creating cash flow records, and accessing a comprehensive statistics tab for in-depth project insights, significantly enhancing administrative control and project management efficiency.

The module’s development began in January 2023 as a consultancy project and was completed in June 2024. As of June’24, the module has received 1000+ projects from 650+ companies, which continues to expand.

As an extension to T&C, a Research and Development (R&D) module was also sanctioned in Oct’23, which is in its final stages of completion. This will enable the NITK faculties and administration to effectively manage and track the end-to-end life cycle of these projects.

Developers: Hrushikesh J, RS Muthukumar, Anirudh Prabhakaran
Product Managers: Rakshita Varadarajan, Guhan Siddharth
Manager: Sushanth Rao, Akshay Revankar
Principle Investigator: Dr. Mohit P Tahiliani

NEP Category C Courses Allocation

Aligning with the National Education Policy (NEP), IRIS successfully implemented the allocation of Category C Liberal Arts courses in just one month. This comprehensive module played a pivotal role in handling applications from over 2000 students. With the admin panel, the courses, seat matrix, and deadlines can be configured. Students could fill in their preferences, and the system auto-calculated their allocated course based on the CGPA, with the entrance exam rank qualifying as a tiebreaker. With an initial hiccup, we ensured a more transparent, fair, and efficient system for the allocation process, promoting a student-centric and performance-driven approach in line with NEP guidelines.

Developer: Sanjeev Holla
Product Manager: Danish Juneja
Manager: Parth Mittal

Non Teaching Staff Recruitment Portal

Each year the institute conducts a recruitment for Non-Teaching staff like the Registrar and Assistant Registrar. To streamline and digitize the process, the institute required a website to be built. Team IRIS successfully built a portal for any applicant to apply through an 8-step process, pay the required fees, upload documents, and track their application status. An admin panel with Role Based Access Control (RBAC) was also built to let the scrutiny committee oversee applications and shortlist candidates. The completion of Phase 1 of the project saw 2000+ applications being received in a span of two months and successfully managed all the operations.

Phase 2 (Oct’23 – Apr’24) saw further improvements to the portal – email notifications, addition of trade specializations, seating arrangement and attendance sheet generation during interviews, automatic Call Letter generation, digital Letters of Recommendations (LoRs), and numerous UI/UX improvements.

Website: recruitment.nitk.ac.in
Developers: Parth Mittal, N Dhurva, Gaurang Velingkar, Sushanth Rao, Utkarsh Mahajan
Product Managers: Danish Juneja, Guhan Siddharth, Akshay Srivastava
Principal Investigator: Dr Sowmya Kamath

Hostel Elections

Hostel Elections for messes and hostel blocks marked a historic transition to a digital platform, courtesy of IRIS. Our dedicated module facilitated this process, recording an impressive 6.5k votes with a substantial 56.15% voter turnout. Remarkably, we developed this module in just 15 days, leveraging a simple yet effective interface using IRIS Forms. Ensuring both anonymity and security, our system allowed individuals to cast their votes for their respective messes and hostel blocks only.

Developer: Harshit Gupta
Product Manager: Danish Juneja

UIMS and Faculty Appraisal Integration

The new faculty module significantly streamlines the data entry process, allowing faculty members to input information throughout the year instead of only during the annual appraisal period. This system includes an import feature from UIMS to Faculty Appraisal with a simple toggle, enhancing efficiency. The module also boasts a revamped UI for improved user experience. This change has been made possible after 2 years of work and 2024 will be the first year in production.

Additionally, this approach promotes UIMS as the central hub for data entry, enabling more processes to leverage this single source. For instance, it facilitates the direct transfer of data to departmental and NITK websites via UIMS (currently a work in progress).

Developer: Parth Mittal
Product Manager: Ananya Chavali
Manager: Gaurang Velingkar

Hostel Complaints Module 2.0

The team revamped the Hostel Complaints module, which was a significant leap forward in providing students with a seamless and efficient platform for lodging complaints directly through IRIS, improvising the complaint management process. In the past, students were required to visit the Hostel Office physically to file a complaint. However, with the upgraded system, students can now effortlessly submit, edit, and track the status of their complaints without ever leaving the comfort of their space. Complaints are categorized and sent to the respective authorities (CCC and Hostel Office currently) who can then update the status of the complaint along with any comments.

In a span of 4 months (Mar – Jun’24), 500+ complaints have been filed with 350+ being solved.

Developers: N Dhruva, Aditya Raj
Product Manager: Akash Gowda H U
Managers: Parth Mittal, Sanjeev Holla
Special thanks: Dr. Kiran Rao

Credits Tracker

Previously, students could view semester-wise and consolidated exam grades but had to manually calculate and ensure they met the B.Tech. curriculum’s credit requirements for degree eligibility each semester. The new Credits Tracker module allows students to track their credits across course types, ensuring accurate credit calculations based on their curriculum and branch. The module features three main components: Total Major Credits displayed as a radial chart, Course Category-wise Credits with safety level indicators, and Semester-wise Credits shown as a bar graph.

An admin panel to set the credit requirements, branch-wise and category-wise has also been added.

Developers: Parth Mittal
Product Manager: Abhinav Raghunandan
Managers: Sanjeev Holla, Vedant Tarale
Special thanks: Dr Ramesh Kini M

Mess Finance

Students pay a mess fee each semester but often go on breaks where their balance isn’t used and can be refunded later. To help them track their mess balance, the hostel office can now upload mess credit and debit details for each student via CSV files and view these details within a defined date range. Students can easily access their monthly mess balance statements, ensuring they have full visibility and control over their unused balances.

Developers: Arif Kallaru
Product Manager: Aadarsh L N
Managers: Parth Mittal, Hrushikesh J

Enhancements and Fixes

Gyan Revamp

Gyan, which is a collection of students’s internship and placement interview experiences, underwent a major facelift. In addition to the new UI, more filters were introduced, such as company, student name, year, degree, and branch. TinyMCE – a What You See Is What You Get (WYSIWYG) editor was integrated into Gyan to improve the experience of filling a Gyan.

Developers: RS Muthukumar
Managers: Parth Mittal, Sushanth Rao

Career Development Centre

We launched a new Student Point of Contact (SPoC) dashboard, making it easy for the CDC team to access information about their assigned companies. With a sleek calendar widget, tracking companies became easier.

Minor improvements and bug fixes enhanced the UI/UX for all users, like the removal of the View Button on the Companies page and streamlining the UX through the Glance Button.

A refactor was also done in the code base to accommodate the newer branches introduced in the curriculum, like Artificial Intelligence and Computational Data Science.

A new feature is being introduced to facilitate the internship and placement process for PG students where hiring falls under the 6-month internship and placement category in addition to the existing internship and placement categories.

Developers: Harshit Gupta
Product Manager: Akshay Srivastava

Calendar and Events Management System

Clubs can now track registrations along with a questionnaire for the registrants. During the event, organizers can mark the attendance of the attendees and export them in the desired format. CEMS events can also be shared now with a click of a button. Very soon, the academic calendars will also be visible on the CEMS calendar UI.

Developers: Vedant Anup Tarale, Anush Revankar
Product Manager: Ananya Chavali

Attendance

A new and improved UI was introduced for faculties in the attendance dashboard. Numerical statistics such as the total number of classes conducted, the total number of hours taken, and the number of students can be seen at a glance. A bar graph displaying the distribution of students in four categories – 0-60, 60-75, 75-90, 90-100 – has been added. Upon clicking each bar, all the details of the students falling in that category can be viewed.

A new feature to mark the default attendance as either present or absence has been added to improve the UX. Faculties can also define the type of class as either Lecture, Theory, or Practical to better distinguish the number of hours spent on each.

Developers: RS Muthukumar, Parth Mittal, Hrushikesh J
Product Manager: Abhinav Raghunandan

IRIS Forms

The in-house alternative to Google Forms saw some UI/UX updates:

Forms permission can also be given to specific hostels and messes.
An automatic deadline can be set to a form after which it would stop accepting responses without manual intervention.
Users can be found using an autocomplete menu while being able to select multiple users at once

IRIS Forms experienced significant usage growth this year, surpassing 150,000 hits compared to 58,000 hits the previous year, marking a threefold increase.

Developers: Arif Kallaru, Harshit Gupta
Product Manager: Fahim Ahmed
Manager: Parth Mittal, Hrushikesh J

Static Search

Search Bar

A simple update to make the search bar at the top right corner of the screen, functional. Users can now search across all modules to find their favourite one without having to click and navigate multiple times. This was much needed owing to the growing number of modules.

Developers: N Dhruva
Product Manager: Akash Gowda H U
Manager: Hrushikesh J

PG Research Module & Course Registration

Numerous advancements have been made to this module, making the entire Synopsis and Thesis Submission process digital. Several meetings were conducted with stakeholders to discuss and improve the requirements and feedback.

The Course Registration module underwent a major refactor to clean up the code base for readability and consistency. Furthermore, new features have been added:

The Green Form for faculties has been improved with information about the student at a glance.
During Course Registration, both students and faculties can choose the registration type (like Open Elective) of a floated course to avoid confusion and ensure correctness.

Both modules are in their final stages of testing and will soon be made live.

Developers: Aditya Agarwal, Keerthi Bhushan, Vedant Tarale, Sanjeev Holla S
Product Manager: Danish Juneja, Fahim Ahmed
Manager: Parth Mittal, Hrushikesh J, Ishaan Singh
Special Thanks: Prof. Dwarakish G S (Dean Academic),
Dr. Arun M (Associate Dean UG), Dr. Ramesh Kini (Associate Dean PG)

Department Websites Revamp

To enhance the institute’s websites, a new site is being developed with the NITK theme to standardize UI/UX. Built with Next.js and Strapi, the design is finalized, and development is underway.

Developers: Minank KP, R S Muthukumar
Product Manager: Vandana S
Principal Investigator: Prof. Dr. Biju R Mohan

IRIS App

New Releases

Flutter Version Upgrade

The code base has been migrated from Flutter version 3.0.1 to 3.19.0, updating packages to the latest versions and addressing deprecations. Deprecated widgets have been upgraded, and unsupported packages have been replaced with suitable alternatives. The code base has been refactored to ensure uniformity among widgets and functions. App routing has been improved to allow for potential deep linking. Redundant calls and null checks have been removed to enhance app rendering speed. Error logging in the app has been improved for better diagnostics.

Developers: Shashank S M, Shashank G, Anirudh V Gubbi, Nishant A S,
Shashank Jain, Aman Revankar, Akshat B, Vishak Kamath