INDIAN INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY KANPUR

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About

Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur (IIT Kanpur) is a public technical and research university located in Kanpur, Uttar Pradesh, India. It was declared to be an Institute of National Importance by the Government of India under the Institutes of Technology Act.

Established in 1959 as one of the first IIT, the institute was created with the assistance of a consortium of nine US research universities as part of the Kanpur Indo-American Programme (KIAP).

INDIAN INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY KANPUR
INDIAN INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY KANPUR

History

Campus

Organisation and administration

Admissions

Computer Centre

History

Faculty Building, IIT Kanpur

IIT Kanpur was established by an Act of Parliament in 1959. The institute was started in December 1959 in a room in the canteen building of the Harcourt Butler Technological Institute at Agricultural Gardens in Kanpur.

During the first ten years of its existence, a consortium of nine US universities (namely MIT, UCB, California Institute of Technology, Princeton University, Carnegie Institute of Technology, University of Michigan, Ohio State University, Case Institute of Technology and Purdue University) helped set up IIT Kanpur’s research laboratories and academic programmes under the Kanpur Indo-American Programme (KIAP). The first director of the institute was P. K. Kelkar (after whom the Central Library was renamed in 2002).

The earliest computer courses were started at IIT Kanpur in August 1963 on an IBM 1620 system. The initiative for computer education came from the Electrical engineering department, then under the chairmanship of Prof. H.K. Kesavan, who was concurrently the chairman of Electrical Engineering and head of the Computer Centre. Prof. Harry Huskey of the University of California, Berkeley, who preceded Kesavan, helped with the computer activity at IIT-Kanpur. In 1971, the institute began an independent academic program in Computer Science and Engineering, leading to MTech and PhD degrees.

In 1972 the KIAP program ended, in part because of tensions due to the U.S. support of Pakistan. Government funding was also reduced as a reaction to the sentiment that the IIT’s were contributing to the brain drain.

The institute’s annual technical festival, Techkriti, was first started in 1995.

Campus

IIT Kanpur panorama from Hall 7

IIT Kanpur is located on the Grand Trunk Road, 15 kilometres (9.3 mi) west of Kanpur City and measures close to 420 hectares (1,000 acres). This land was donated by the Government of Uttar Pradesh in 1960 and by March 1963 the institute had moved to its current location.

PK Kelkar Library

The institute has around 6478 students with 3938 undergraduate students and 2540 postgraduate students and about 500 research associates

Organisation and administration

Governance

All IITs follow the same organization structure which has President of India as visitor at the top of the hierarchy. Directly under the president is the IIT Council. Under the IIT Council is the board of governors of each IIT. Under the board of governors is the director, who is the chief academic and executive officer of the IIT.

Academics

IIT Kanpur Faculty Building

Undergraduate

IIT Kanpur offers four-year BTech programs in Aerospace Engineering, Biological Sciences and Bio-engineering, Chemical Engineering, Civil Engineering, Computer Science and Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Materials Science and Engineering and Mechanical Engineering. IIT Kanpur also offers four-year B.S. Programs in Pure and Applied Sciences (Mathematics, Physics and Chemistry in particular), Earth Science and Economics.

New academic system

From 2011, IIT Kanpur has started offering a four-year BS program in sciences and has kept its BTech Program intact. In order to reduce the number of student exams, IIT Kanpur has also abolished the earlier system of conducting two mid-term examinations.

Postgraduate

The institute also offers two-tier MSc courses in areas of basic sciences in which students are admitted through Joint Admission Test for MSc (JAM) exam. The institute also offers M.Des. (2 years), M.B.A. (2 years) and MSc (2 years) degrees. Admissions to M. Des are made once a year through both Graduate Aptitude Test in Engineering (GATE) and Common Entrance Exam for Design (CEED). Until 2011, admissions to the M.B.A. program were accomplished through the Joint Management Entrance Test (JMET), held yearly, and followed by a Group Discussion/Personal Interview process. In 2011, JMET was replaced by Common Admission Test (CAT).

Admissions

Undergraduate admissions until 2012 were being done through the national-level Indian Institute of Technology Joint Entrance Examination (IIT-JEE). Following the Ministry of Human Resource Development’s decision to replace IIT-JEE with a common engineering entrance examination, IIT Kanpur’s admissions are now based on JEE (Joint Entrance Examination) -Advanced level along with other IITs.

Postgraduate admissions are made through the Graduate Aptitude Test in Engineering and Common Admission Test.

Computer Centre

The Computer Centre is one of the advanced computing service centre among academic institution in India. IT hosts IIT Kanpur website and provides personal web space for students and faculties. It also provides a spam filtered email server and high speed fibre optic Internet to all the hostels and the academics. Users have multiple options to choose among various interfaces to access mail service. It has Linux and windows laboratories equipped with dozens of high-end software like MATLAB, Autocad, Ansys, Abaqus etc. for use of students. Apart from departmental computer labs, computer centre hosts more than 300 Linux terminals and more than 100 Windows terminals and is continuously available to the students for academic work and recreation. Computer centre has recently adopted an open source software policy for its infrastructure and computing. Various high-end compute and GPU servers are remotely available from data centre for user computation.

Computer centre has multiple super computing clusters for research and teaching activity. In June 2014 IIT Kanpur launched their 2nd supercomputer which is India’s 5th most powerful supercomputer as of now.

“Above mentioned information taken from Wikipedia”