The All India Student Congress 2013 was organised by the Institution of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) India Council and IEEE Madras Section at Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham, near Coimbatore.
A student of Electrical Engineering from Delhi Technological University and a member of IEEE Delhi section, I have always been inclined towards renewable and sustainable technologies and their future prospects in India.
The conference topics ranged from power electronics to renewable energy and from power systems to smart grids and SCADA.
It enabled the participants to work as a team and come up with critical analysis of the projects showcased.
As many as 330 select student delegates from 80 institutions across eight States attended the event.
The main event was the innovative project showcase competition where 33 projects were short-listed.
The most awaited event — “Innovative Project Showcase Competition” — took place on the third day. Students presented their ideas and innovations using posters and prototypes.
Prize-winning entry
Samantha Sharma and I presented a poster on “Mitigating Cyber Security Hazards in Smart Grids using Novel Security Management Architecture,” which won us the first prize.
Our research focussed on identifying various cyber threats to the energy sector and calculating their risk potential in India. We had suggested the use of the novel security management architecture that focussed on mitigating the cyber threats and hazards in smart grids.
We also came up with a mathematical technique to provide numerical values for the threats, their respective vulnerabilities and the cost to the company in case of a successful attack, to calculate their risk potential.
This can be used in the industry where companies can use their security data, audit it and find out the weaknesses in their cyber armours and secure it from future cyber attacks.
The student congress did not focus on ideologies alone, but on realistic and pragmatic avenues in the fields of power and energy and motivated participants to come up with out of the box ideas to use resources at our disposal for advancing technology for humanity.