Samsung Partners IIT Kharagpur to Setup ‘Samsung Digital Academy’

Samsung India has signed a MoU with IIT Kharagpur to set up Samsung Digital Academy at the institutes’ campus, thereby strengthening its commitment towards the government’s Skill India mission and also bolstering the Digital India initiative.

Mr. YoungKi Byun, Managing Director, Samsung Research & Development Institute, Delhi and Prof. Sriman Kumar, Deputy Director, IIT Kharagpur signed the MoU

The Department of Computer Science and Engineering, IIT Kharagpur, will host the Samsung Innovation Lab and train students on Internet of Things (IoT) through Tizen-based operating systems helping them learn industry-relevant skills and making them job-ready. Tizen is the operating system that is used by Samsung in its mobile phones, televisions, refrigerators and many other smart home appliances.

Samsung Digital Academy is the Company’s corporate social initiative that aims to bridge the digital divide and proficiency gaps in the country by skilling students on cutting-edge technology. Through this partnership with IIT Kharagpur, the academy targets to train over 100 students in the next three years.

“Samsung is happy to partner with IIT Kharagpur to help students leverage the growing digital technologies market, especially Internet of things which is the future of connectivity. With Samsung Digital Academy, students will be able to hone their programming skills on Tizen, the operating system for IoT. We are committed to work in the field of next generation technology development and participate in the growth of advanced research areas of IoT. Innovation is the future and we at Samsung encourage students, on a regular basis, to develop their talent,” said Mr. YoungKi Byun, Managing Director, Samsung Research & Development Institute, Delhi.

“We are delighted to work with Samsung for this initiative. The partnership will help our students in developing their skills on the emerging areas of IoT and Artificial Intelligence. Students enrolling for the courses will be able to utilize this opportunity to be part of an exciting, new era in smart devices that will help shape the future,” said Mr. Partha Pratim Chakrabarti, Director, IIT Kharagpur.

The curriculum at the Samsung Digital Academy has been conceptualized for easy comprehension of beginners in app development. The course includes the basics of web application development on Tizen, learning how to test, debug apps and later develop Tizen ecosystem tools and other framework libraries associated with Tizen. The course will be taught over 14 weeks through classroom lectures, assignments and lab room sessions, self-study and mini projects. Extensive tutorials and approach documents will also be provided to students to facilitate practical exercises.

“We are looking forward to partnering with Samsung on setting up an IoT Lab in our department. This lab will enable our students to have hands-on experience with the Tizen operating system as well as facilitate research and app development on IoT platforms and embedded systems,” said Prof. Sudeshna Sarkar, Head, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, IIT Kharagpur.

Earlier this year, Samsung launched the Samsung IoT Innovation Lab, under its Samsung Digital Academy initiative, with the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi at the latter’s campus. The lab will endeavour to build a smarter communication landscape for end users and its current focus is on three major activities including research at IIT Delhi, collaborative research with Samsung and lab exercises for IoT course/training offered by Samsung. The IoT lab will carry out research on areas such as sensor data processing, network architecture and embedded intelligence.

What is Internet of Things?

Internet of Things is the concept of connecting physical and smart devices, other than traditional devices such as computers, smartphones and tablets, to the internet. This can include devices such as cars, kitchen appliances, heart rate monitors, lights inside a home or an office building, alarm clocks and others gargets so that data can be exchanged through the sensors inside them. The concept of the Internet of Things was invented by and term coined by Peter T. Lewis in September 1985.

Gartner, Inc forecasts that 8.4 billion connected things will be in use worldwide in 2017, up 31% from 2016, and will reach 20.4 billion by 2020. Total spending on endpoints and services will reach almost $2 trillion in 2017.