ASME E-Fests Begin with Successful Asia Pacific Event; First U.S. ASME EFx™ Event to Launch in March

The third year of the ASME Engineering Festivals™ (ASME E-Fests) program kicked off earlier this month with ASME E-Fest Asia Pacific in India — a three-day celebration of engineering that incorporated a variety of informative panel sessions and workshops, entertainment and several exciting student competitions including the Human Powered Vehicle Challenge, the Student Design Competition, the Innovative Additive Manufacturing 3D Challenge and the Old Guard Oral Presentation and Technical Poster Competitions.

The event, which was held which was held from Feb. 1 to 3 at Vellore Institute of Technology (VIT) in Vellore, India, was also the biggest E-Fest so far in the program’s three-year history. Nearly 1,300 students, faculty and volunteers from more than 70 universities took part in the spirited festival for engineering students.

ASME E-Fest Asia Pacific officially opened Friday morning with a lamp lighting ceremony featuring senior leaders from VIT including the Honorable Vice Chancellor G. Viswanathan, Vice President Sekar Viswanathan and Vice Chancellor Anand A. Samuel. Among the representatives from ASME at the ceremony were Callie Tourigny, ASME’s senior vice president of Student and Early Career Engagement, and John Hasselmann, ASME’s managing director for Global Public Affairs.

Addressing the aspiring engineers in the audience during her remarks at the lamp lighting session, Callie Tourigny pointed out that ASME could be a valuable resource for them as they embarked upon their careers. “Every single one of you have an incredible opportunity now and ahead to make a difference in the world,” she said. “As a professional society, ASME is pleased to expand our mission here as India’s economy continues to grow. ASME’s mission is to promote and advance engineering knowledge to improve the quality of life. We are committed to ensuring that all of you have the tools and experience you need to solve the complex challenges that face our world.”

The festival also encompassed a number of career development sessions and workshops that were extremely popular with E-Fest Asia Pacific attendees, including an all-day workshop on biologically inspired design led by Prashant Dhawan and Seema Anand, co-founders of Bio-mimicry Network India; a 3D printing workshop, “3D Printing — Transforming the Way we Design and Manufacture,” an Engineering for Change (E4C) workshop, “E4C: Engineering Social Innovation”; and a session, “The Path Forward at ASME,” in which ASME volunteers and staff discussed the various volunteer and leadership opportunities that are available to students and early career engineers through the Society and the professional and personal benefits participating as a volunteer can provide.
 

(Left to right) John Beck, manager of member development for ASME, Student Design Competition judge and early career engineer Dhaval Trivedi, ASME Senior Vice President Callie Tourigny, Prakhar Deep of the ASME India Office and ASME E-Fest Steering Committee member Sadarth Jadeja at the “Path Forward at ASME” session at E-Fest Asia Pacific.

In addition to the career development opportunities, E-Fest Asia Pacific hosted several of the Society’s major student competitions, including the Human Powered Vehicle Challenge (HPVC). Forty teams registered for the competition, which asks teams of students to design and build human powered vehicles that they then put to the test in men’s and women’s speed races and a grueling two-and-half hour endurance competition.

The team from the E-Fest’s host school, Vellore Institute of Technology (VIT), took first place overall – and the $1,000 top prize – at the HPVC in India. The team, which was the overall winner at last year’s festival in India, also placed second in the endurance event, third in the men’s and women’s speed races, and earned a special award for sportsmanship at the competition.

Placing second overall at the HPVC was the team from NMIMS Mukesh Patel School of Technology Management and Engineering. In addition to taking home the $750 second prize, the team also received $500 for placing first in both the men’s and women’s drag races. Kalinga Institute of Industrial Technology took third place overall, winning $500, as well as the $250 first place prize in the HPVC endurance event and second place in the men’s drag race speed event.

Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Bombay took top honors at the Student Design Competition at E-Fest Asia Pacific, taking home the $500 first prize. For this year’s competition, “The Pick-and-Place Race,” students were challenged to design and construct remote-controlled devices that could quickly collect a variety of balls of different sizes from their stands and place them in a collection area without causing the balls to hit the ground. The team from VIT was the runner-up at the competition, receiving the $300 second prize, while a team of students from Hong Kong Polytechnic University won the $150 third prize.

Other prize winners at E-Fest Asia Pacific included the team from Swami Keshvanand Institute of Technology Management and Gramothan, which placed first in the Innovative Additive Manufacturing 3D (IAM3D) Challenge; Satish Ranjan Pradhan from National Institute of Technology Rourkela, who placed first in the Old Guard Oral Presentation Competition; and Mohammed Shoaib from the Anurag Group of Institutions, who took top honors in the Old Guard Technical Poster Competition.

E-Fest Asia Pacific, which also featured two lively rock concerts that enthralled the students attending, was an “an incredible experience,” according to Vineet Vashi, one of the event’s student organizers. “It was a dream to host the E-Fest at VIT,” said Vashi, who along with fellow students Pujan Parvadia and Manas Chavan, led a team of 150 students who coordinated the festival.

The Society will present two more E-Fests during the next two months. The first, E-Fest West, will take place from March 15 to 17 at the Fairplex in Pomona, Calif. For more information, to view the preliminary program or to register, visit https://efestwest.asme.org. Discounted early registration is available through March 15 for the other festival to be held this spring, E-Fest North, which will take place from April 5 to 7 at Michigan State University in East Lansing, Mich. To learn more or to register, visit https://efestnorth.asme.org.

In other related news, ASME is presenting its first ASME EFx™ event in the United States next month. EFx events are smaller-scale versions of E-Fests that can be easily staged by local colleges and universities. The first EFx in the United States, EFx NYU: MakerHack, will be offered on March 9 and 10 at NYU Tandon MakerSpace in Brooklyn, N.Y. To learn more or to register, visit https://efxnyu.asme.org.

For more information on the E-Fest programs, visit https://efests.asme.org. Universities who are interested in hosting an E-Fest in 2020 should contact Brandy Smith at smithb@asme.org. For information on hosting an EFx, contact Kristen Leoce at leocek@asme.org.