Chandigarh: Chitkara University today announced its innovation fight against COVID-19, named NOVATE+ 2020.

Chitkara University is making an effort to fight COVID-19 leveraging innovations. Chitkara University through NOVATE+ 2020 aims to help accelerate research in the fight against Corona Virus. NOVATE+ 2020 has benefits for participants worth Rs 1 crore to support innovations.

As the world struggles to come out of the precarious situation caused by COVID-19 pandemic, Chitkara University looks for ideas and technologies that will protect human lives, change human behaviour and enhance knowledge. NOVATE+ 2020 is calling students/faculty from any institution/university in India or registered Indian start-ups to participate in NOVATE+ 2020.

NOVATE+ 2020 is conceptualized as Prayerise, Picturise, Actualize. Prayerise involves ideas invited for novel ways to think and keep positive. The ideas for Prayerise can be drawn from Medical Science, Ancient Practices, Alternate Therapies, Diverse Cultures. Picturise involves ideas invited in the form of pictures, flowcharts, cartoons, block diagrams that can help fight COVID-19. Actualize involves Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Augment Reality and Virtual Reality based simulations for the shortlisted themes.

The themes shortlisted for NOVATE+ 2020 are tracking and geofencing COVID-19 patients, scalable solutions for sanitization, effective delivery of essential/non-essential goods, effective implementation of social distancing, crop harvesting using minimal labour, work from home solution s and DIY (Do-It-Yourself) kit ideas.

The Awards and Benefits of NOVATE+ 2020 include Acceleration funds to support research worth 75 lakh rupees, 3 prototyping grants of 2.5 lakh rupees each from NewGen IEDC, 4 prototyping grants of 4 lakh rupees each from MEITY TIDE 2.0, Best project award wins a cash prize for 5 lakh rupees sponsored by Chitkara University.

“Chitkara University always acts as per its strengths and abilities to contribute to a cause. With immense access to students, faculties and start-ups, Chitkara University has chalked out NOVATE+ 2020, to fight COVID-19 leveraging innovations. Chitkara University invites students, faculties, start-ups to participate in NOVATE+ 2020 to accelerate the innovations and thoughts towards fighting COVID-19 together,” said Dr Madhu Chitkara, Vice-Chancellor, Chitkara University.

(ANI/NewsVoir)