India Science Fest is India’s largest public celebration of science and technology.We strongly feel that India needs to step up its S&T and innovation agenda, in order to keep up its economic progress and social development. The gap between science and society needs to be bridged immediately. ISF endeavors to serve as platform for deeper engagement between scientists, researchers, professionals, entrepreneurs and students. We wish to have the public involved in the latest in science and get all actors in the ecosystem to discuss, collaborate and progress together.
ISF 2020 was held in January 2020 at IISER Pune. The event saw several science talks with focus groups, roundtables around science policy, workshops, exhibits and was a beautiful culmination of science with art, music, food, dance and drama.The event was a resounding success with 40+ speakers and 13,000+ participants. It was rated 8 and above out of 10, by 74% of the audience and participants. 43% of the audience had met scientists for the very first time in their lives, and 82% of our speakers rate ISF’s impact on society 4 and above, out of 5.
Even in times of uncertainty with the worldwide Covid-19 pandemic, India Science Fest would like to emphasize that our vision of recognizing and celebrating the wonders of science and technology will not be hindered. To ensure continuity, India Science Fest will be holding the second edition of the festival as the India Science Month Online (ISMO) in January 2021. India Science Fest will make sure that our audiences are able to enjoy the festival in the comfort of their own homes.
ISMO 2021 | SCHEDULE
WEEK 1 | |||
Sunday, 3rd Jan | |||
8:00 pm - 9:00 pm | Climate Action (Panel Discussion in association with Social Alpha - Tentative) | ||
9:00 pm - 10:00 pm | Will 21st Century Robots Partner With Humans? Rodney Brooks, MIT, USA |
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Tuesday, 5th Jan | |||
7:00 pm - 7:45 pm | The European Space Agency: Once explorers, always explorers Mark McCaughrean, ESA, Netherlands |
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Friday, 8th Jan | |||
5:45 pm - 7:00 pm | Quiz (Game) Quiz |
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7:00 pm - 8:00 pm | Science and Sports - Science empowering paratheletes (Panel Discussion - Tentative) Deepa Malik (President of Paralympic Committee of India, Paralympic Olympian Medalist), Satyapal Singh (Head Coach, Indian Paralympic Team), Manish Rana (Sports Scientist, Former Associate with India Paralympic Team) |
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WEEK 2 | |||
Saturday, 9th Jan | |||
11:00 am - 12:00 pm | Live Lab Tour with STRAND Life Sciences (Demonstration) Lab Tour with STRAND Life Sciences |
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12:00 pm - 1:00 pm | Science Illustrations with Ipsa Jain (Workshop) Ipsa Jain |
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6:15 pm - 7:00 pm | Seeing is believing: Imaging cancer progression inside our body Abhijit De, ACTREC, India |
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7:15 pm - 8:00 pm | Can numbers and equations help tame COVID-19? Lav Varshney, UIUC, USA |
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8:00 pm - 9:00 pm | ** Can science fascinate our nation, like cricket or Bollywood does? Inaugural panel moderated by Barkha Dutt |
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Sunday, 10th Jan | |||
11:00 am - 12:00 pm | Postcard Program and Space Exploration with Club for the Future (Workshop) Club for the future |
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12:00 pm - 1:00 pm | Drawing Competition (Game) Drawing Competition |
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5:15 pm - 6:00 pm | Swachh Robots: Sanitation robots that sense and act underwater Prabhu Rajagopal, IIT, India |
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6:15 pm - 7:00 pm | Life beyond Earth: What makes a planet habitable? Dimitra Atri, NYUAD, UAE |
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7:15 pm - 8:00 pm | Making the world around us intelligent - Internet of things Sanjay Sarma, MIT, USA |
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8:00 pm - 9:00 pm | COVID 19 - Tackling public health emergencies while also dealing with human rights (Panel Discussion) Curated and Moderated by Prof. Satchit Balsari, Harvard Medical School |
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Tuesday, 12th Jan | |||
8:00 pm - 9:00 pm | Can science yield economic output? (Panel Discussion) Amitabh Shrivastava (Managing Partner at July Ventures LLP), Vandana Sarda (Strategic Partnerships & Alliances, Business Management (SPJIMR)), Premnath Venugopalan (Head, NCL Innovations; Head, IP Group; Scientist, NCL; Director, Venture Center), Vijay Chandru (Co-founder and Director at Strand Life Sciences, Pioneer at AIFoundry), Varun Aggarwal (Founder, India Science Fest, Co-Founder at Aspiring Minds) |
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Friday, 15th Jan | |||
6:00 pm - 7:15 pm | Science Pictionary (Game) Science Pictionary |
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7:15 pm - 8:00 pm | Aliens - Are we alone or not? Does it matter? (Panel Discussion) Betul Kacar (Astrobiologist, University of Arizona), Frank J. Tipler (Mathematical Physicist and Cosmologist, Tulane University), Vandana Singh (Physicist and Sci-Fi author, Framingham University), Nick Pope (UK Ministry of Defence UFO Investigator (Retired)) |
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WEEK 3 | |||
Tuesday, 12th Jan | |||
7:15 pm - 8:00 pm | Getting everyone an ambulance in time: How math can help! Lavanya Marla, UIUC, USA |
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Friday, 15th Jan | |||
8:00 pm - 8:45 pm | Science, public health, literature: What happens when you bring them together? (Tentative) Sunetra Gupta, Oxford, UK |
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Saturday, 16th Jan | |||
5:00 pm - 5:45 pm | Democratizing space - How Africa launched its first nanosatellite to space Robert Van Zyl, FSATI, South Africa |
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6:00 pm - 7:00 pm | Arogya Swaraj: Achieving health freedom by empowering individuals and communities Abhay Bang, SEARCH, India |
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7:00 pm - 8:00 pm | Ancient Indian medicine: Nirvana or no good - how do we find? (Panel Discussion) Shantanu Abhyankar (Staunch allopath, obstretician and gynaecologist), P Rammanohar (Research Director, Amrita School of Ayurveda), Ajit Kulkarni (Director of Homoeopathic Research Institute, Satara & Pune), Pulok Mukherjee (Director, Institute of Bioresources and Sustainable DeveloPMent) |
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8:15 pm - 9:00 pm | Getting adverserial AI to secure us from hackers Una-May O'Reilly, MIT, USA |
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9:00 pm - 10:00 pm | Modern Biology (Panel Discussion in association with Tata Institute for Genetics and Society) Curated and Moderated by Prof. Suresh Subramani, TIGS |
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Sunday, 17th Jan | |||
12:00 pm - 1:00 pm | Science Storytelling with Usha Venkatraman (Workshop) Usha Venkatraman |
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5:00 pm - 5:45 pm | Mobility Redefined: Innovations that Enable Independence Sujatha Srinivasan, IIT, India |
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6:00 pm - 7:00 pm | Healthcare for a billion: Research in India, for India (Panel Discussion) Ravdeep Singh Anand (Founder and President, DART), K Srinath Reddy (President, Public Health Foundation of India), Ramesh Hariharan (CTO at Strand Life Sciences), Vidur Mahajan (Head of Research at CARING, Associate Director at Mahajan Imaging) |
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7:00 pm - 8:00 pm | Mental Health (Panel Discussion in association with Librum) Shekhar Saxena (Co-Founder at Librum, Professor of the Practice of Global Mental Health, Harvard T.H Chan School of Public Health), Neha Kirpal (Co-Founder at Librum, Social Entrepreneur & Mental Health Ambassador) |
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8:15 pm - 9:00 pm | Uncovering the dark secrets harboured by our universe Priyamvada Natarajan, Yale, USA |
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9:00 pm - 9:45 pm | The Man Who Knew Infinity - Representing STEM in Literature and Cinema Robert Kanigel and Ken Ono, Science Writer and Author/ Mathematician, USA |
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11:00 pm - 12:00 pm | Educators 2020 : Rethinking conversations on colourism with Jyoti Gupta (Workshop) Jyoti Gupta |
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Tuesday, 19th Jan | |||
9:00 pm - 9:45 pm | A talk with Anita Sengupta: The engineer who designed the parachute to land Curiosity on Mars! (Tentative) Anita Sengupta, USC/Former NASA, USA |
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Friday, 22nd Jan | |||
3:00 pm - 4:00 pm | Training robots to talk to humans, teaching humans talk to robots (Tentative) Emily Cross, University of Glasgow, UK |
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4:00 pm - 4:45 pm | What can robots see and what can they not? Peter Corke, QUT, Australia |
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4:45 pm - 6:00 pm | JAM (Game) Model Making |
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6:00 pm - 7:15 pm | Science Pictionary (Game) JAM |
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WEEK 4 | |||
Friday, 22nd Jan | |||
7:00 pm - 7:45 pm | What bio-robots teach us about fighting diseases Ritu Raman, MIT, USA |
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Saturday, 23rd Jan | |||
12:00 pm - 1:00 pm | Science Made fun with Wonderlab - Ages 3-6 (Workshop) Wonderlab |
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5:30 pm - 6:15 pm | Auria Kathi: An AI artist on the cloud! Sleeba Paul, Perleybrook Labs LLC, India |
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6:15 pm - 7:00 pm | Joining the dots: Science through tribal art and folk songs Bitasta Das, IISc, India |
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7:15 pm - 8:00 pm | The next space revolution: Living and working in space Erika Wagner, Blue Origin, USA |
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Sunday, 24th Jan | |||
11:00 am - 1:00 pm | Exploring Phytopia with Science Gallery Bengaluru (Workshop) Science Gallery Bengaluru |
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5:30 pm - 6:15 pm | Music of Science, Science of Music: The play of science and art (Panel Discussion) Shantala Hegde (Associate Professor, Clinical Neuropsychology and Cognitive Neuroscience Center, NIMHANS), Vinod Vidwans (Professor & ex-Chair, School of Fine & Performing Arts, FLAME University), Andreas Bergsland (Associate Professor, Music Technology Program at Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU)), Manasi Kulkarni (Musician and Associate Lead: Clinical and Scientific Affairs at PierianDx) |
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6:15 pm - 7:00 pm | Role of private universities in building India's research ecosystem : Will India have its own Stanford? (Panel Discussion) Sandeep Sancheti (VC, SRM University of Science and Technology), Sunder Ramaswamy (VC, Krea University), Vineet Gupta (Founder and Trustee, Ashoka and Plaksha University), Philip Altbach (Founding Director & Research Professor, Center for International Higher Education), Rupamanjari Ghosh (VC, Shiv Nadar University) |
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7:15 pm - 8:00 pm | Facebook and Health: Understanding public health through social media data! (Tentative) Rumi Chunara, UIUC, USA |
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8:15 pm - 9:00 pm | Farming Robots: Swarm of robots to revolutionize agriculture Girish Chowdhary, UIUC, USA |
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Tuesday, 26th Jan | |||
7:15 pm - 8:00 pm | Aliens, Astrobiology and Exoplanets - In search for life in space Daniel Angerhausen, ETH Zurich, Switzerland |
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Friday, 29th Jan | |||
5:30 pm - 7:00 pm | Model Making (Game) Science Pictionary |
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7:00 pm - 8:00 pm | Making your imprint on Space : How everyone can become a Space Scientist (Panel Discussion) Bidushi Bhattacharya (Founder and CEO of Astropreneurs HUB), Shanmuga Subramanian (Citizen Space Scientist), Rishabh Nakra (Founder and Admin, Secrets of the Universe), Srimathy Kesan (Founder and CEO, SpaceKidz India) |
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8:00 pm - 8:45 pm | Stem cells: Cells that can turn into organs and treat dangerous diseases (Tentative) Kameshwar Prasad, AIIMS, India |
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WEEK 5 | |||
Saturday, 30th Jan | |||
12:00 pm - 1:00 pm | SciFari - Exploring science through stories - with Usha Venkatraman (Demonstration) SciFari - Exploring science through stories |
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5:30 pm - 6:15 pm | Superbugs - What Africans have to fear and how we can contain them Iruka Okeke, Univeristy of Ibadan, Nigeria |
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6:15 pm - 7:00 pm | An interview with the author of the Sci-Fi book, the Bird Farm Varun Aggarwal, Founder, India Science Fest, India |
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7:00 pm - 8:00 pm | Science for ALL: Archiving Science and bringing it to the public Venkat Srinivasan and Sarah Iqbal, NCBS/ DBT India Alliance, USA/India |
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8:00 pm - 9:00 pm | Deeptech: The next frontier for Indian startups (Panel Discussion) Sourabh Gupta (Founder and CEO, Vernacular.ai), Awais Ahmed (Founder and CEO, Pixxel), Geetha Manjunath (Founder, CEO and CTO, NIRAMAI), Siraj Dhanani (Founder and CEO at InnAccel) |
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9:00 pm - 9:45 pm | How COVID also infected AI models: Why did they fail? Pawan Deshpande, Domino Data Lab, USA |
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Sunday, 31st Jan | |||
12:00 pm - 1:00 pm | Science Made fun with Wonderlab - Ages 7-10 (Workshop) Wonderlab |
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1:00 pm - 2:00 pm | Drawing Competition (Game) Drawing Competition |
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5:30 pm - 6:15 pm | Small is wonderful - Treating diseases with tiny nano-particles and RNA-based drugs Dan Peer, Tel Aviv University, Israel |
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6:15 pm - 7:00 pm | Making robots fly: Navigating the hardest terrains Sebastian Scherer, CMU, USA |
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8:00 pm - 9:00 pm | Bias in STEM - Does science have a single shade? (Panel Discussion) Ansley Booker (Director, Diversity and Inclusion Initiatives, Mercer University), Sandhya Vishweshariah (Professor, Department of Molecular Reproduction, DeveloPMent and Genetics, IISc), Satendra Singh (Associate Professor of Physiology, Co-founder of Health Humanities Group at University College of Medical Sciences, Delhi) |
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9:00 pm - 9:45 pm | An evening with ex-NASA astronaut, Tony England! Anthony England, UMDearborn, USA |
Visit official website https://www.indiasciencefest.org/