IIITH’s Smart City Living Lab team won ‘Best Promotion of oneM2M’ Award (3rd Prize) along with a cash award of 500,000 KRW at the 2025 International oneM2M Hackathon (8th Mobius Developer Challenge), marking the 5th consecutive win for the IIITH at this global event. This year’s recognition celebrates the team’s innovative project, “oneM2M-enabled AI for Resilient Building Systems.” The idea behind it is simple but powerful: How can buildings think smarter, respond faster, and stay resilient—no matter the situation? Their solution blends oneM2M’s interoperable IoT framework with AI-driven intelligence to create buildings that automatically detect issues, adjust conditions, save energy, and keep occupants safe. It is a bold step toward the future of intelligent, sustainable spaces. Team Nexus (Likhith Kanigolla, Kartik Gharde, Peri Reddy Vaka, and Nishitha Varma) brought this idea to life. They were mentored by Ms. Anuradha Vattem and Dr. Karthik Vaidhyanathan.

Research revealing how “thermal” behaviour can emerge from low-complexity dynamics and not necessarily extremely chaotic ones, has been published in the prestigious journal Physical Review Letters. In everyday life, objects equilibrate with the environment. “A steaming cup of tea left on your desk eventually reaches room temperature, losing almost all memory of how it was heated,” says Prof. Shantanav Chakraborty, Center for Quantum Science and Technology, IIITH. He is referring to the process known as thermalization in Physics, where many-particle systems evolve towards equilibrium. “Here, only a few coarse properties, like temperature or energy, matter, and the fine details of the past are effectively forgotten”. According to the professor, quantum physics can mimic thermalization but in an intriguing manner. “A large quantum system can be in a perfectly well-defined pure state, evolving deterministically under Schrödinger’s equation, and yet any small part of it can still look completely random and ‘thermal’”, he says.

Prof. Sandeep K Shukla, director of IIIT Hyderabad, in an exclusive interview with Careers360, speaks about the institute’s research-oriented vision, focus on gender and socio-economic diversity, and special admission channels designed for students from underprivileged backgrounds. He also highlighted the direct admission pathways for students from state boards, scholarships offered, how US universities excel and the lessons that can be learnt. IIIT Hyderabad has already established itself as a socially conscious, research-driven institution — one that applies technology to address real societal challenges. Whether it’s through projects Bhashini, our language technology initiatives, or work in computer vision and related areas, the institute has built a strong foundation in research that serves social causes. I believe the next major goal for India — and for IIIT Hyderabad — is to move toward technological sovereignty. Today, we depend heavily on global corporations for almost every layer of our digital infrastructure – from cloud services and operating systems to semiconductors and enterprise applications.