Our Journey

The journey of Next Tech Lab starts in 2016 when a group of curious and driven individuals came together and formed this organisation that would soon leave behind a legacy of outstanding people who collaborate, research and innovate, and later transform into a community of a global scale.. We initially gained popularity on a national level by notable achievements such as securing first place in the ITC InfoTech challenge 2016, securing a cash prize of 3,00,000.

This was the year when Next Tech Lab began to grow in fame and became among the highest funded and technologically forward communities in SRM, following which we won the silver award for the International QS Student-led Innovation for Reimagining Education 2017 in Wharton school of Business. Apart from that, Three Next Tech Lab teams who participated in the Smart India Hackathon all came victorious. Several members met notable researchers and public figures across the world, such as legendary computer scientist Stephen Wolfram, Google AI lead Jeff Dean, Facebook Director of AI Yann LeCun, Google Brain cofounder Andrew Ng to name a few. It was a powerful phase of growth for Next Tech Lab.

A wonderful year for Next Tech Lab members, who show no stopping when it comes to their passion for technology, which gets noticed by several of the biggest names and remembered through their prominent achievements. Members of the lab won first prize in AngelHack Hyderabad which was hosted by Microsoft India R&D Pvt. Ltd, passed final evaluations in Google Summer of Code, won the Accenture Blockchain Hackathon in Bengaluru, and even gaining fame among the likes of MIT by winning ‘Most Novel Data Mobility Hack’ prize by Dell at HackMIT2018.

Next Tech Lab left their mark everywhere they went, and soon transcended beyond their roots to achieve exceptional feats. 3 teams placed top 5 overall, won the best Blockchain hack and the "Best use of Google Cloud platform" award, at San Francisco Developer Hackathon, which is the largest hackathon in America and part of the Major Hacking League. We also won the 2019 Vivli Microsoft Hackathon held in Boston.Among the fascinating people members got to meet in 2019 were Rajat Monga (Director of TensorFlow), François Chollet (creator of Keras) and Jeremy Howard (founder and educator at fast.ai) among many other highly distinguished experts.

A very unfortunate year for the entire world, as the COVID-19 virus outbreak forced the whole world to stay indoors and miss their distant loved ones. Next Tech Lab, still managed to prevail and sustain its fame due to our determined and creative members' efforts. One of our members, Swapnanil Dhol became the only two-time winner of the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference Design Challenge. Next Tech Lab also were a strong contributer to Folding@Home, a distributed computing project for simulating protein dynamics, to support development of the COVID-19 vaccine.

As the COVID-19 pandemic remains and massive lockdowns extending across the world, many massive hackathons and events were unable to be conducted and some occurred virtually. Even then, the philosophy of Next Tech Lab still carried forward as three of our Pausch members participated in the COVID-19 Gameathon organized by AngelHack, sponsored by the U.S. Consulate General Hyderabad, and bagged the 3rd prize, competing against 60+ teams worldwide from different universities.

Like a new beginning to an old tale, after several efforts taken by the UN, WHO, governments and NGOs, through the fall of COVID-19 and the rise of humanity, members of Next Tech Lab continue to pass on their legacy and philosophy to the upcoming generations, while still proving that we, as a community are not giving up. Lab Members Vedant Singh and Tanya Singh won 1st and 3rd place in Smart India Hackathon 2022. Mihir Tripathy, a member of McCarthy Lab got featured in the Smithsonian Magazine for writing about the SpaceX's Starlink Constellation. We also began to host researchers and professors upon the lift of the lockdown, namely Prof. Aristides Kiprakis and representatives from Edinburgh University.

Even during tough times, it is through unity that we thrive and rise, and this year truly embodied this fact, as we as a community continued to encourage curiosity and supported innovative young minds who desperately seek that support. Profound members like Ravikul Rao from Pausch lab secured first place in the DITTO4NF hackathon, continuing the legacy forward. Aman Agarwal, syndicate of the lab, and his work on Neural Radiance Fields caught the eyes of universities like Stanford and Carnegie Mellon, whom he later worked with. Lab members Karan Pargal and Mehul, won first place for the Router Protocol track at Unfold 2023, and Karan Pargal also won the ETHIndia hackathon 2023, the world's largest blockchain hackathon in 2023. All in all, the legacy of Next Tech Lab continues to thrive and looking for the next worthy people to carry the torch forward.