In a first in the country, academic users in India will have free access to the Laboratory Virtual Instrument Engineering Workbench (LabVIEW) software suite – a system design platform and visual programming language development environment. Indian Science Technology and Engineering facility Map (I-STEM), a national web portal for sharing research facilities/facilities, and National Instruments Inc., based in Austin, TX, USA, have entered into a collaboration agreement to enable this free platform access . I-STEM (www.istem.gov.in) is an initiative of scientists at the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, supported by the Office of the Chief Scientific Adviser to the Government India under the PM-STIAC mission.
Launch of LabVIEW during the online event on Monday, July 18, 2022, the chief guest of honor Prof. A.K. Sood, Chief Scientific Adviser to the Government. India noted that the availability of such software platforms to academics and deep technology start-ups in the country will lead to collaborative research and increase innovation. “The benefits of such a platform would be greater if users had access to experts who can help them understand and interpret the results of their experiments,” noted Prof Sood. He added that it is important to ensure that users properly recognize public investment by the government. in I-STEM. He also specified that acknowledgment should not take the form of any authorship in reports/publications.
LabVIEW uses a graphical interface that allows different elements to be connected to provide the desired flow, and runs on Windows, OS X (Apple), and Linux, making it suitable for most computer systems.The software suite is hosted on a cloud server set up by I-STEM to provide user-friendly access from anywhere in India. This arrangement is expected to help many students and researchers in the country, especially those in more remote and under-resourced institutions, improving learning outcomes and boosting research and development efforts across India. I-STEM already provides academics with free access to the COMSOL Multiphysics and MathWorks/MATLAB platforms.
As presented at the opening by Dr. Sanjeev Kumar Shrivastava, National Coordinator, I-STEM Platform aims to strengthen the research and development ecosystem by connecting researchers with resources. The platform does this in part by supporting the development of technology and scientific equipment in-house and by providing necessary supplies and support to researchers, allowing them to access existing R&D facilities through the I-STEM web portal. The portal hosts a database of facilities across India, so a researcher who wishes to use any of them can search for them and book online for their use. Currently, the portal lists more than 22,900 pieces of equipment from 1,520 institutions across the country and is used by more than 16,000 Indian researchers.
The portal also includes a Digital Catalog of technologies and products developed in the country. I-STEM also hosts a platform for various City Knowledge and Innovation Clusters to enhance R&D collaboration and skill development across the country.The launch was followed by two technical presentations on LabVIEW by National Instruments (NI) experts, who talked about the support NI provides to users through online videos and other instructional materials, and offered to host in-depth training sessions for I-STEM LabVIEW users. . The opening ceremony was attended by participants from all over the country.
