New Delhi, Jul 13 (IANS): Eight BTech students of Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham have been selected for Google Summer of Code (GSoC) 2021, a global annual programme in which the search engine giant awards stipends to students who successfully complete a free and open-source software coding project during the summer.

The selected Amrita students include Alluri Harshit Varma (The Terasology Foundation) and Nived (TensorFlow) as well as others from Amrita's student clubs amFOSS and bi0s, namely, Pranjal Singh, Vishnu Madhav, Simran Kathpalia, Aswin C, Anoushka Ramesh and Mainak Deb. Two former GSoC students of Amrita from amFOSS, Shashank Priyadarshi and Abhijit Ramesh are also participating this year as mentors for The Apache Software Foundation.

"Google Summer of Code programme is a great opportunity for students and mentors to work together on an open-source project for a period of over three months. Over the last 14 years, many of our students have contributed to various open-source organisations such as VideoLAN, The Linux Foundation, WikiMedia, NetBSD, GNOME, KDE, Mozilla, and INCF. Since 2010, members from amFOSS have been getting selected for the Google Summer of Code program every year," said Vipin Pavithran, Chief Mentor of amFOSS and bi0s, Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham, in a statement.

Last year, seven students were selected for GSoC 2020.

GSoC, dubbed as the largest open-source event, requires interested students to submit proposals to one or two participating open-source organisations, describing the details of the project that they wish to do along with their past experiences. The organisation mentors then selects the most promising proposals and mentors the students for completing the project.

Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham has been ranked the fourth Best Overall University in India in the 2020 National Institution Ranking Framework (NIRF).