Krishnaveni B V
At CMRIT Hyderabad, in the Department of Electronics and Communication Engineering, Dr. Krishnaveni B V teaches machine learning to computer science students. This is not where her story begins. In 2019, she signed up for her first NPTEL course on a colleague’s suggestion, choosing something safe and close to her own field. 5 courses followed almost immediately, still within the comfort of electronics. Then, without quite planning it, she crossed into computer science: Python for Data Science, then data analytics, then data structures and algorithms. She did not know at the time that these subjects belonged to what NPTEL calls a “domain.” She was simply following the thread of what interested her.
The thread led, eventually, to artificial intelligence, and to a course that nearly stopped her. “An Introduction to Artificial Intelligence” by Prof. Mausam, from IIT Delhi, was the hardest thing she had attempted. She persisted anyway, moving on to 3 linked courses in constraint satisfaction, search methods, and knowledge representation. Of the 30 courses she has completed across three domains, these are the ones she returns to when asked what stayed with her.
Part of the difficulty was structural. Where most NPTEL exams are divided into 2 or 3 sections, the AI papers are split by topic, one section for each week of material, with no upper limit on how many that might be. Students who usually finish other exams in 90 minutes find themselves still writing at the three-hour mark.
After every AI exam, she waits up until midnight for her marks to appear, checking the portal the way one might check on a sleeping child.
She holds 12 NPTEL Star recognitions and reports gold in nearly every course, with only reinforcement learning giving her real trouble. The consistency did not come from an easy schedule. Exams fall on weekends, and One semester, she sat for four of them, two on consecutive days; the family calendar rearranged around a deadline that would not move. NPTEL, she says, made this bearable in a small way, by assigning her the same exam center each time, sparing her the trouble of learning a new route to a new hall under pressure.
What she gained is harder to itemize than a certificate. An electronics faculty member by training, she now teaches AI and machine learning to computer science students, a reversal she attributes to her NPTEL learning. A separate faculty-development track taught her to write research papers, draft patents, and map course outcomes for accreditation, skills that sit outside any syllabus but shape a career all the same.
Her advice to the undecided is practical rather than inspirational.
Do not write “I know Python” on a resume, she says; write that the knowledge came from IIT, through NPTEL, because the second sentence carries weight the first one does not.
It is a small change, but one that reflects how she has approached NPTEL herself: one course, one deadline, one midnight refresh at a time.
~written by Elsa Prasad