Department of Computer Science and Engineering, was established in the year 1991 with B.Tech. (CSE) program with an intake of 40. It has grown by leaps and bounds over the last three decades with intake increased to 300 by 2016. It started M.Tech.(CST) in the year 2006 with an intake of 18 and increased to 36 by year 2011. The department was recognised as a research center by Jawaharlal Nehru Technological University Kakinada (JNTUK) who allocates research scholars to guides recognised by the university. The department has all the necessary infrastructure, highly qualified and experienced faculty for a better teaching learning experience to students. The department has well equipped laboratories (11), research labs (3), seminar halls (2) and e-class rooms (4) and other class rooms (13). The strength of the department is the faculty with a total of 64 faculty out of whom 12 are doctorates, 4 are about to finish their Ph.D., another 20 are registered for Ph.D. and the remaining have M.Tech., qualification. The courses offered in the department meet the requirements of both industry and research. The faculty of the Department are actively engaged in research in the areas of Machine Learning, Data Mining, Artificial Intelligence, Bioinformatics and Cloud Computing. The faculty members are collaborating with institutions like Blackbuck Engineers Pvt. Ltd, Bennett University, Netenrich- Hyderabad, TCS Ion and Opsramp Inc. for research and consultancy. Due to recent national and international research thrust, the department has now to consider research seriously. As a result, the department is giving importance to publications, which, it is hoped, will give more impetus to research in the department. The department now wishes to propose a research center with its focus on Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning. The center proposes to conduct extensive research in these areas contributing to academic excellence and social needs. Through this center of excellence the department aims to build a vibrant community of professors, researchers and students and provide smart solutions to real industry specific problems, regional and global problems by applying AI and Deep Learning.

S.R.K.R. Engineering College is located in a rural area in the state of Andhra Pradesh. Agriculture and Aquaculture are major sources of livelihood of people in the region. Andhra Pradesh is the pioneering state for fish production in India. Fish that grow in both fresh water and saline water are grown in this region. The state is the biggest producer of fish and shrimp in India. The fish and prawn production has a 6.4 percent share in the Gross State Domestic Production (GSDP) and provides livelihood to 14.5 lakh population. The area under aquaculture in West Godavari is 85,000 hectares. In view of above importance, we want to develop a machine learning based system to predict water/soil parameters influencing aquaculture in the state of Andhra Pradesh. The parameters like dissolved oxygen, pH, Ammonia, Nitrate etc. have a large impact on fish and shrimp culture. These parameters in turn change based on weather, feed and soil. The proposed system makes use of weather data as well data collected using sensors from the ponds to predict the various parameters affecting the aquaculture. If the farmers are notified of changes in these parameters in advance, they could prevent/reduce the damage to the production.

The proposed center of research, while conducting the above research through concerted efforts, hopes to obtain funding from various funding agencies such as UGC, AICTE, DST to further enhance the laboratory facilities in order to cater to the research needs.

The Center of Excellence is headed and supervised by Dr. V Chandra Sekhar in the areas of Machine Learning. It is attracting scholars not only from the SRKR Computer Science and Engineering Department but also from other institutions such as JNT University Kakinada. It is hoped that the center will flourish further and contribute to excellence in research and publications and serve the society.