Calcutta, May 10: Collaborations and tie-ups with academic and research institutes will feature high on the agenda of the IIT Kharagpur team that will be heading to the US next week for the Global IIT 2005 Conference.

?We have an advanced VLSI (very large scale integration) design laboratory in the institute and to expand our activities, we are planning to strongly pitch for Indo-US joint venture for research initiatives,? said S.K. Dubey, the director of the institute and leader of the three-member team.

The VLSI lab at IIT Kharagpur designs advanced microchips, containing thousands of transistors.

Kalyan Chakraborty, dean of the Vinod Gupta School of Management and P.P. Chakraborty, dean of sponsored research and industrial consultancy, are the others in the trio.

Union human resource development minister Arjun Singh will be present at the inaugural session of the biennial conference ? between May 20 and 22 ? of Pan IIT, an umbrella organisation of all the IITs in Washington DC.

Alumnus of the institutes, policy makers and corporate chieftains will take part in the conference to discuss development issues, besides trends in technology and business. The participants will include Jack Welch, the former CEO of GE, Rajat Gupta, senior partner, McKinsey, C.K. Pralhad of the University of Michigan, Sam Pitroda, the CEO and founder of WorldTel, and K.V. Kamath, the ICICI Bank boss.

?All the seven IITs will take part in the conference, aimed at building the IIT brand,? Chakraborty said. For cooperation in management education, the Kharagpur B-school will sign up with the business schools of the universities of Southern California, Nebraska and Creighton. ?We’ll also be looking at a tie-up with Boston University,? added Chakraborty.