Title: REPRESENTATION, DISCOVERY, RECOGNITION AND SEGMENTATION OF OBJECTS AND ACTIVITIES

Biography:

Narendra Ahuja received the B.E. degree with honors in electronics engineering from the Birla Institute of Technology and Science, Pilani, India, in 1972, the M.E. degree with distinction in electrical communication engineering from the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, India, in 1974, and the Ph.D. degree in computer science from the University of Maryland, College Park, USA, in 1979. Since 1979 he has been with the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign where he is currently Donald Biggar Willet Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, the Beckman Institute, and the Coordinated Science Laboratory. His current research is focused on extraction and representation of spatial structure in images and video; integrated use of multiple image-based sources for scene representation and recognition; versatile sensors for computer vision; and applications including visual communication, image manipulation, and information retrieval. He received the 1999 Emanuel R. Piore award of the IEEE, and the 1998 Technology Achievement Award of the International Society for Optical Engineering, and 2008 TA Stewart-Dyer/Frederick Harvey Trevithick Prize of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers, and 2008 Open Innovation Research Award from Hewlett-Packard. He was selected as Associate for 1998-99 and 2006-07 and Beckman Associate for 1990-91 in the University of Illinois Center for Advanced Study. He received Distinguished Alumnus Award from University of Maryland Department of Computer Science (2008), Best Paper Award from IEEE Transaction on Multimedia (2006), University Scholar Award (1985), Presidential Young Investigator Award (1984), National Scholarship (1967-72), and President’s Merit Award (1966). He has co-authored the books Pattern Models (Wiley, 1983), Motion and Structure from Image Sequences (Springer-Verlag, 1992), and Face and Gesture Recognition (Kluwer, 2001); and co-edited the book Advances in Image Understanding (IEEE Press, 1996). He is a fellow of IEEE, American Association for Artificial Intelligence, International Association for Pattern Recognition,Association for Computing Machinery, American Association for the Advancement of Science, and International Society for Optical Engineering. He is on the editorial boards of the journals IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence; Computer Vision, Graphics, and Image Processing; Journal of Mathematical Imaging and Vision; Journal of Pattern Analysis and Applications; Int. Journal of Imaging Systems and Technology; Journal of Information Science and Technology; and IEE Japan Transactions on Electrical and Electronic Engineering; and and a guest coeditor of the Artificial Intelligence Journal’s special issue on vision. He was the Founding Director of International Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad where he continues to serve as Director International.

Title: Wireless Networks: Advancements and Challenges

Abstract

A lot of important development did take place in the field of communication networks both in terms of technological advancement and theoretical development during last twenty years. First of all developments in wired network industry did lead to a saturation. There were already too many resources and too many types of equipment in the inventory of manufacturers and the so called “dot-com” revolution became a future that never happened. In this situation wireless networking technology and its various variants offered a new lease of life to communication networks community in general. Now, we are not only dealing with cellular networks and 4G and 5G technologies but we are also in sensor networks, ad hoc networks, vehicular networks, networking support for intelligent transportation systems (ITS), intelligent power grid, and computational grids. Apart from these wireless networked large scale control and cyber-physical systems, machine to machine communication in internet of things over unreliable wireless links, body area networks and related remote consultation with physicians are some of the issues that did attract the attention of research community. New technologies like MIMO, massive MIMO, steerable and adjustable multiple antenna beams, cognitive systems, network coding, directional antenna systems, cooperative communication became issues of the day. These propositions did throw in not only new research problems but a lot of fundamental questions which were still not well understood as per the framework of traditional information theory. Traditional information theory did not take care of multiuser communication, variable delay between source and destination or burstiness of traffic. Neither did it addresses any possibility of cooperation or competition among nodes / agents and possibility of self-organization or phase change, micro macro link etc which leads to some global emergent phenomena. Can there be mechanism design or inverse optimization so that desirable global emergence occurs as a consequence of local interaction patterns that we design? Can there are be a mesoscopic systems approach which takes an intermediate path between micro-analysis and macro-analysis and allows us to formulate some form of analysis of these large wireless networked multi-agent systems which reveals more subtle truth? Such questions are yet to be completely answered. As we are changing the physical layer itself with the introduction of beam forming technology, MIMO, 5G etc. new problems related to resource allocation, cooperative communication, and energy efficiency are emerging. In this talk we would like to address some of the issues related to these recent trends in wireless networking. We will also discuss some recent results we obtained in fluid modeling of sensor data flow, network coding, Cooperative communication with decode and forward relaying, lifetime maximal routing, and diversity systems.

Biography:

Dr. Rajarshi Roy works for Dept. of E & ECE, IIT, KGP as associate professor. He got his PhD in EE from Polytechnic University, Brooklyn, NY (2001) (now known as New York University Tandon School of Engineering). He did his M.Sc. (Engg.) from IISc, Bangalore (1995) and B.E. in ETCE from Jadavpur University (1992) with first class (Hons.). His area of interest is Complex communication and other networks, queuing theory, and Markov decision process etc. His work was funded by MHRD and ISRO. He did write several journal and conference papers and supervised several doctoral students.

Title: The role and challenges of advanced e-Infrastructure for supporting scientific collaboration and innovation

Abstract

Some of the well known discoveries in the field of high energy physics and life science will be presented as a use case to indicate the basic steps and challenges of huge data handling (storage) and processing (computing) that was addressed leading to these discoveries. The setting up an advanced e-Infrastructure and building a platform for collaboration for conducting these experiments are crucial for accelerated discoveries . C-DAC over the years has gained considerable experience on developing and maintaining distributed e-infrastructures that include High Performance Computing, Grid and Cloud computing technologies. The present status and future road map of these technologies being planned to address these challenges will be elaborated in this talk.

Biography:

Subrata Chattopadhyay is currently head of Operational Grid Garuda and Infrastructure (OGGI) Group at C-DAC, Bangalore and also Chief Investigator of Garuda. He was involved in setting up the PARAM Padma, Supercomputing facility and address the challenges of high performance computing. He has also contributed for setting up of high speed communication fabric of GARUDA and deploying grid middleware across various platforms of supercomputers. From C-DAC, he was the technical manager for the EUIndia Grid projects that interconnect Indian grid project – Garuda with the European grid initiatives – EGI. He is also leading another International project funded by European Commission entitled Co-ordination and Harmonisation of Advanced E-Infrastructure - Research and Education Data Sharing (CHAIN-REDS). He holds a Bachelors in Engineering degree from NIT, Durgapur, Masters from IIT, Kanpur and PhD in Engineering from University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada He published more than 40 papers in International journals and conferences and traveled widely both in India and abroad. He brings more than 27 years of experience both from IT industry and research organizations. His major areas of interest include high performance computing, Grid/ Cloud computing and process modeling and simulations

Title: Healthcare + IoT + Artificial Intelligence = Smart Healthcare

Abstract

The current global emphasis on the large scale connectivity between people, thnvironment or the emergent network of the future highlights the extreme importance of sensor-based intelligent and u more commonly known as “cyber-physical systems”. The technology has the potential to create a network of smart devices and thinever been envisaged before, far out-numbering the number of devices connected in the Internet as we know tins that can see a disruptive change is Healthcare - using off the shelf medical sensors, everyday gadgets like mobileebcams etc. on the sensor side, and large scale analytics based on traditional machine learning and the new field of dees an overview of a set of healthcare applications that can be created on top of such easily available gadgets, and how those cand prognostic analysis of the most complex machine of all, i.e. human body.

Biography:

Arijit completed his Bachelors and Master’s degree in Computer Science from reputed universities in India. After completion of the Master’s degree, Arijit worked in the software ultancy Services and Verizon) for about five years till 2002 in various projects for telecommunication giants such nd Siemens. His major projects were related to Residential Broadband, Intelligent Network, Corporate GSM and Data Networky 2002 Arijit joined the School of Computing Science, Newcastle University, UK as a Research Associate and started working ogies and service orientation. He was one of the main researchers in the internationally acclaimed myGrid, OGSA-DAIand ntributed to the development of W3C standards for Web Services/SOA. His special interest was in dynamic service provisioning wibuted databases on which he completed his PhD in 2008. From June 2008, Arijit worked as a lead researcher at Connectiva elecommunications revenue assurance product company in Kolkata, India, for three years. He joined the Innovation Labs es in September 2011 and is currently working as a Senior Scientist. Arijit's research involves massively parallel processing,ognitive computing in the context of Internet of Things. In addition, Arijit
• is an Executive Committee member of IEEE Computer Society, Kolkata Chapter
• is a regular reviewer of Inters Future Generation Computer Systems, Expert Systems with Applications, Computer Networks from Elsevier
• has served in the Technical Preral International Conferences such as IEEE WiMob, ICACCI, ISPCT, AiMOC etc.
• has been the Program Co-Chair kshop on Computing and Networking for Internet of Things (ComNet-IoT)
• has over 35 publications in Inand journals, more than 10 patent applications and a Google Scholar h-index of 10
In his personal life, Arijit is r and has been awarded the Artiste fellowship by the Federation of International Art Photography. He is also a violinist trainedc and an avid reader of books.

Title: Using Sensing and Data Analytics to Scale and Personalize Services

Abstract

Many services, such as healthcare and education are highly human-intensive offerings that remain inaccessible (at acceptable quality level) to large numbers of people. With advances in computational power and increasing digitization of the world, there is an opportunity to apply a combination of sensing and analytics to transform these services. We begin by describing a dire need and an opportunity to improve the healthcare system worldwide by supporting a shift from reactive treatment to more proactive action. As examples of what is possible, we present techniques to predict a class of complications in an ICU, to identify patients in a hospital who are likely to require ICU admission, and to support triage of stroke patients. We also present preliminary work that shows the applicability of remote sensing and data analytics to measure body vitals such as respiration and heart rate, to screen for diseases, and to reduce the need for people to visit a hospital. We then describe a system called TutorSpace to help with personalization and improved navigation of videos from massive open online courses to enable more effective learning. Finally, we present techniques, based on sensing of mobility demand and analytics over that data, to improve public transportation services and to enable cities to reduce traffic congestion while offering a range of transportation options to their citizens. We frame all of the above efforts as examples of using information technology to offer personalized services at scale. We describe some outstanding challenges, including modelling of human behaviour, that need to be met to achieve truly transformational impact.

Biography:

Dr. Manish Gupta is Vice President at Xerox Corporation and Director of Xerox Research Centre in India. Previously, Manish has served as Managing Director, Technology Division at Goldman Sachs India, and has held various leadership positions with IBM, including that of Director, IBM Research - India and Chief Technologist, IBM India/South Asia. From 2001 to 2006, he served as a Senior Manager at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, New York, where he led the team developing system software for the Blue Gene/L supercomputer. IBM was awarded a National Medal of Technology and Innovation for Blue Gene by US President Barack Obama in 2009. Manish holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign. He has co-authored about 75 papers, with more than 6,000 citations in Google Scholar in the areas of high-performance computing, compilers, and virtual machine optimizations, and has been granted 19 US patents. While at IBM, Manish received an Outstanding Innovation Award, two Outstanding Technical Achievement Awards and the Lou Gerstner Team Award for Client Excellence. Manish is an ACM Fellow, a Fellow of the Indian National Academy of Engineering, and a recipient of a Distinguished Alumnus Award from IIT Delhi.