Keynote - 1: What on Earth is a Smart City?
Speaker: Bhaskar Ramamurthi, Director, IIT Madras
Abstract: Every country worth its flag is committing resources to build smart cities. India, too, has bet big on smart cities, committing to a hundred of them across the country. Cities, and smart ideas for them, are being identified based on competitions. So, what is a smart city? There are various definitions from all over the world, including one from India. Most of them have in common a focus on sustainability - with its myriad meanings. This talk will explore what a smart city in India might mean in the context of the challenges to provide basic amenities and economic opportunities to its citizens in a sustainable manner. Long-term implications for the development and application of information and communication technologies can be derived from a good understanding of the problems sought to be addressed in a smart city.
Speaker bio: Prof. Bhaskar Ramamurthi got his B.Tech in Electronics from IIT Madras in 1980, and his M.S. and Ph.D is Electrical Engineering from the University of California at Santa Barbara, in 1982 and 1985 respectively. After working at AT&T Bell Laboratories for a couple of years, he joined the faculty of IIT Madras, his alma mater, in 1986. He took over as Director, IIT Madras in September 2011.
His areas of specialisation are Communications and Signal Processing. His research work is in Wireless Networks, Modulation, Wireless Data, and Audio and Video Compression. He is a founding member of the TeNeT group of IIT Madras, active in developing telecom and networking technologies, and incubating companies to develop and market products based on these.
He heads the Centre of Excellence in Wireless Technology, a public-private initiative at the IIT-M Research Park to make India a wireless technology leader.
He is a Fellow of the Indian National Academy of Engineering, and of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). He is also an Honorary Fellow of the International Medical Sciences Academy. He was awarded the Vasvik Award for Electronic Sciences and Technology for the year 2000, the Tamil Nadu Scientist Award for Engineering and Technology for the year 2003, India Semiconductor Association TechnoVisionary Award for the year 2011, Doyens of Madras Award for the year 2014 and ACCS–CDAC Foundation Award for the year 2015.
Keynote - 2: Telco 2020 - Delivering new experiences
Speaker: Ayan Mukerji, Chief Executive, Media & Telecom and Product Engineering Services, Wipro Technologies
Speaker bio: Ayan Mukerji is the Chief Executive of Wipro’s Media and Telecom Strategic Business Unit & Product Engineering Services.
In an era of digital disruption, Ayan is responsible to help organizations, Customer of Wiproacross the Telco Media value chain to achieve their goals by delivering the business and technology expertise that enables them to do business better. Ayan also heads Wipro’s Product Engineering Service line that creates intelligent products and connected devices for customers while enhancing engineering and manufacturing processes across industry sectors.
Over his tenure of more than twenty five years at Wipro, Ayan has held a wide range of leadership positions across IT, Product Engineering and Systems Integration businesses. As the Chief Sales and Operations Officer for Europe until March 2010, he transformed Europe into one of Wipro’s fastest growing regions significantly ahead of competition. Ayan has been instrumental in expanding Wipro’s customer base in France, Germany and the Nordics in particular.
Prior to this he was the Head of Sales for Wipro’s Product Engineering Services business at North America for seven years. During this time, he drove Wipro’s exponential growth in the technology business, making it the largest Product R&D services provider in the world. Ayan also established Wipro’s VLSI and hardware design services practice, an area in which Wipro is the undisputed global leader today.
He joined Wipro in 1987 as a management graduate from The Indian Institute of Management (IIM), Calcutta. He did his B.Tech. in Electrical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Kharagpur.
Ayan’s experience of working with CEOs, CIOs and CTOs of Fortune 100 corporations, especially in the Telco-Media space over gives him a unique and in-depth understanding of their markets and businesses. A prolific speaker, Ayan has been sharing his views on technology’s impact on changing consumer experiences at forums like Oracle open world, Zinnov Confluence and other global events across the Telco Media landscape.
He is associated with leading forums like Telecom Council Silicon Valley, TM Forum and ETC (Entertainment Technology Center) and has been sharing perspectives at leading academic institutions globally.
He is currently located in Mountain View, California.
Keynote - 3: Optical Access Networks - Technology and Challenges in Indian Markets
Speaker: Bharat P. Dave, CEO, Alphion
Speaker bio: Dr. Bharat P. Dave is the Founder, Chairman, President, and CEO of Alphion Group of Companies. Dr. Dave is a recognized expert in optical network systems. Prior to founding Alphion in July 2000, Dr. Dave spent 15 years with BELL Labs where he led the Research and Development of Industry leading Transport, Switching, and Optical Networking products. Over the past 15 years, he has grown Alphion to be a multi-national corporation and leader in Fiber-To-The-Premises Industry. He has received numerous awards and patents for his accomplishments in optical networking and fault tolerant computing. He holds a M.S. in Electrical Engineering from Virginia Tech and a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Princeton University.
Keynote - 4: Smart-Sensing using Smart-Sensors
Speaker: Prasant Mohapatra, UC Davis
Abstract: With the expansive usage of mobile devices and potential growth in the deployment of Internet of things, we will have proliferation of smart sensors in our handheld devices, wearables, and in our surroundings. Making sense out of the web of sensors is what we term as Smart-Sensing. Smart-Sensing would involve accurate and innovative sensing approaches while using minimal resources. In this talk, we will have an overview of a few approaches and novel ideas for Smart-Sensing using Smart-Sensors. Capturing the movement of fingers and hand gestures through accelerometer and gyroscope, we will develop the concept of finger-writing using smartwatches. Then we will explore how the WiFi APs can detect the movement of other devices at a fine granular level. Sensor assisted biometric authentication will be the next topic of our discussion. The last part of the talk will demonstrate the use of accelerometer for detecting voice and we will propose the use of this concept for saving energy consumption in smart devices. The talk will conclude with the summary of the potential scope and applications of Smart-Sensing environments.
Speaker bio: Dr. Prasant Mohapatra is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science and serves as the Associate Chancellor of the University of California, Davis. He is the former Tim Bucher Family Endowed Chairman of the department. In the past, he has held Visiting Professor positions at AT&T, Intel Corporation, Panasonic Technologies, Institute of Infocomm Research (I2R), Singapore, and National ICT Australia (NICTA), University of Padova, Italy, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST), and Yonsei University, South Korea. He is the Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing, and has served on the editorial boards of the IEEE Transactions on Computers, IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing, IEEE Transaction on Parallel and Distributed Systems, ACM WINET, and Ad Hoc Networks. He has been on the program/organizational committees of several international conferences.
Dr. Mohapatra is the recipient of an Outstanding Engineering Alumni Award from Penn State University, an Outstanding Research Faculty Award from the College of Engineering at the University of California, and the HP Labs Innovation Research Award winner for three years. He is a Fellow of the IEEE and AAAS. Dr. Mohapatra's research interests are in the areas of wireless networks, mobile communications, sensor networks, Internet protocols, and QoS. Dr. Mohapatra's research has been funded through grants from the National Science Foundation, Department of Defense, Intel Corporation, Siemens, Panasonic Technologies, Hewlett Packard, Raytheon, Huawei Technologies, and EMC Corporation.
Keynote - 5: Network Transformation in the Cloud Era
Speaker: Utkarsh Rai, Infinera
Speaker bio: Utkarsh Rai (www.utkarshrai.com) is Vice President software and Managing director of Infinera India. He is recipient of Udyog Rattan award. After earning his Computer Science degree from BITS Pilani in the late eighties, Utkarsh worked in Siemens, first in Delhi and then in Germany. Later, he moved on to work with Adaptec in the USA. During the boom period of the late nineties, when Indians were flooding the U.S. job market, he sensed better opportunities in India and swam against the tide to join Motorola in Bengaluru. Having gained the required experiences, he took another gamble in leaving a safe and successful career in Motorola to join a small startup, Infinera. Since then Infinera has gone public growing manifold. He is an established author with several books to his name and active in startup ecosystem through investing and mentoring. He loves to travel and learn about the history and culture of the world.
Keynote - 6: LTE License Assisted Access (LAA) - way forward for 5G
Speaker: Anantha Sinha, Principal Research Scientist, Networks Lab, TCS Research, Bangalore
Abstract: The next generation mobile telecommunication standards beyond what we see today and what we expect to have in the next couple of years is being buzzed out as 5G. However, the Network Pundits are still not clear about the complete solutions which can provide sustainable and guaranteed high spectral efficiency as required by 5G. Since the spectrum availability is limited and scarce, various spectrum re-use techniques are being coined as the possible candidate solutions for 5G. Out of various proposals, LTE License Assisted Access (LAA) or LTE-U (unlicensed) is being seen as a promising alternative solution in which along with the licensed spectrum, unlicensed spectrum at 3.5 GHz and 5 GHz can also be used for regular cellular data communications. Moreover, it has been observed that, LAA can not only improve the spectral efficiency, but also can help the operators to reduce the cost of operation - which in turn can be beneficial to the mobile users as well in terms of QoS and cost. This can also give a potential thrust to the WiFi users in terms of additional capacity for both outdoor and indoor applications.
However, the 3.5GHz and 5 GHz unlicensed bands popularly known as ISM band (Industrial, Scientific and Medical) being considered for LAA, are at present heavily used for a wide variety of applications including microwave ovens, WiFi, Bluetooth, and much more. Therefore, direct use of LAA services can lead to denial of services to the above applications. Therefore, appropriate techniques should be developed such that LAA service can coexist with other users of the band. This brings significant research and development opportunities for the academia, researchers and the industry. Standardization body such as TSDSI, 3GPP and IEEE have also shown interest in this, such that fair and efficient solutions can be realized by LAA as well as the ISM band users.
To make the discussion concrete, in this talk, I plan to discuss the following – (i) LAA as an enabler for 5G, (ii) Coexistence of LAA with WiFi, (iii) Current trends in LAA research, (iv) LAA research at TCS, (v) Possible deployment scenario, (vi) Future of LAA.
Speaker bio: Anantha, Member IEEE, is a Principal Research Scientist at CTO Networks Lab, TCS, Bangalore. After obtaining his MTech from IIT Madras, he has worked in the field of networking and communications for the last 30+ years. Currently he is heading the Networks Lab, Bangalore under CTO organization of TCS. His current research interests includes: QoS in Networks, Scheduling, Self-Optimization, Large Scale Network Design, Offloading in LET Networks, Cloud Computing, Software Defined Networks, ICN Architecture Design, Next Generation Networks, Network Virtualization etc. He has published many research papers in national and international conferences/seminars such as IEEE ICC, Globecom, NCC, ANTS, COMSNETS, PIMRC, CSNT, PIMRC, INDICON etc., and has filed several patents through TCS. Anantha has presented in various technical events, and is actively involved in standardization activities through TSDSI. Anantha was an invited talk speaker and a tutorial speaker in IEEE ANTS 2014.
