Interaction with School Kids

It was a wonderful experience to interact with school kids learning #programming using #Sanskrit in June 2022. They were curious about the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs), programming, computer science and engineering and other aspects of student life in higher education institutions.

Projects for Goa Assembly Elections 2022

Press coverage of Shri Kunal, Chief Electoral Officer, Goa (during Goa Assembly Elections 2022) felicitating IIT Goa students for IT applications (Voterdost chatbot, AI based webcasting and absentee voter system) developed by them under my guidance for Goa State Elections 2022. The students (Aditi Saxena, Sakar Salunke, Shivom Aghalte, Uppala Sumana, Shivam Jaiswal and Yuvraj Agarwal) designed, developed and deployed these solutions with the help of Dept. of Information Technology, Govt. of Goa. The ideas for these projects were floated by Shri Kunal to bring about more IT enabled services and governance during elections. The chatbot was also released during the visit by the Hon’ble Election Commission of India in January 2022.

The various related tweets can be found at the links: link1, link2, link3, link4

DST AWSAR Award 2021 and VLSID 2022

The 35th International Conference on VLSI Design and the 31st International Conference on Embedded Systems were held 26 Feb to 2 March 2022. Both VLSI design and embedded systems are two of the areas in which my group carries out research. Encouraging students to participate in these conferences is one way of helping them align with their field more closely. Prachi Kashikar, the 1st PhD student in my group, received the VLSID 2022 Fellowship. This year, I also served as a TPC member in the Embedded Systems track.

Another PhD student, Pavitra Bhade, is one of the winners of the DST AWSAR Award 2021 for the Best Story in PhD category. The Department of Science and Technology (DST), Govt. of India sponsored AWSAR award aims to promote story telling approaches to describe research. AWSAR stands for Augmenting Writing Skills for Articulating Research. The goal is to make research work accessible to non-experts. Pavitra wrote a story on her research about detection of cache side channel attacks by using a children’s playground as an example.

Talk on Use of Technology in Education

I recently gave a talk on “Use of Technology in Education” as part of National Education Policy 2020 (NEP 2020) organized by the Indian Institute of Technology Goa (IIT Goa) where I am a faculty member. This talk discussed not only related sections in NEP (sections 23 and 24) but also focused on aspects related to GDP, investment in education and some past projects in making online/digital education accessible. The talk is available at this link.

IEEE Potentials wins 2020 APEX Awards

As Editor-in-Chief of IEEE Potentials magazine, am happy to share that our Sept.-Oct. 2019 issue  has won two Awards of Excellence (in Magazines and Illustration-Design categories) in the 2020 APEX Awards for Publication Excellence : https://apexawards.com

The award winning issue focused on the world of Engineering in Disney Imaginations. It was possible due to tremendous support received from them.

FDP on Arm Architecture and System on Chip Design

In December 2019, together with Arm and the SMDP-C2SD program of Ministry of Electronics and IT, Govt. of India (http://smdpc2sd.gov.in/), I had organized a Faculty Development Program (FDP) on “Arm Architecture and System on Chip Design” at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Goa. Attended by faculty members from other IITs, NITs and engineering colleges across India, the story is now part of Arm Community Hub . The speakers included Ish Dham, Distinguished Engineer, Arm; Dr. Akshay Visweswaran, IMEC, Belgium; Apurva Varma, Arm University Program Manager, South Asia.

 

Online Education – Research Integrity and Ethics

A few weeks ago, I finished my course module on “Research Integrity and Ethics” for the graduate students at Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Goa. It was a delight to teach this module and my students were also very interested. Needless to say that in these times of COVID-19 , it was all conducted online! Shown here is an image of my students, that I took with their consent. (I am in the bottom right corner).

An online session for the Research Integrity and Ethics course.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) for All Workshop

My colleague, Clint and I organized an AI for All workshop on August 31, 2019. The workshop was attended by forty high school students and their teachers from school in and around Ponda, Goa. It was a day well spent in an academic activity where we interacted with these students and introduced very basic concepts of AI to them. Our hope is to get them excited about AI and that they develop an inquisitiveness to learn more about it. The workshop was supported by a grant from ACM Special Interest Group on AI (SIGAI) under its AI Activities Fund.

We also released an “Artificial Intelligence (AI) Storybook” which is available for free download: ACM-SIGAI-IIT Goa-Storybook.

The student participants were given printed copies of the storybook as a token of appreciation for showing interest in the subject of artificial intelligence.

AI for All Workshop

Auctioning Algorithms : for those who design algorithms!

The Algorithm Auction was the world’s first auction of algorithms in 2015. This auction was meant, like most other auctions, to celebrate something. In this case, it was the algorithms (in the form of code) that can be considered artsy. Organized by Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum and Artsy, the auction brought together vintage items like hand written and signed code of the original Hello World C program by Brian Kernighan, a very compact Perl code (6 lines and named qrpff) that could decrypt content on a DRM protected video disc etc. The qrpff code fetched 2500 US$.

I had only heard about auctions of cellular spectrum, houses, historical artifacts and vintage collection items. The auction of algorithms was the idea of a company by the name Ruse Laboratories which it seems has ceased to exist. I could not find any good reference or website. Nevertheless, I think that this was a wonderful idea. Looking for art in science and technology is very interesting. I had organized a thematic issue around this subject in the Nov-Dec. 2016 issue of IEEE Potentials.  This auction goes to prove that a curious mind can come up with really novel ideas and open up doors for others. My friends who design algorithms have something more to cheer about!

Translational Research: What I learned doing (seemingly) mundane task of video annotation

In the recent past I have been doing some work related to automatic video annotation. Videos that you and I take can be annotated with data about the contents of the video. The contents of the video can mean: objects, their types, their shape, background scene (moving or static), number of objects, static and in-motion objects, color of objects etc. One would like to keep a track of objects as the video progresses. Tracking helps in knowing when an object appeared in the scene and when it disappeared. All of the prior work on automatic video annotation is not really completely automatic [1], [2] etc.. They are semi-automatic at best and manual input and control is still required when annotating using these methods.

While doing this work, I developed a better understanding of some of the so called “automatic object tracking for surveillance” solutions out there in the market.  None of these solutions can ensure a complete hands-off scenario for humans. Humans still need to be involved and there are reasons for that.  At the same time, it is also possible to do everything in cloud (including human interaction) and claim it as “hands off for a user”. In this case, it is simply that the client is paying someone else to provide the service. It is not a stand-alone autopilot kind of system installed in a user’s premises. Real automatic video annotation is extremely hard, especially when the scene can change without any guarantees. If we add “video analytics” i.e. ability to analyse the video automatically to detect a certain set of activities, it again becomes very difficult to propose a general solution. So, assumptions are again made and these can be based on user requirements or can be domain specific (say tennis video analytics at Wimbledon). Here is a system which may be of interest to you: IBM’s Digital Video Surveillance Service and a few others described in the paper titled “Automated visual surveillance in realistic scenarios“.

Most of the research work makes certain assumptions either about the scenes or about the methods they use. These assumptions simply fail in real world scenarios. These methods may work under a “restricted real world view” made using a set of assumptions, but when assumptions fail, these methods become limited in applicability.

I believe this is a critical issue that many researchers who want to translate their work into usable products have to understand. This is where both strong theoretical and practical foundations in a discipline are needed: theory gives the methods and the tools, engineering tells you what can/cannot be done and the two can interact back and forth.