SRM Research Institute

Transcription

1 1 SRM Research Institute

2 About SRM Research Institute (SRM RI) SRM Research Institute, a unit of SRM University, is formed to catalyze proactive applied research to help solve industry s technical problems and is positioned to address and contribute to the market and society needs. This unique and exploratory initiative spearheaded by Prof. P. Sathyanarayanan, the Vice Chancellor of SRM University, provides a creative, innovative, and research ambient to help bring best out of the researchers of the Research Institute. In essence, the objective is to build intellectual firepower that can generate and assess ideas keeping ahead of the technology envelope all the time, and overcome the challenges of multi-party, multi-year collaborations and engineering cycles. The body of knowledge developed by the faculty members of SRM University over the years is available for addressing the needs and challenges, and the faculty members and the student community virtually participate to support applied research and engineering activities. Vision of the research institute: Identify / create opportunities and research to deliver world-class products and services Mission of the research institute: Carry out proactive and funded research activities by nurturing a talented research team that innovates The philosophy of the research institute is to distribute geographically to take advantage of the intellectual diversity. The research institute is already operational in Bangalore and the Chennai center is to be started soon. Each of these centers is focused on a niche research area(s) so as to collectively address a wide variety of problems. These centers are interlinked, interoperate, and are virtually co-located. The centers collectively and in a cooperative manner identify and initiate applied research projects, create and combine patentable intellectual property (IP) components, design and develop prototypes and proof of concepts, manage and market products and solutions (through knowhow transferred incubated companies), and win and work to deliver funded research projects. 2

3 The goals of the research institute, in general, are to Publish papers in refereed International Journals and Conferences, to File patent applications in marketdependent countries, to Assert relationship with multi-national research labs, and to Submit proposals to federal funding agencies. The research institute works in a proactive manner to lay a foundation for work in a particular area and based on this foundational work submits concrete proposals to corporate R&D labs and government funding agencies. The research institute is keen to offer applied research and development services and explicitly demonstrate the value add. SRM RI is headed by Dr. Sridhar V who has over twenty three years of research and industry experience. He holds doctorate in Computer Science from Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore and is a Senior Member of IEEE and ACM professional societies. He has published widely and has over one hundred and forty technical publications in refereed international conferences and journals. Dr. Sridhar has been a co-inventor in thirty three invention disclosures filed in USPTO with eight patent grants and additionally, two Notice of Allowances have been issued. Sridhar has successfully led and is leading a group of researchers to explore research topics, develop proof of concepts, publish technical papers in international conferences and journals, and explore new ideas and file patent applications in USPTO and in other patent offices. The focus is to work in the broad areas of communication, computation leading to the design and development of algorithms, analytical models, and simulation systems, and drive applied research in a variety of technological areas. 3

4 Areas of Focus SRM Research Institute SRM Research Institute is focused on several industry verticals and domains to study, research, and develop techniques that solve market critical problems. In particular, the current areas of focus are as follows: Domain of Education: Study, research, and develop tools and techniques to address the needs of a university, faculty members, students, and prospective students Domain of Wireless Healthcare: Study and propose solutions in the area of Telemedicine Domain of Multimedia: Study of comprehensive and supportive audio, video, and text processing Domain of Next Generation Networks: Study of next generation of networks and next generation services 4

5 Domain of Education Technology has advanced many folds in multiple directions such as in terms of tools and gadgets, connectivity, availability, and ease of use. Advancements in technology have had only limited impact on an educational system, and there is an immediate need as well as scope for deriving the benefits of technology. Technology has a key role to play in addressing the challenges of the educational system, say, by providing a pervasive collaborating and interactive environment. The trends of globalization and technological changes that have transformed the workplace provide an opportunity to create the educational system that will work in the new world. In order to drive technology in to the educational system an extensive adoption of a range of presentation tools, including computers, interactive whiteboards, and handhelds, as well as digital management and Web 2.0 solutions is essential. Futuristic educational system includes high end technology implementation such as like smart card-enabled lockers, a bookless library, and smart classrooms, new types of instructional software applications to aid students with differential abilities. Thus technology plays a role in introducing basic wireless system to remote presence based educational system and in bringing out new innovations like student specific PCs and it is pertinent to launch high end technology projects widely as part of the educational system. Various forums and groups are focused on enabling the educational system to use technology. There are professional organizations such as International Technology Education Association for technology, innovation, design, and engineering educators, Associations of educators such as Association for Educational Communications and Technology that strive to improve instruction through technology, and The Association for the Advancement of Computing in Education, an international, not-for-profit, educational organization, with the mission of advancing Information Technology in Education and E-Learning research. An active forum that addresses needs of diverse players in the education system is International Society for Technology in Education that strives to advance excellence in learning and teaching through innovative and effective use of technology and has brought out National Educational Technology Standards that help measure proficiency and set goals for what students, teachers and administrators should know and be able to do with technology. It is a need of the hour to develop tools and techniques that can help bring technology very naturally and necessarily into the domain of education. 5

6 Domain of Wireless Healthcare Delivering quality healthcare in the context of developing and underdeveloped countries acquires significance as the available resources are meagre and the challenges for healthcare delivery are too many. Some of the major challenges faced in effective delivery of healthcare are: Large number of aging population in rural areas; Maternity and neonatal healthcare delivery in remote rural areas; and Raising costs of quality healthcare delivery due to limited expertise and infrastructure. Two major trends in modern healthcare delivery to mass are in the directions of Telemedicine and Remote Patient Monitoring. Remote Patient Monitoring (RPM) solutions enable healthcare organizations to remotely monitor and manage patients with chronic diseases such as congestive heart failure, diabetes, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, and asthma. RPM solutions enable healthcare organizations to: (a) improve treatment outcomes, (b) reduce healthcare delivery costs, and (c) increase access to care for patients living in rural/remote areas. RPM improves treatment outcomes by facilitating the prediction of impending emergency before the patient s condition(s) become more acute. RPM focuses more on patients who are at the greatest risk of re-hospitalization and/or make unnecessary trips to the emergency department. Typical RPM System, essentially, has a capability to wirelessly detect signals from a human body sensor network, a capability to transfer data efficiently and reliably to the different nodes in the body sensor network, a capability to transmit data securely over the body sensor network, and capability for optimized analysis of data at different nodes and abstract the essential information for further processing. Wearable sensors play a critical role in RPM systems and convergence with consumer electronics products enables patients to use devices they are already familiar and comfortable with including Smartphones and personal computers. Research in the area of wearable sensors holds a great promise for effective remote patient monitoring. Wearbility, precession, reliability, and power efficiency are the key aspects in the development of wearable sensors. On the other hand, reliable and low power communication technologies are crucial for developing an efficient body sensor networks. Research challenges in RPM are mainly in terms of finding novel ways of detection of vital parameters from a patient body, novel methods for effective analysis and abstraction of the sensor data at different layers, and techniques for reliable and secure transmission of data among different nodes within the body sensor network and to the medical centres. The objective of telemedicine is to provide specialized healthcare consultation to patients in remote locations where access and cost of specialized care are prohibitive or infeasible. Telemedicine relies heavily on the advances made in computational, communication, and audio visual technologies. Telemedicine largely addresses the challenges faced in delivering healthcare in developing countries: (a) Inadequate infrastructural resources in remote rural areas; (b) Inadequacy of expert and specialist resources in rural areas; and (c) Lack of opportunity for training or continuing medical education for practicing doctors in rural areas. Several challenges exist for researchers in telemedicine in terms of complexities in audio visual systems and reliable communication systems. 6

7 Domain of Next Generation Networks The internet has transformed itself into a virtual world with more than a billion users collaborating using a diverse set of services ranging from the old fashioned to ecommerce, egovernance, and social networks. A closer look at the underlying technology that is currently supporting such services reveals the inherent need for technological alignment to the services hosted on it thereby leading to the concept of Next Generation Service-Oriented Networks. The need for extreme dynamism in Next Generation Networks demands every entity on the Internet to be flexible, adaptive, and cooperative. This leads to a service specific effective customization and quicker provisioning of the network to deliver services in a much more cost-conscious manner. A core concern for current and future applications is the fact that it be environment friendly. Current data centers have thousands of servers/routers that are always on but on an average only a small percentage of them are in use. Next generation networks need to enhance the utilization of powered-on entities in an intelligent manner. Another interesting feature, from applications perspective, is that the network should provide seamless connectivity so that the deployed services are "always on." An essential ingredient is to exploit bleeding edge technologies such as Virtualization. Virtualization enables slicing of a single physical entity into multiple network entities. Each virtual entity can interconnect with other such entities to create mini-internets all through a single physical system. As the number of entities and services increase exponentially, there is a need for the network to be semantically aware to support open and easy integration. Next generation networks provide an excellent platform for the deployment of the next generation services that need to be highly user-friendly, ubiquitous, and adaptive in terms of network availability, location, and devices: The usage of XML as a message format for web services is a good example of brining openness in next generation networks. 7

8 Domain of Multimedia Digital content has taken over an indispensible role in our lives. With large quantities of varied audio visual content being created by both organized and amateur sources, the challenge of providing right content to right consumer has acquired significance. Especially the audio content is almost all pervasive, starting from the metro radio stations to amateur music albums. Audio processing has come off the age in providing novel and beneficial audio technologies which have direct impact on user experience and in some cases on quality of life and security: Efficient techniques for search and retrieval of relevant content by users. Until recently the indexing and retrieval of music content largely rely on the meta data provided by the content creators. Recent times have seen techniques such as query by humming and search based on sample audio clips. Given the size of the audio content database and the varied nature of the user requirements, these kinds of services call for a large scale automation of indexing and retrieval process and this involves intelligent processing of audio content at different levels to extract the semantics and perceptible characteristics. Another important research direction in music related audio is music synthesis. Although the generation of a fully synthetic music is a distant dream, new musical instruments which can generate synthetic music based on critical inputs from musicians are increasingly being attempted. With ever increasing real time audio streaming services and internet radio stations, the challenge of efficient transmission of audio data within the constraints of bandwidth and quality requirements has become significant. Both academic and corporate research world over is actively contributing to audio research with an endeavor to make the world noise free, enhance user experience, and improve the quality of communication between individuals, and between individuals and machines. Apart from the entertainment industry, biometrics and security industries are also the major beneficiaries of the ongoing audio research. One of the long cherished dreams of humans has been to replicate human visual capabilities in a machine. Invention of a camera was the first major step in this direction. With the development of computers followed by the revolution in digital content, focus of researchers turned more towards the perceptual aspects of human vision and efforts are directed to analyze and derive semantics out of digitized visual information. The objectives of visual content analysis depend on the domain under considerations such as Manufacturing and industrial automation, Healthcare and disease management, Security and surveillance, Entertainment and marketing, and Transport and travel. Image Processing is efficiently used for identifying specific objects or their states, that in turn is used for high level decision making. Image processing is most effectively exploited in catering to ever increasing demands of viewers in entertainment domain, be it in terms of hi-tech special effects, in terms of superior quality of images with minimum storage and transmission overheads, or in terms of efficient search and retrieval systems. One of the successful applications of image processing comes in the form of driver assistance by in-vehicle cameras that provide enhanced safety in the form of collision avoidance systems and lane change detection systems. The image-based applications present significant challenges due to varying lighting and other environmental conditions necessitating the use of multiple techniques such as pattern recognition, machine learning, psycho-visual analysis, and information theory. Current research focuses on advanced techniques that involve combined analysis of multiple visual sensors leading to actionable inferences. Analysis of multisensory data provides greater opportunity for realizing the goals of computer vision 8

9 community by integrating and analyzing multi-dimensional visual data to gain near three dimensional comprehensions on the objects and their states. Some of the applications of multisensor fusion are multi-camera tracking of objects in surveillance, remote sensing, and target recognition in war fields. The processing and understanding of multisensory data for integration is still a major challenge for computer vision community. Majority of information available on World Wide Web, that is now the single, most referred repository of almost all the knowledge in the world, is textual and this necessitates the use of text processing techniques to build better web search engines. News available on the websites and the news servers are parsed to create news capsules to be recommended for individual and corporate users. Further, with the advent of social networking, blogging, and other online publishing mechanisms, the available unstructured textual data has grown exponentially, pressing the need for efficient and intelligent text processing mechanisms. The volume of the available data, as well as the inherent requirement of the users to easily correlate and understand this voluminous data have paved the way for the processing both textually (syntactically) and semantically. Text is processed at various levels of depth and involves data gathering, preprocessing, mining, and processing to generate meaningful information for the users overcoming the challenges such as conversion between formats, removal of unnecessary information, and creating linkages among data elements based on similarity measures. Text processing also involves the usage of natural language processing techniques, statistical techniques, and visualizing of the available data as text (for example, Bioinformatics and Genetic engineering, such as the Human Genome project, make use of text processing algorithms to process biological data such as Nucleotide and Protein sequences for similarity detection). Internal Security agencies use advanced text processing algorithms to analyze s and other encrypted content. Semantic analysis of text involves analyzing the text from users perspective, servers perspective, and domains perspective and this combined and comprehensive analysis is important in analyzing the internet queries. The current standard of Web 2.0, through the easy to use UI, integrates the multiple sources of data including websites data to help create tagclouds. It is required for any next generation Internet application to be semantically charged to bridge the gap between a user s need and a system s perspective using a domain (of the system) ontology for information mining, correlating and chaining, and to provide semantically accurate responses. 9

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