11th Indo – German Frontiers of Engineering Conference (INDOGFOE 2021)
Agenda Book Organized by
In association with
24 – 26 February 2021 On Let’s Get Digital IIT Kharagpur
11th Indo – German Frontiers of Engineering Conference
Let’s Get Digital, 24 – 26 February 2021
Agenda Book
Agenda Book: INDOGFOE 2021
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Conference Information 1 Organizing Committee 2 Forewords by the conference co-chairs 3 Program Schedule 6 List of Oral Presentations 9 Oral Presentation Abstracts 11 Advanced Communication and 5G Technologies 11 Energy Materials 14 Machine Learning and Big Data Analytics 19 Sustainable Earth 25 List of Poster Presentations 30 Poster Presentation Abstracts 33 Advanced Communication and 5G Technologies 33 Energy Materials 40 Machine Learning and Big Data Analytics 47 Sustainable Earth 53 Bio-sketch of Participants 62 Panel Discussion 93 Bio-sketch of Panellists 94 About Alexander von Humboldt Foundation 98 Details of Alexander von Humboldt Foundation Officials 99 About Department of Science & Technology (DST), Government of India 100 Details about DST Officials 102 About the Host Institute: Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur 105 CONNECT – AvH Follow-up Program 107
Conference Information
The Indo German Frontiers of Engineering (INDOGFOE) is a flagship bilateral event organised jointly by Department of Science & Technology, Government of India (DST‐GoI) and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation (AvH), Germany and is running successfully since 2009, alternating between venues in India and Germany. The key objective of the conference is to bring together outstanding, early‐career engineers and scientists working in industry, universities, and other research institutions from both the countries, to exchange their research ideas and expertise, thereby facilitating possible colabration and cooperation and to foster interdisciplinary research and transfer of knowledge that eventually can lead to the larger collaborative networks of young researchers across both countries. The 2020 INDOGFOE was supposed to be held in the East Indian mega‐polis of Kolkata, in June 2020 with IIT Kharagpur being the host Institute. Unfortunately, the meeting had to be deferred due to the prevaling global pandemic and we are delighted that both DST, AvH Foundation and the conferene chairs finally agreed to have an online meeting in February 2021 to maintain the continuity of the series. The conference will be held using the digital platform „Lets go Digital“ arranged by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation (AvH), Germany and will take place in a virtual mode between 24th and 26th February 2021. The official language of the meeting will be English. The conference will have four (4) themes which are: 1) Advanced Communication and 5G Technologies. 2) Energy Materials. 3) Machine Learning and Big Data Analytics. 4) Sustainable Earth. Each session is organised by two session chairs, one each from both the countries and will have 4 oral presentations of 10 minutes each (2 Indian and 2 German speaekers), 8 posters (4 each from India and Germany) and about 40 minutes slot for discussion. The conference will also involve a panel discussion on „ Indo‐German Cooperation in Science and Technology: Fostering Knowledge Transfer for Society” on the last day of the meeting.
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Organizing Committee Conference Co‐Chairs Prof. Rabibrata Mukherjee Prof. Benedikt Schmulling Indian Co-Chair, INDOGFOE 2020 German Co-Chair, INDOGFOE 2020 Professor, Department of Chemical Engineering Professor & Chair, E‐Mobility Research Group Indian Institute of Technology University of Wuppertal Kharagpur, Rainer‐Gruenter‐Straße 21 Pin 721302, West Bengal, India Raum: FD 02.16 Phone: +91‐3222‐283912 (O) D‐42119 Wuppertal +91‐9831096816 (Cell) Telefon: +49 202 439‐1510 +91‐9475884339 (Cell) Telefax : +49 202 439‐1512 Email: [email protected] e‐mail: schmuelling@uni‐wuppertal.de Session (Themes ) Co‐Chairs (Themes arranged alphabetically) INDIA GERMANY
Prof. Bheemarjuna Reddy Tamma Dr.‐Ing. Christian Senger Advanced Professor Deputy Director Communication and Dept. of Computer Science & Institute of Telecommunications Engg., IIT Hyderabad, Kandi, University of Stuttgart 5G Technologies India 502285 Pfaffenwaldring 47 Email: [email protected] 70569 Stuttgart, Germany Email: [email protected]‐stuttgart.de Prof. Sebastian C. Peter Prof. Oliver Clemens Associate Professor Technische Universität Darmstadt Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Materials Science Energy Materials Advanced Scientific Research, Alarich‐Weiss‐Straße 2
Jakkur Post, Bengaluru, India‐ 64287 Darmstadt, Germany 560064 E‐Mail: [email protected]‐ Email: [email protected] darmstadt.de Dr. Narayanan C Krishnan Prof. Sebastian Stober Department of Computer Artificial Intelligence Lab Machine Learning Science and Engineering Institute for Intelligent Cooperating and Big Data Indian Institute of Technology Systems, Faculty of Computer Science, Analytics Ropar, Rupnagar, India ‐ 140001 Otto von Guericke University Magdeburg Email: [email protected] Universitätsplatz 2 D‐39106 Magdeburg, Germany E‐Mail: [email protected] Dr. Abhijit Mukherjee Dr. Manisha Jain Department of Geology and Leibniz Institute of Ecological Urban and Sustainable Earth Geophysics, Indian Institute of Regional Development Technology (IIT) Kharagpur Weberplatz 1, 01217 Dresden, Germany
West Bengal 721302, India Email: [email protected] Email: [email protected] [email protected]
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Foreword by the Conference Co-chairs
We are delighted to welcome you all in the 11th edition of the Indo German Frontiers of Engineering (INDOGFOE) meeting, though over a virtual platform! We are delighted to host the meeting between 24th and 26th February 2021, on the platform “Let’s go digital”. The meeting, which is a flagship event of Department of Science & Technology, Government of India (DST, GoI) and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation (AvH), Germany is running successfully ever since the first edition took place in the beautiful south Indian mega‐polis Chennai in 2009. As most of you will realize during the next three days that the meeting is unique as it brings together outstanding, early‐career German and Indian engineers and scientists from industry, universities, and other research institutions, to discuss their areas of research and technical expertise, thereby facilitating a conducive atmosphere for cooperation and to foster interdisciplinary transfer of knowledge and methodology that could eventually lead to the development of collaborative networks of young researchers from both countries. The discussions in the conference will be based on four apparently non‐correlated, but extremely contemporary, socially relevant and scientifically cutting edge domains. For this year’s meeting, the themes are: 1) Advanced Communication and 5G Technologies; 2) Energy Materials; 3) Machine Learning and Big Data Analytics; and 4) Sustainable Earth. Interestingly, though apparently un‐correlated, there is strong the inter linkage between the different themes, which ideally is to encourage researchers from both the countries is collectively addressing challenges from a wider perspective, that involve multi‐disciplinary engagements. We all know that the proliferation and penetration of smart phones and IoT devices is having profound impact on world economy. Advanced wireless communication technologies like 5G will help in supporting billions of wirelessly connected devices and tackling exponentially increasing traffic demands and ever‐increasing Quality of Experience (QoE) and energy efficiency requirements of diverse services and applications being envisaged in the networks of the future. We look forward from learning the basics of how “5G” is going to change our lives and approach towards science & probably society in a wonderful session on “Advanced Communication and 5G Technologies” put together by Prof. Bheemarjuna Reddy Tamma of IIT Hyderabad and Dr.‐Ing. Christian Senger of University of Stuttgart. The advancement of civilization is associated with more and more use of technology and automation for betterment of human life. The ever increasing demand for energy storage and energy conversion systems, which stems from the ceaseless demand of energy for everyday functioning, reflects the critical need for advanced energy materials. Research
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in fundamental discovery in materials science, engineering, and related disciplines leads to the discovery of novel devices like advanced batteries, supercapacitors, fuel cell, thermoelectrics with high energy storage which are used in different applications. The efficient fuel production from the water and pollutant materials like CO2 and biomass also urged the scientific thrust in fundamental research, especially in materials research. We learn about all these novel developments in the session on “Energy Materials” set up by Prof. Sebastian Peter of Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research (JNCASR), Bengaluru and Prof. Oliver Clemens of TU Darmstadt. One of the key drivers for development of technology today is based on Data Science. We cannot imagine a life without the internet, on which we depend for searching an answer for any inquisitive question that comes to our mind. The easy access to large data repositories, growth in computing power, and advances in algorithm modelling have resulted in the ubiquity of machine learning and big data analytics techniques. The impact of machine learning is being felt across all domains with a spurt in applications driven by artificial intelligence models. This session on “Machine Learning and Big Data Analytics” put together by Prof. Narayanan C Krishnan of IIT Ropar and Prof. Sebastian Stober of University Magdeburg. Finally, whatever we do, we do it on our mother earth, and there is no scope for denial that unplanned development often leads to damaging the earth and environment. At present, we stand at the doorstep of a new decade, during which the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) are to be achieved. This cannot be done without involving Earth Science to a great degree in a variety of problems, ranging from poverty alleviation to access to clean water. For achieving this it is essential to integrate and collaborate with other disciplines, including engineering and the social sciences, to greater degrees, such that together they can solve topical issues with better efficiency. We educate ourselves on how each one of us can contribute in securing the future of the earth in the session on “Sustainable Earth” put forward by Prof. Abhijit Mukherjee of IIT Kharagpur and Dr. Manisha Jain of Leibniz Institute of Ecological Urban and Regional Development, Dresden. From this year’s edition, we have added panel discussion as one of the events. We would like to sincerely thank the panellists: Prof. Sarit Das (Professor, IIT Madras, and the first Chair of the INDOGFOE series), Prof. Sandeep Verma (Secretary, SERB, GoI and former Chair of the INDOGFOE), Prof. Arijita Dutta (Department of Economics, Calcutta University), Dr.‐Ing. Martina Scheer (former Session Chair of INDOGFOE), Dr. Madhusudan Reddy Nandineni (Scientific Attaché/ Counsellor (Science and Technology) at the Embassy of India, Berlin) and Mr. Philipp von Ritter (Head of the Science and
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Technology Section at the German Embassy New Delhi) for their time and active involvement. The conference chairs extend a hearty thanks to the funding agencies Department of Science and Technology, Government of India, and Alexander von Humboldt Foundation towards facilitating the meeting with generous support. We would like to put on record our sincere thanks for the untiring support and coordination by Mr. Matthias Hergenhan, Program Coordinator of Frontiers of Research, the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. We would also like to thank Dr. Miguel Haubrich Seco, Group Leader Frontiers of Research and the Deputy Head of Division Berlin Office for his direct engagement in many phases of planning. We would also like to thank Dr. Enno Aufderheide, Secretary General, Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, Dr. S. K. Varshney, Adviser & Head, International Cooperation, Department of Science & Technology, Government of India, Dr. Chadaram Sivaji, International Bilateral Cooperation Division, Department of Science and Technology, Government of India. The Indian host wishes to acknowledge the administrative help from the Dean, Continuing Education Program (CEP) of IIT Kharagpur for successful conduct of INDOGFOE 2021. Finally, we would like to highlight that the whole concept and success of the INDOGFOE series lies in interaction with peers probably whom you do not meet in regular conferences. We therefore welcome you to this new experience and participate in the fullest possible way, exploiting several unique features of the platform “Let’s get Digital”, and make the conference as lively and close to a physical meeting as possible.
Prof. Dr.-Ing. Benedikt Schmuelling Prof. Rabibrata Mukherjee
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Program Schedule
Program of the Digital INDOGFOE-Conference | 24 to 26 February 2021
Virtual Venue: Let’s Get Digital Wednesday, 24th February – CONFERENCE DAY 1 09:00-10:00 | 13:30-14:30 IST Conference kick-off: time to check posters and video flash talks, webinar environments, participants’ profiles and matches, and to schedule individual appointments
10:00-10:05 | 14:30-14:35 IST Conference Opening Moderation by Conference Chairs
10:05-10:25 | 14:35-14:50 IST Warm-up Networking: 15 minutes parallel meetings in small groups of 5 to 6 attendees
10:25-10:45 | 14:50-15:15 IST Official Welcome Ceremony: Remarks by S. K. Varshney (Head of Department International Cooperation, DST), Enno Aufderheide (Secretary General, Alexander von Humboldt Foundation), and Conference Chairs
10:45-11:15 | 15:15-15:45 IST Brain Dates – Networking Carousel Part 1
11:15-11:20 | 15:45-15:50 IST Lobby Moderation
11:20-12:05 | 15:50-16:35 IST Machine Learning and Big Data Analytics – Part 1 Speakers: Eirini Ntoutsi and Prathosh A. P
12:05-12:35 | 16:35-17:05 IST Break / Opportunity for one-on-one connections
12:35-13:20 | 17:05-17:50 IST Machine Learning and Big Data Analytics – Part 2 Speakers: Preethi Jyothi and Georg Martius
13:20-13:25 | 17:50-17:55 IST Lobby Moderation (Moderator(s) tbc)
13:25-14:10 | 17:55-18:40 IST Presentation of Funding Schemes by Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, Department of Science and Technology, and BMBF’s International Bureau
14:10-14:40 | 18:40-19:10 IST Brain Dates – Networking Carousel Part 2
14:40-14:50 | 19:10-19:20 IST Wrap-up Conference Day 1 hosted by Conference Chairs
14:50-16:00 | 19:20-20:30 IST Optional networking opportunities: Parallel workshop rooms and opportunity to schedule one-on-one appointments or group meetings
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Thursday, 25th February – CONFERENCE DAY 2 09:00-10:00 | 13:30-14:30 IST Recommended optional attendance: time to check posters and video flash talks | schedule one-on-one appointments or group meetings
10:00-10:05 | 14:30-14:35 IST Short Welcome Moderation by Conference Chairs
10:05-10:40 | 14:35-15:10 IST Poster Session Part 1: short flash-talk presentations and discussions in four parallel poster groups assigned by corresponding research areas / interconnectedness / complementary approaches and goals. Open access, moderation by Session Chairs
10:40-10:45 | 15:10-15:15 IST Lobby Moderation
10:45-11:30 | 15:15-16:00 IST Advanced Communication & 5G Technologies – Part 1 Speakers: Chandra Murthy and Vahid Aref
11:30-12:00 | 16:00-16:30 IST Break / opportunity for one-on-one connections
12:00-12:45 | 16:30-17:15 IST Advanced Communication & 5G Technologies – Part 2 Speakers: Rafael Schaefer and Radha Krishna Ganthi
12:45-12:50 | 17:15-17:20 IST Short break
12:50-13:25 | 17:20-17:55 IST Poster Session Part 2: short flash-talk presentations and discussions in four parallel poster groups assigned by corresponding research areas / interconnectedness / complementary approaches and goals. Open access, moderation by Session Chairs
13:25-13:30 | 17:55-18:00 IST Lobby Moderation
13:30-14:15 | 18:00-18:45 IST Sustainable Earth – Part 1 Speakers: Cathrin Zengerling and S. Suresh Babu
14:15-14:25 | 18:45-18:55 IST Wrap-up Conference Day 2 hosted by Conference Chairs
14:25-15:30 | 18:55-20:00 IST Optional networking opportunities: Parallel workshop rooms and opportunity to schedule one-on-one appointments or group meetings
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Friday, 26th February – CONFERENCE DAY 3 09:00-10:00 | 13:30-14:30 IST Optional pre-conference attendance: time to check posters and video flash talks and to schedule one-on-one appointments or group meetings
10:00-10:05 | 14:30-14:35 IST Short Welcome Moderation by Conference Chairs
10:05-10:50 | 14:35-15:20 IST Sustainable Earth – Part 2 Speakers: Adhiti Mukherji and Peter Dannenberg
10:50-10:55 | 15:20-15:25 IST Short break
10:55-11:45 | 15:25-16:15 IST Panel Discussion: Indo-German Cooperation in Science and Technology - Fostering Knowledge Transfer for Society Speakers: see separate program
11:45-12:15 | 16:15-16:45 IST Break / opportunity for one-on-one connections / optional workshop “Meet the panellists” / last 5 minutes Lobby Moderation
12:15-13:00 | 16:45-17:30 IST Energy Materials – Part 1 Speakers: Selina Olthof and Angshuman Nag
13:00-13:15 | 17:30-17:45 IST Short break / opportunity for one-on-one connections / last 5 minutes Lobby Moderation
13:15-14:00 | 17:45-18:30 IST Energy Materials – Part 2 Speakers: Suman Jain and Karin Kleiner
14:00-14:15 | 18:30-18:45 IST Conference Closing Session: Remarks by S. K. Varshney (Head of Department International Cooperation, DST tbc), Miguel Haubrich Seco (Frontiers of Research Program Director, Alexander von Humboldt Foundation), and Suman Chakraborty (Dean of Sponsored Research and Industrial Consultancy, IIT Kharagpur tbc)
14:15-14:30 | 18:45-19:00 IST Conference Wrap-up hosted by Conference Chairs
14:30-15:30 | 19:00-20:00 IST Optional networking opportunities: Parallel workshop rooms and opportunity to schedule one-on-one appointments or group meetings
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List of Oral Presentations (theme wise) (sessions and session speakers in alphabetical order) Theme: Advanced Communication and 5G Technologies Theme co-chairs: Prof. Bheemarjuna Reddy Tamma, Indian Institute of Technology Hyderabad and Dr.-Ing. Christian Senger, University of Stuttgart. List of Oral Presentations: Overview on Advanced Communication and 5G Technologies Bheemarjuna Reddy Tamma and Christian Senger Irregular repetition slotted Aloha: A promising candidate for grant-free multiple access in massive machine-type communications Chandra R. Murthy, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore. Overview of the Indian 5G testbed Radha Krishna Ganti, Indian Institute of Technology Madras. Deep Learning for Channel Coding Rafael Schaefer, Technical University Berlin. Advanced Channel Coding from 5G Mobile Networks to Optical Fiber Communication Vahid Aref, Nokia Bell Labs, Stuttgart and University of Stuttgart.
Theme: Energy Materials Theme co-chairs: Sebastian C. Peter and Prof. Oliver Clemens. List of Oral Presentations: Overview on Energy Materials Oliver Clemens, Technical University Darmstadt and Sebastian C. Peter, JNCASR. Designing Nanoscale Interface for Optoelectronic Properties of Layered Hybrid Perovskite Angshuman Nag, Indian Institute of Science Education and Research. The Power of Symmetry – Core Level Spectroscopy With Electrochemical Systems Karin Kleiner, University of Münster. Investigation of Halide Perovskites for Solar Cell Applications Selina Olthof, University of Cologne.
Semiconductor-metal Complex Hybrid Materials for Photocatalytic Conversion of CO2 to Chemicals Suman L. Jain, CSIR-Indian Institute of Petroleum, Dehradun.
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Theme: Machine Learning and Big Data Analytics Theme co-chairs: Prof. Narayanan C Krishnan, Indian Insititute of Technology Ropar and Prof. Sebastian Stober, Otto von Guericke University Magdeburg. List of Oral Presentations: Overview on Machine Learning and Big Data Analytics Narayanan CK and Sebastian Stober. Understanding AI technology is a prerequisite for its successful application Eirini Ntoutsi, Leibniz University Hannover. Empower Deep Networks with Combinatorial Algorithms Georg Martius, Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems, Tübingen. Handling Domain Shifts in Deep Learning for Clinical Images Prathosh A. P., Indian Institute of Technology Delhi. Speech Recognition Technologies for Indian languages: Challenges and Opportunities Preethi Jyothi, Indian Institute of Technology Bombay. Theme: Sustainable Earth Theme co-chairs: Prof. Abhijit Mukherjee, Indian Insitute of Technology Kharagpur and Dr. Manisha Jain, Leibniz Institute of Ecological Urban and Regional Development, Dresden. List of Oral Presentations: Overview on Sustainable Earth Abhijit Mukherjee and Manisha Jain Need for an integrated water-energy-food nexus approach for managing India’s groundwater crisis Aditi Mukherji, International Water Management Institute. Urban Footprints – Towards Greater Accountability in Cities’ Climate Governance
Cathrin Zengerling, Albert-Ludwigs-University Freiburg. Agricultural and land use dynamics in the context of global value chains and development policies-The case of the megaproject: Southern Agricultural Growth Corridor of Tanzania Peter Dannenberg, University of Cologne. Aerosol Radiative Forcing over India and Regional Climate S. Suresh Babu, Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre, Thiruvananthapuram.
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Oral Presentation Abstracts Theme: Advanced Communication and 5G Technologies
Overview on Advanced Communication and 5G Technologies
Prof. Bheemarjuna Reddy Tamma, Indian Institute of Technology Hyderabad and Prof. Christian Senger, University of Stuttgart. The proliferation and penetration of smartphones and Internet of Things (IoT) devices is having a profound impact on world economy. But the huge growth in the number of smartphones and IoT devices sold and the traffic generated by them have become a major challenge to the telecom industry. Telecom operators are constantly scouting for new technologies and strategies to meet this exponential demand for data. Next generation (5G) broadband cellular networking technology is designed to provide support for three different generic services, namely, enhanced Mobile BroadBand (eMBB), massive Machine‐Type Communications (mMTC), and UltraReliable Low‐Latency Communications (URLLC), each offering distinct quality of services to their users. 5G networks will offer data rates of up to 10 Gigabit per second, which means an increase of almost two orders of magnitude compared to existing cellular networks. Applications related to the IoT and in machine‐to‐machine communication bump up the number of potential users even further and as a consequence, billions of active 5G devices are expected by 2025. The advanced 5G/6G communication technologies will redefine a broad range of industries with connected services from retail to education, transportation to entertainment, healthcare to manufacturing, agriculture to public safety, and everything in between.
While high data rate (fast download speed) is usually the most perceivable quality parameter of the network from a mobile user’s point of view, other parameters are equally as important. One of them is latency, which is especially relevant for interactive applications such as teleconferencing and video games. Another one is reliability, which is crucial for applications such as for example remote surgeries and finance. The last parameter mentioned here is capacity, that is, the network has to maintain its quality parameters even in densely packet environments such as a sports stadium.
The first talk of the session will present some of the requirements of machine‐to‐machine communications together with a new and promising variant of a well‐known method for sharing the wireless medium among multiple users.
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None of the aforementioned quality parameters can be maintained if the bit error rate (the probability that a bit is delivered incorrectly, e.g., a transmitted zero becomes one at the receiver) of the communication channel is too high since this will either require retransmissions (affecting data rate and latency) or it will lead to flaky or even lost connections (affecting reliability). The channel bit error rate can be brought down using a variety of methods, the main tool being error control coding. The second talk will give an overview of this field in the context of 5G and optical networks.
Most current error control codes are based on a very mature mathematical framework, the so‐ called linear codes. A recent field of research is to leave this framework behind and try go “learn” error control codes using Deep Learning. Motivated by promising results on learning complete wireless transmission systems, the third talk presents a novel approach for learning efficient codes.
Due to the multitude of quality parameters, applications and deployed technologies, 5G networks require practical verification of the achievable quality parameters as well as extensive testing. The final talk presents an overview of a major 5G testbed, which was realized in India as a joint effort of multiple research institutions (funded by the Department of Telecommunications, Govt of India).
Irregular repetition slotted Aloha: A promising candidate for grant-free multiple access in massive machine-type communications
Prof. Chandra R. Murthy, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore.
Massive machine‐type communication (MMTC) services are expected to be an integral part of fifth‐generation wireless systems. A typical MMTC scenario serves a large number of users who sporadically send short packets to an access point or base station. Grant‐free random access (RA) based non‐orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) schemes have the advantage of requiring very low coordination and signaling overhead for such users. We exploit the sparse characteristics of MMTC and use compressive sensing (CS) approaches for detecting the active users in each frame. As the underlying multiple access scheme, we explore a successive interference cancellation (SIC) based RA protocol known as irregular repetition slotted ALOHA (IRSA). We analyze the performance of IRSA under (a) practical channel estimation, (b) an SINR based packet capture model, (c) multiple antenna base stations, and assess their effect on the achievable throughput.
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We will see that the completely distributed nature of the protocol, relatively low decoding complexity, and high throughput achieved makes IRSA a very promising candidate for MMTC applications. We conclude with discussing some critical challenges and potential ways to overcome them.
Overview of the Indian 5G testbed
Prof. Radha Krishna Ganti, Indian Institute of Technology Madras.
5G testbed is a multi‐institute program that has been funded by the Department of Telecommunications (DOT). Eight academic and research institutes are involved in building this end‐to‐end 5G testbed. As a part of the testbed, the core network, the RAN, the UE, both hardware and software have been developed indigenously. In this talk, I will provide details about the testbed, the features and how it is envisioned to help 5G eco‐system in India.
Deep Learning for Channel Coding
Prof. Rafael Schaefer, Berlin Institute of Technology.
Deep learning‐based physical layer communication algorithms that use some form of neural networks for communication related tasks such as encoding or decoding has received considerable interest recently. However, most of these works either focus solely on the decoding aspect or investigate end‐to‐end systems, where encoder, decoder, and sometimes also further components, are simultaneously learned as one concatenated system; the so‐called autoencoder. However, it can be advantageous to decouple the overall system to allow the optimization and learning of certain parts independently of the remaining ones. For example, it might be desirable to optimize the encoding functions independently of the decoder to avoid additional feedback about the decoder to the transmitter during the training process. To enable such an approach, one cannot rely on decoding‐centered metrics but needs to focus on the fundamental principle of mutual information between the input and output of the channel itself. In this talk, a novel approach is presented that optimizes a neural network for communication‐efficient encoding by using the negative mutual information as a loss function. It is shown that this yields similar results as using the end‐to‐end approach of autoencoders, although requiring an estimate of the mutual information. 13 11th Indo-German Frontiers of Engineering Conference (INDOGFOE) 2021 A joint undertaking by the Department of Science and Technology, IIT Kharagpur and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation
Advanced Channel Coding from 5G Mobile Networks to Optical Fiber Communication
Prof. Vahid Aref, Nokia Bell Labs, Stuttgart
In today’s high‐speed, low‐latency and energy‐efficient digital telecommunications, channel coding is the critical element to clean up the remaining data errors in the data processing chain of receivers. Since Shannon seminal work in 1948, which characterizes the ultimate performance of channel coding, many remarkable channel codes have been devised such that it is feasible today to operate very close to this ultimate limit. Today’s telecommunication services have though additional stringent requirements in terms of latency, reliability and energy‐efficiency which need different elaborate designs of channel codes. As an important example, the fifth generation (5G) mobile networks have demanding data rates of 100Mb/s‐10Gb/s while keeping latency smaller than 1ms and block error rate of 10−4−10−6. The next generation fiber optical networks support beyond 1Tb/s per single channel while having strict error rate of 10−15 and low power consumption. In this talk, we overview the channel coding design for 5G mobile networks and for the fiber optical networks and explain how their different requirements lead to elaborate design of different classes of high‐performance channel codes.
Theme: Energy Materials
Overview on Energy Materials
Prof. Oliver Clemens, JNCASR, Bengaluru and Prof. Sebastian C. Peter, University of Stuttgart.
Energy Materials are of ubiquitous importance to provide solution strategies to the challenge on how to proceed from fossil to renewable energy sources. Clearly, there will be no single solution to this process, and future societies will have to rely on a combination of several strategies, well adapted to local or regional demands, which can differ from country to country or departments therein. This relates to different availability of various energy sources to be harvested, including solar, wind, geothermal, and tidal energy, as well as bio fuels.
Let’s take the example of electromobility to exemplify the complexity on how to address future demands. Electric vehicles can be based either on batteries or on fuel cell technologies. For the former, it is necessary to prepare large amounts of inorganic materials involving elements such as
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lithium, nickel, iron, cobalt, phosphorous, etc., which can be more or critical concerning the large amounts required for world‐wide fabrication; once available, this technology is extremely efficient in converting electrical energy to chemical energy stored in these materials with low energy losses. Fuel cells transform chemical energy stored in chemical fuels such as hydrogen into electrical energy by converting it to water. Hydrogen is not abundant, and needs to be formed from water ideally using a renewable energy source, e. g., solar energy. These transformation processes between the different chemical compounds does require significant lower amounts of energy materials to catalyse the conversion process. However, at current overall losses for compressing and storing hydrogen as well as for its transformation make the whole technology less energy efficient, and about 3 – 4 times more energy would be required in comparison to battery technologies.
Research on energy materials is not only limited to the finding of new materials, which make these processes more efficient, but also on gaining a deeper understanding of the detailed working principles of materials already available, which will help to develop and improve them further and push them towards their physical limits.
In this session, it is aimed to provide the audience with knowledge on some current developments on the preparation and functionalization of new energy materials. Further, we aim to initiate a deeper discussion, if the solution to reduction of fossil fuel emission can be fully material based, or if will require a more complex societal change of behaviour in addition.
Designing Nanoscale Interface for Optoelectronic Properties of Layered Hybrid Perovskite
Prof. Angshuman Nag, Indian Institute of Science Education and Research, Pune.
Layered hybrid perovskites like (C4H9NH3)2PbI4 exhibit optoelectronic properties suitable for applications in solar cell and light emitting diode (LED). They have fascinating layered crystal
2‐ + structure with periodic nanoscale interfaces between the inorganic {PbI4} and organic C4H9NH3
2‐ cation. Because of these interfaces, electron and hole are confined in atomically thin {PbI4} inorganic well layers. Therefore, these layered perovskites are considered as electronically 2D systems, irrespective of their crystallite sizes.1,2 Importantly, the crystal structure is flexible, allowing a number of combinations of different organic cations and inorganic anions. So a rational design of the nanoscale interfaces, and hence, tunable optoelectronic properties are feasible. For
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example, excitonic binding energy can be controlled over an order of magnitude from a few tens of meV to a few hundreds of meV, with simple variation of composition of organic cations. So for solar cell and photocatalytic applications, one can choose the composition with lower excitonic binding energies, whereas for LED, higher excitonic binding energy is preferred. Interestingly, chiral organic cations can impart optical non‐linearity and chiral optoelectronic properties. In this talk, I will discuss about how controlling nanoscale interface between organic and inorganic layers can yield interesting optical and optoelectronic properties. Furthermore, we observe signatures
2‐ 3 of interactions between adjacent {PbI4} inorganic wells. Does it mean that the layered perovskites deviate from the perceived model of electronically 2D quantum well? Well, the story is not so simple, and I will discuss the role of layer edge.
References: 1. Sheikh, T.; Shinde, A.; Mahamuni, S.; Nag, A. Possible Dual Bandgap in (C4H9NH3)2PbI4 2D Layered Perovskite: Single‐Crystal and Exfoliated Few‐Layer. ACS Energy Lett. 2018, 3, 2940. 2. Chakraborty, R.; Nag, A. Dielectric Confinement for Designing Compositions and Optoelectronic Properties of 2D Layered Hybrid Perovskites. Phys. Chem. Chem. Phys. 2021, 23, 82. 3. Sheikh, T.; Nawale, V.; Pathoor, N.; Phadnis, C.; Chowdhury, A.; Nag, A. Angew. Chem. Int. Ed. 2020, 59, 11653.
The Power of Symmetry – Core Level Spectroscopy With Electrochemical Systems
Prof. Karin Kleiner, University of Münster.
Near edge X‐ray absorption fine structure (‘NEXAFS’) spectroscopy at transition metal (Me) L and oxygen (O) K edges in combination with charge transfer multiplet (‘CTM’) calculations are a powerful tool to study changes in the electronic structure of layered oxides and structural related materials upon operation. On the basis of NCM 111 (LiNi1/3Co1/3Mn1/3O2), NCM 622(LiNi0.6Co0.2Mn0.2O2) and NCM 811 (LiNi0.8Co0.1Mn0.1O2) it is shown, that highly ionic Ni2+ is the main redox active configuration forming highly covalent Ni3+ at high states of charge. The charged states are therefore stabilized by a shift of electron density from O to Ni. The covalent character of the NCMs, in turn, determines the electrochemical potential of the materials and
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thus the cell voltage of Li‐ion batteries. Moreover, the comparison of the results to crystallographic changes upon cycling gives new insights into capacity limitations of layered oxides.
Acknowledgement: BMBF, Funding number: 03XP0231
Investigation of Halide Perovskites for Solar Cell Applications
Prof. Selina Olthof, University of Cologne.
Perovskite compounds have played a central role in the evolution of condensed matter physics and materials chemistry over the last 70 years. During the last decade, halide‐based perovskites in particular have attracted tremendous attention due to their promising performance as absorbers in thin film solar cells. Even though these materials are commonly prepared via low‐cost solution processing, the current record solar cells are almost reaching efficiencies of state‐of‐the‐art single crystalline silicon devices! Research on other applications as sensors or light emitting diodes show also highly promising results.
While these rapid improvements in performance are impressive, there is still much to learn about the materials properties. Understanding the physical and chemical phenomena that make these materials deliver such impressive results can help researchers to further improve on these optoelectronic devices.
In my research group, we use photoelectron spectroscopy to probe thin films of perovskites which we either prepare by thermal evaporation in vacuum or by solution processing approaches. We are interested to learn about the changes that can be introduced to the charge transport levels and the energetic alignments to adjacent transport layers. Using a combination of UV and inverse photoelectron spectroscopy, density functional theory, and a tight binding model we were able to extract the relevant energy level positions and explain the origin of these changes based on changes in hybridization strength, atomic level positions, and lattice distortion.
A second research focus lies on the interface chemistry between halide perovskites and adjacent transport layers. We observed that the perovskite composition and film formation can be significantly influenced by chemical reactions taking place at these interfaces which can be probed using x‐ray photoelectron spectroscopy. Here, understanding the underlying reasons for
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the degradation of the material will help to develop more stable perovskite based optoelectronic devices.
Semiconductor-metal Complex Hybrid Materials for Photocatalytic Conversion of CO2 to Chemicals
Prof. Suman L. Jain, CSIR-Indian Institute of Petroleum, Dehradun.
Photochemical reduction of CO2 using solar energy is an area of tremendous importance as it can tackle both the issues of the global warming and shortage of the fossil resources.1 The transformation of CO2 into chemicals by using solar light irradiation is an effective method because there is no addition of extra energy and no negative influence on the environment. The immediate requirement in this technology is to develop visible light‐sensitive photocatalysts, which are prominent in CO2 recycling. So far a number of photocatalysts mainly semiconductors based have been introduced by many researchers, however their quantum yields and selectivities of products are low.2 Transition‐metal complexes such as ruthenium(II) polypyridine carbonyl complex, cobalt(II) trisbipyridine, and cobalt(III) macrocycles with or without a photosensitizer have also often been used as photoredox catalysts for CO2 conversion.3 These catalysts are advantageous over semiconductor systems as they can absorb a significant portion of the solar spectrum, have long‐lived excited states, can promote multi‐electron transfer and activate small molecules through binding. The large availability and tunable properties of transition metal complexes make them a favorite choice as sensitizers, with the added possibility of using polymeric ligands for more organized systems. So far the rhenium‐(I) bipyridine (bpy) complexes i.e. fac‐[ReI(bpy)(CO)3(L)]n+(L )Cl (n) 0); PR3 (n ) have been considered to be most effective and high yielding photocatalysts, which can work not only as a catalyst but also as a photosensitizer, and CO is the principal product of CO2 reduction.4 However, the presence of organic ligands raises concerns about long term stability of the catalyst. In addition difficult recovery and non‐ recycling ability of such catalysts make their applicability limited from industrial viewpoints. One of the logical approaches to overcome these limitations is to immobilize such metal based photoredox catalysts to photoactive supports like TiO2, graphene oxide etc. The covalent attachment of these complexes to the photoactive supports not only enhances the stability of these complexes however, make their recovery and reusability feasible. During our recent research we have designed and developed a number of highly effective hybrid photocatalysts by combining molecular photoredox complexes to photoactive supports for the significantly 18 11th Indo-German Frontiers of Engineering Conference (INDOGFOE) 2021 A joint undertaking by the Department of Science and Technology, IIT Kharagpur and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation
improved conversion of CO2 to high value chemicals such as methanol, carbonates and carboxylic acids.5‐7
References: 1. P. M. Cox, R. A. Betts, C. D. Jones, S. A. Spall, I. J. Totterdell, Nature 408 (2000) 184–187 2. A. J. Morris, G. J. Meyer, E. Fujita Acc. Chem. Res. 2009, 42, 1983‐1994. 3. a) H. Hori, F. P. A. Johnson, K. Koike, O. Ishitani, T. Ibusuki, J. Photochem. Photobiol. A 1996, 96, 171. b) C. Bruckmeier, N. W. Lehenmeier, R. Reithmeier, B. Rieger, J. Herranz, C. Kavakli, Dalton Trans. 2012, 41, 5026. 4. H. Tsubaki,A. Sekine, Y. Ohashi, K. Koike, H. Takeda, O. Ishitani, J. Am. Chem. Soc. 2005, 127, 15544P. 5.P. Kumar, A. Kumar, B. Sreedhar, B. Sain, S. S. Ray, S. L. Jain, Chem. Eur. J. 20 (2014) 6154–6161. 6. P. Kumar, A. Bansiwal, N. Labhsetwar, S. L. Jain, Green Chem. 17 (2015) 1605–1609. 7. Sandhya Saini, Pankaj Prajapati, Hari Singh, Anil K. Sinha and Suman L. Jain, ACS Sustainable Chem. Eng. 713 (2019) 11313‐11322.
Theme: Machine Learning and Big Data Analytics
Overview on Machine Learning and Big Data Analytics
Prof. Narayanan CK, Indian Institute of Technology Ropar and Prof. Sebastian Stober, Otto von Guericke University Magdeburg.
The easy access to large data repositories, growth in computing power, and advances in algorithm modelling have resulted in the ubiquity of machine learning and big data analytics techniques. Their impact is being felt across all domains with a spurt in applications driven by artificial intelligence models. This special session at INDOGFOE 2020 is aimed at showcasing to the larger audience both relevant recent advances in machine learning and big data analytics as well as their successful applications. Some of our speakers and general participants are researching solutions for fundamental challenges such as increasing trustworthiness or the ability to reason in machine learning models. Others are experts in a wide range of machine learning applications such as computer vision, bioinformatics, speech and music, natural language processing, and psychology.
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Machine learning technologies are ubiquitously penetrating our daily lives, however, challenges remain. One of the challenges is to make these technologies accessible to people across all countries and cultures, i.e., an accessible human‐computer interface. Speech being a dominant mode of communication has received a lot of attention as a natural means for facilitating human‐ computer interaction. Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) is the problem of converting spoken utterances into written text. ASR has been one of the long‐standing challenges in the field of AI and poses a number of technically challenging problems. In her talk, Preethi Jyothi will focus on two challenges that are important for ASR systems to handle in multilingual societies such as India: 1) Accented speech and 2) Code‐mixed speech. While it is essential to develop natural and easy means to interact with AI and machine learning technology, a critical factor that can increase its adoption for expensive decision making is its trustworthiness. The public concerns caused by the risk that this technology poses has resulted in the recent right to explanation act by the EU. Increasing the reliability and trustworthiness of machine learning is therefore an important research area that is witnessing significant innovations. While it is important to make machine learning trustworthy, it is also essential to understand the root cause of public misgivings if any. In her talk, Eirini Ntoutsi will highlight the need for an accurate understanding of the technology to remove some of the misconceptions. In particular, the speaker will address the stationarity assumption on the data. She will also discuss ways to overcome bias and discrimination in data‐ driven AI systems. Another central challenge in machine learning applications is the train‐test mismatch. Here, the distribution of the data observed during the deployment phase differs significantly from the data that was used during training time. This is a typical situation when dealing with computer‐assisted medical image analytics. Domain shifts due to variation in the capture device, stains, and dyes, etc are common. Learning generalizable machine learning models that can cope with such changes is a very challenging task. In his talk, A. P. Pratosh will discuss the problem of domain generalization in the context of medical image analysis. He will present a recent method for overcoming the domain shift problem. While the talk focuses primarily on the imaging modality, the solutions proposed can be adapted for various applications that face the problem of domain shifts.
Finally, the talk by Georg Martius will address a fundamental shortcoming of current machine learning techniques: the ability to reason. While they can extract very complicated patterns from data, there is a certain sense of dissatisfaction when it comes to their performance on tasks with 20 11th Indo-German Frontiers of Engineering Conference (INDOGFOE) 2021 A joint undertaking by the Department of Science and Technology, IIT Kharagpur and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation
combinatorial or algorithmic complexity. Looking at combinatorial or algorithmic problems in isolation and with a clean specification , already very strong methods for solving them have been developed that do not involve machine learning. This talk will introduce recent advances of bringing these two worlds ‐‐ machine learning and combinatorial algorithms ‐‐ together towards an AI with improved reasoning capability.
Understanding AI technology is a prerequisite for its successful application
Prof. Eirini Ntoutsi, Leibniz University Hannover.
Data‐driven decision making is widely employed nowadays by businesses, governments and other organizations in order to optimize efficiency and effectiveness of their operations. Decisions once undertaken by humans are increasingly conducted by algorithms, derived through Machine Learning (ML) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) powered by big data. The technology has already penetrated into almost all spheres of human life, from content recommendation and healthcare to predictive policing and autonomous driving, deeply affecting everyone, anywhere, anytime.
While data‐driven Artificial Intelligence systems allow previously unthinkable optimizations in the automation of expensive human decision making, the risks that the technology can pose are also high, leading to an ever increasing public concern about the impact of the technology in our lives and hindering its adaption. In this talk I will argue that many of these risks are the result of misconceptions and violated assumptions and therefore, an accurate understanding of the technology is essential for benefiting from its huge potential.
In particular, in this talk I will cover i) the stationarity assumption that data characteristics do not change and how to ensure that what is learned is up‐to‐date and valid and ii) the objectivity myth that algorithms and data are objective and how to detect and mitigate bias and discrimination in data‐driven AI systems.
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Empower Deep Networks with Combinatorial Algorithms
Prof. Georg Martius, Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems, Tübingen.
Machine Learning has achieved great successes in solving problems that seemed unsolvable just a decade ago. Examples are the mastering of the game of Go, automatic machine translation, and learning in‐hand manipulation with a robotic hand. Besides many technical innovations, these advances have been enabled by two main ingredients: highly flexible differentiable function approximators (deep networks) and huge amounts of data.
While deep networks can extract very complicated patterns from data, there is a certain sense of dissatisfaction when it comes to their performance on tasks with combinatorial or algorithmic complexity. For example, think of learning to find the shortest path in an environment when provided only with raw birds‐eye maps (images). Current, deep networks can learn this task on maps they were trained on, but perform poorly on new maps. The reason is that part of the problem has an algorithmic nature: the same shortest path algorithm works on all maps if suitably represented as a graph. However, a normal deep network cannot perform the same computations and thus can only learn to imitate the process.
The next big step for researchers in machine learning and artificial intelligence is to enhance the ability of the methods to reason. This sentiment was for example expressed by Battaglia et al [1] who advocate that “combinatorial generalization must be a top priority for AI”.
Importantly, there are decades worth of research contributions in graph algorithms and discrete optimization. We have optimal runtimes for sorting algorithms, clever tricks for various algorithmic problems over graphs/networks such as for shortest path or various cuts or matching‐ based problems. In other words, when faced with combinatorial or algorithmic problems in isolation and with a clean specification, we already have very strong methods for solving them. This should not be ignored.
While there is some level of success in designing deep learning architectures with “algorithmic behavior”, the classical methods are still miles ahead when it comes to performance in purely combinatorial setups. We believe the right approach is to build bridges between the two disciplines so that progress can freely flow from one to another. In that spirit, we would rephrase
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the earlier sentiment as “merging techniques from combinatorial optimization and deep learning must be a top priority for AI”.
We have recently developed a method [2] that allows embedding a large class of combinatorial algorithms in deep neural networks while maintaining the usual training procedure unchanged. In the talk, I will explain the fundamental problem that we had to overcome and show examples of what can be done with the new architecture. This includes the shortest path problem on raw images [2] and finding correspondences in pairs of images [3].
We have two blog‐posts on this topic: https://towardsdatascience.com/the‐fusion‐of‐deep‐learning‐and‐combinatorics‐4d0112a74fa7 https://towardsdatascience.com/rambo‐ranking‐metric‐blackbox‐optimization‐36811a5f52dd References: [1] P. Battaglia et al. Relational inductive biases, deep learning, and graph networks. https://arxiv.org/abs/1806.01261, 2018 [2] M. Vlastelica, A. Paulus, V. Musil, G. Martius, and M. Rolínek. Differentiation of blackbox combinatorial solvers. In International Conference on Learning Representations, ICLR, 2020. [3] M. Rolínek, P. Swoboda, D. Zietlow, A. Paulus, V. Musil, and G. Martius. Deep graph matching via blackbox differentiation of combinatorial solvers. In European Conference on Computer Vision ECCV, 2020 [4] M. Rolínek, V. Musil, A. Paulus, M. Vlastelica, C. Michaelis, and G. Martius. Optimizing ranking‐ based metrics with blackbox differentiation. In Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, CVPR, 2020.
Handling Domain Shifts in Deep Learning for Clinical Images
Prof. Prathosh A. P., Indian Institute of Technology Delhi.
Oftentimes, Deep learning models built on a certain dataset does not generalize well on similar but unseen target data. This is more pronounced in clinical images where it is very common to have distributional shifts from sources such as change of capture device, variation in stains and dyes, change in device optics etc. In this talk, we discuss the problem of domain generalization, in the context of clinical images with an example of classification of WBCs from Peripheral Blood Smear images. We discuss a recent method based on metric learning and neural generative
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models to address the problem of domain shifts in PBS images caused by change in characteristics of the camera.
Speech Recognition Technologies for Indian languages: Challenges and Opportunities
Prof. Preethi Jyothi, Indian Institute of Technology Bombay.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) has increasingly been making inroads into our lives over the last decade. We are entering an era where users are likely to take advantage of AI‐driven technologies in all walks of life, by interacting seamlessly with digital systems. But, as with all other technologies, it is an important challenge to make such technology accessible to people from all countries and cultures. This challenge manifests itself mostly at the interface between humans and computers. A key component of this interface that is highly sensitive to the cultural and linguistic background of the users is automatic speech recognition (ASR). ASR is the problem of converting spoken utterances into written text. ASR has been one of the long‐standing challenges in the field of AI and poses a number of technically challenging problems. In this talk, we will focus on two challenges that are important for ASR systems to handle in multilingual societies such as India: 1) Accented speech and 2) Code‐mixed speech. We focus on accented speech as an important challenge to ASR. Accents refer to a distinctive manner of pronouncing words in a language, influenced by the geographic, linguistic and socio‐cultural background of the speaker. Even when the language of interaction with an ASR system is restricted to a lingua franca (such as English), the accent of the speaker can vary dramatically based on their linguistic background. We find that ASR systems that provide impressive accuracies on mainstream speech accent significantly underperform when confronted with new speech accents. Thus, adapting ASR systems using machine learning techniques to be robust to varying accents is an important research problem. Code‐mixed ASR is our second challenge of interest. Code‐mixing is the use of more than one language in the same conversation or utterance, and is commonplace in multilingual communities all over the world. Understanding code‐mixing patterns in different languages and developing accurate code‐mixed ASR models remains a challenge, primarily due to the lack of large code‐ mixed datasets. Handling both these challenges could have a great impact on the wide adoption of speech‐driven services in linguistically‐diverse countries like India.
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Theme: Sustainable Earth
Overview on Sustainable Earth
Prof. Manisha Jain, Leibniz Institute of Ecological Urban & Regional Development and Prof. Abhijit Mukherjee, Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur.
The 21st Century urbanisation process unfolding in the countries of the Global South under neoliberalisation is characterised by dramatic rural to urban transformation, which as per IPCC Report 2019 on “Climate Change and Land” has affected 70% of the global land and surface air temperature has increased by 1.53°C, thus undermining global sustainability. Also, as per United Nations 2019 report “World Urbanization Prospects: The 2018 Revision”, urbanization level is set to raise to 68% by 2050 with majority of the countries in the Global South doubling their population. This development coupled with complexities of COVID‐19 outbreak, accommodating future growth sustainably remains a challenge. Subsequently, there has been a resurgence of increasing need of sustainable development not only from academia but also from civil society, planners and bureaucrats.
Since the foundation of sustainable development relies on interconnectedness of natural and socioeconomic systems, the complexities associated with sustainable development cannot be adequately addressed by research approaches restricted to single scientific disciplines. A comprehensive understanding of these complexities requires the collaboration of different disciplines such as economics, geography, ecology and environmental science, and will be highly interdisciplinary.
So far, transferring specific research findings into policies and specific public programs to achieve sustainable development remains a challenge. This session of “Sustainable Earth” brings together different disciplines of science aiming not only to simplify understanding the findings but also enabling policy formulation and reforms. The session focuses specifically in context to current research demand and problems in sustainable development in Indian rural urban regions but is not limited to the following:
1. Institutional and economic reforms under neoliberalism and increasing socioeconomic inequity (e.g. access to basic services, infrastructure, economic opportunities and housing).
2. Land grabbing and displacement for construction of mega projects resulting in forced migration from rural areas towards large cities to be absorbed in informal sector. 25 11th Indo-German Frontiers of Engineering Conference (INDOGFOE) 2021 A joint undertaking by the Department of Science and Technology, IIT Kharagpur and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation
3. Unregulated land use change and impact on natural resources (e.g. soil sealing, depletion of ground water, river contamination, reliance on private vehicles and resultant increase in Co2 emissions etc.).
4. Water availability, pollution and related aspects
5. Climate change, extreme climate, climate stress etc.
6. Limited planning and implementation as well as public participation to sustainably manage and guide growth in rapidly growing cities (e.g. lack of government accountability, lack of citizen empowerment and making them accountable for growth/change).
7. Evidence‐based policies and reforms for sustainable growth management. The lack of good quality and reliable data hinders research and policy evaluation and formulation process.
Need for an integrated water-energy-food nexus approach for managing India’s groundwater crisis
Dr. Aditi Mukherji, International Water Management Institute.
India is the world’s largest user of groundwater, with an annual draft of 250 km3. Almost 80% of this is used for irrigation and there are 20 million irrigation wells and tubewells – again the highest number anywhere in the world. Groundwater‐ led irrigation was instrumental in success of Green Revolution in India, however, very soon, it was apparent that increase in agricultural production came at the cost of groundwater sustainability. Currently, India’s water crisis can be largely traced to growth in groundwater irrigation – a trajectory influenced by India’s food and electricity policy since the late 1970s. In this presentation, I will argue that India’s food policy of providing affordable and cheap food to consumers dictates the need to keep input prices, including that of electricity for pumping groundwater, low, so that output (food) prices can be also kept low. Solutions to India’s groundwater problems has to be embedded within a broader water‐ energy‐food nexus context. I will discuss some of the nexus solutions (e.g. solutions in the water, food and energy sectors) that impact groundwater use, with examples from different states in India. Many of these solutions are being already implemented at various scales, and the paper will assess, using secondary literature, the extent to which these interventions have been effective in better groundwater governance.
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References: 1. Mukherji, A. 2020. Sustainable Groundwater Management in India Needs a Water‐Energy‐ Food Nexus Approach. Applied Economic Perspectives and Policy. DOI: 10.1002/aepp.13123 2. Mukherji, A., P.S. Banerjee, and D. Biswas (2018), Private investments in groundwater irrigation and small holder agriculture in West Bengal: Opportunities and constraints in Groundwater of South Asia, Abhijit Mukherjee (ed), Springer Verlag, Singapore. 3. Mukherji, A. 2017. Managing energy‐irrigation nexus: Insights from Karnataka and Punjab states in India in Advances in Groundwater Governance Villholth, K.G.; Gun Jac van der, Lopez‐Gunn, E.; Conti, K. and Garrido. A (eds)., Routledge Publishers. pp. 284‐302.
Urban Footprints – Towards Greater Accountability in Cities’ Climate Governance
Prof. Cathrin Zengerling, Albert-Ludwigs-University Freiburg.
With global warming and the increasing depletion of resources the world faces enormous environmental and societal challenges. Globally, scientists and politicians agree that meeting these challenges requires great transformation processes compared to business as usual. Complex societal problems with unknown solutions are best addressed by a variety of actors and overlapping policies at local, national, and international levels. The “Urban Footprints” research project focuses on the current as well as the potential future role of cities in combating climate change and resource depletion. It aims to explore accountable modes of governance of cities’ carbon and material footprints in order to activate the transformative forces within cities.
Cities are crucial actors when it comes to global problems. Urban infrastructures and lifestyles are responsible for significant shares of global greenhouse gas emissions and resource consumption. They leave global footprints. For example, approximately 75% of global energy and material flows are consumed in cities. Nowadays, about half of the world’s population lives in cities and this number is expected to rise to 66% by 2050. The research is built on the presumption that cities are not only part of the problem but also part of the solution. It is in cities that innovation happens. However, this innovation needs to be incentivized and steered reliably, in view of the severe threat that climate change and resource depletion pose for global living conditions.
Bridging the disciplines of legal sciences and urban studies the project aims to provide answers to the following core question: What is the status quo and what is the potential for the accountable
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governance of cities' carbon and material footprints? The project develops a knowledge base, an analysis of opportunities and challenges, as well as recommendations for enhanced accountable governance of urban carbon and material footprints in eight national jurisdictions as well as eight cities in those countries: China (Shenzhen), India (Delhi), United States (Los Angeles), Brazil (São Paulo), Nigeria (Lagos), Germany (Hamburg), Egypt (Cairo), Canada (Toronto). The chosen eight countries in question cover almost half – 47 % – of the global urban population. The research envisages future cities that are accountable for their carbon and material footprints.
The key note focuses on urban climate governance and presents the methodology and interim findings of the ongoing “Urban Footprints” research. It provides a comparative overview of emerging patterns of accountability in selected cities in the global north and south with regard to four perspectives: responsibility, assessment, transparency and participation. It highlights current challenges and carves out options for enhancing accountable urban climate governance.
Agricultural and land use dynamics in the context of global value chains and development policies –The case of the megaproject: Southern Agricultural Growth Corridor of Tanzania
Prof. Peter Dannenberg, University of Cologne.
Agricultural mega projects and large‐scale growth corridor programs in the global South have been critically discussed for their environmental, social and economic unsustainable development implications for decades. Nevertheless, such large‐scale top‐down modernization dreamscapes have become popular again all around the world. This presentation discusses and conceptualizes how and why such large‐scale approaches could become popular again for donors and national policy makers and what this can mean for sustainable development.
Here I use the example of the Southern Agricultural Growth Corridor of Tanzania (SAGCOT) as one of the biggest and most ambitious agricultural development programs in the Global South. The corridor covers about one third of the area of Tanzania and was established with the vision of a “transformed, commercially viable agriculture sector that enhances food security, improves livelihoods and ensures environmental sustainability". To fulfill this vision, SAGCOT follows a national top‐down initiative based on an explicit global value chain integration strategy. This includes the involvement of powerful multinational enterprises both at the upstream (e.g. YARA) and the downstream (e.g. Unilever) end of value chains as strategic partners in the planning and
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development of the corridor vision. As a result, NGOs, civil society organizations and latest academic literature heavily accuse SAGCOT of fostering land use conflicts, land grabbing, and even increasing food insecurity and risks for local livelihoods.
By building up on the concepts of Global Production Networks and Global Value Chains, in detail this presentation discusses how the SAGCOT corridor is planned, negotiated and implemented, which conflicts of interests occur and how this leads to intended and in particular unintended effects for farmers and communities. Our results show, how in particular globally travelling narratives, figures and vision of possible bright and dark futures are strategically used by different actors to persuade decision makers and to enforce own interests of sustainability – partly to the disadvantage of marginal groups.
Aerosol Radiative Forcing over India and Regional Climate
Dr. S. Suresh Babu, Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre, Thiruvananthapuram.
Aerosols affects the radiation balance of the earth – atmosphere system through direct (scattering and absorption) and indirect (modifying the cloud properties) radiative forcing and alter regional and global climate. However, scientific understanding of the various processes responsible for the climate impact of aerosols were limited, especially over South Asian region. For the systematic characterization of the spatio‐temporal properties of atmospheric aerosols, their optical and microphysical properties over the Indian region and assessing their implications for radiation balance and climate forcing, Aerosol Radiative Forcing over India (ARFI) project was formulated by ISRO (Indian Space Research Organisation). Currently, ISRO maintains the largest network of aerosol observatories (ARFINET) over India covering distinct landmass regions in India and marine regions around it. Besides this, several multi‐ platform field campaigns were conducted onboard research ship, aircraft and high altitude balloons. This talk is about the important scientific results from the Aerosol Radiative Forcing over India (ARFI) Project of ISRO ‐ GBP, which improved our understanding of the atmospheric aerosols over South Asia in general and India in particular. Details are available in https://spl.gov.in/SPL/index.php/arfs‐home.
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List of Poster Presentations
(sessions and session speakers in alphabetical order) Theme: Advanced Communication and 5G Technologies
Stochastic Geometry for Communication Networks: Wireless and Beyond Abhishek Gupta, Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur.
Current Research Activities in Wireless Communication and Radar Systems Jan Mietzner, Hamburg University of Applied Sciences (HAW).
5G Radio Access Network Virtualization Koteswararao Kondepu, Indian Institute of Technology Dharwad.
Future Reliable Communication Systems: Machine Learning Based Designs Laurent Schmalen – Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT).
Quantum Communication Networks Ricardo Bassoli, Technical University Dresden
Network-Application Integration in the 5G Era: A Case Study of OTT Media Services Sandip Chakraborty, Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur.
Coexistence of LTE/5G-Unlicensed and WiFi using techniques from Optimization, Game- theory, and Q-learning Naveen K. P., Indian Institute of Technology Tirupati.
Theme: Energy Materials
Ab Initio Microkinetic Modeling Augmented with Machine Learning Approaches to Design Catalyst Materials for Renewable Energy and Chemicals M. Ali Haider, Indian Institute of Technology Delhi.
Probing Functional Interfaces in Li-Ion Batteries
Julia Maibach, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology.
Novel mixed anionic hydrides and structurally and thermally sensitive luminescence Nathalie Kunkel, Georg-August-University Göttingen.
Towards High Capacity NASICON Cathodes for Sodium ion Batteries Premkumar Senguttuvan, JNCASR, Bengaluru.
30 11th Indo-German Frontiers of Engineering Conference (INDOGFOE) 2021 A joint undertaking by the Department of Science and Technology, IIT Kharagpur and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation
Scalable Coating of Solution-Processed Inks for OER Electrocatalysis and Energy Storage Devices Ritu Gupta, Indian Institute of Technology Jodhpur.
Conversion and storage of energy: pyroelectrics and solid electrolytes Tilman Leisegang, Technische Universität Bergakademie Freiberg.
Oxygen-redox cathode & control of first cycle voltage hysteresis Urmimala Maitra, IACS Kolkata.
Waste as a resource? Daniel Pleissner, Leuphana University Lüneburg AND Institute for Food and Environmental Research
Theme: Machine Learning and Big Data Analytics
Multimodal Machine Learning for Enhancing Image Understanding Anand Mishra, Indian Institute of Technology Jodhpur.
Automatic Detection of Informative Tweets During Crisis Events Anna Kruspe, Technical University of Munich.
Anomaly Event Detection in Surveillance Videos Maheshkumar H Kolekar, Indian Institute of Technology Patna.
Machine and Deep Learning for Clinical Neuroimaging Kirsten Ritter, Charité - Universitätsmedizin Berlin.
Meaningful Information Extraction from documents Mayank Singh, Indian Institute of Technology Gandhinagar.
DataLad - Decentralized Management of Digital Objects for Open Science Michael Hanke, Forschungszentrum Jülich.
Principal metabolic flux mode analysis Sahely Bhadra, Indian Institute of Technology Palakkad.
CogXAI { Cognitive neuroscience inspired techniques for eXplainable AI Sebastian Stober, Otto von Guericke University Magdeburg.
Machine learning for detecting negative communication practices in digital media Tatjana Scheffler, Ruhr-Universität Bochum. Generative Machine Learning for Spin Systems in Statistical Physics Vipul Arora, Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur. 31 11th Indo-German Frontiers of Engineering Conference (INDOGFOE) 2021 A joint undertaking by the Department of Science and Technology, IIT Kharagpur and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation
Theme: Sustainable Earth
Generalized Linear Models to Study Non-stationarity in Hydrology: Some Applications using Linear and Circular Statistics Arpita Mondal, Indian Institute of Technology Bombay.
Complexation of arsenic species with oxygen-containing functional groups of natural organic matter: Insight from X-ray absorption spectroscopic (XAS) study Ashis Biswas, Indian Institute of Science and Education Research Bhopal.
Geographic Perspectives on India’s urban transformation Carsten Butsch, University of Cologne.
Earth Observation Techniques for Spatial Disaggregation of Exposure Data Christian Geiß, German Aerospace Centre (DLR).
Organic carbon dynamics of oxbow lakes in Gangetic plains Devanita Ghosh, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore.
Groundwater storage quantification in India and its influence in food security Soumendra Nath Bhanja, Indian Institute of Science Bangalore.
Urban Regional Resilience and Land-use Strategies Sonja Deppisch, HafenCity Universität Hamburg.
32 11th Indo-German Frontiers of Engineering Conference (INDOGFOE) 2021 A joint undertaking by the Department of Science and Technology, IIT Kharagpur and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation
Poster Presentation Abstracts
Theme: Advanced Communication and 5G Technologies
Stochastic Geometry for Communication Networks: Wireless and Beyond
Prof. Abhishek Gupta, Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur.
Stochastic geometry (SG) is study of spatial distribution of random objects in a space. Recently, it has emerged a tractable tool to model and analyze wireless communication networks. Prior to SG based frameworks, analytical system level performance evaluation of a wireless network was an open research problem and studies were limited to simulation results or very simple Wyner models. It was shown that SG based frameworks are fairly accurate to model modern wireless networks and these models found their applicability in the study of mobile ad hoc networks, and cellular networks. Owing to their tractability, they can provide many design insights to help build an optimal network. As we move towards current 5G generation, user centric, heterogeneous, ultra‐dense and opportunistic deployments have resulted in further randomization of modern networks and making SG based models more accurate. Therefore these models were applied to analyze 5G millimeter wave networks and heterogeneous networks and they continue to be relevant to study beyond 5G systems including THz and visible light communication (VLC) networks. With evolution of communication, we have observed many new paradigms such as vehicle to vehicle (V2V) and vehicle to everything communication, digital broadcasting networks, where SG can be applied. In this talk, I plan to introduce the SG, and its applicability to wide variety of networks. Further, evolution of new communication paradigms bring many new challenges in their modeling and analysis which leads to development of new tools and approaches. I will discuss some of the topics where we have developed SG based frameworks to study new technologies. SG provides a collection of many spatial processes to model different types of deployments. In networks, where nodes are deployed more or less independent, Poisson point process can be used to model node’s locations. In networks where small cells are opportunistic deployed in user hotspots, clustered point processes can be applied. Poisson line processes are used to model streets based deployments. Spatial processes containing random objects can be used to study blockages, connectivity and coverage in a network. As we move ahead of wireless towards a new communication paradigm known as molecular communication, SG has again proved to a valuable tool for its study. My work focuses on identifying new analytical 33 11th Indo-German Frontiers of Engineering Conference (INDOGFOE) 2021 A joint undertaking by the Department of Science and Technology, IIT Kharagpur and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation
frameworks and deriving mathematical tools for various modern communication paradigms including molecular communication, broadcast networks, V2V and V2X, mmWave, VLC, THz communication.
Research Area: K903, Operating, Communication and Information Systems, H10107‐ Stochastics, Probability Theory
Current Research Activities in Wireless Communication and Radar Systems
Prof. Jan Mietzner, Hamburg University of Applied Sciences (HAW).
Our current research interests lie in the areas of software‐defined radio (SDR) and 5G wireless communications, visible light communications (VLC) and radar/ joint radar‐communications (RadCom) applications. The poster highlights some current and recent research activities, which concern for example planning and evaluation of VLC settings for different wireless communication and indoor navigation use cases, the combination of VLC and human‐centric lighting (HCL) techniques, experimental evaluation of VLC systems, novel waveforms for multiple‐ input multiple‐output (MIMO) radar and experimental evaluation, compressed sensing for radar applications, and waveforms for RadCom applications. For our research activities we employ different SDR platforms, a 80 GHz radar system‐on‐chip hardware with evaluation board and processing software/ GUI implemented in MATLAB, as well as different commercially available VLC systems. For practical research a fully equipped communications lab is available, while experimental evaluations (especially of the VLC systems) are conducted in our Research & Transfer Center (FTZ) ‘Digital Reality’ situated in Hamburg’s historical.
5G Radio Access Network Virtualization
Prof. Koteswararao Kondepu, Indian Institute of Technology Dharwad.
5G and beyond networks are expected to be based on a cloud/virtualized Radio Access Network (vRAN). In vRAN the next generation eNodeB (gNB) is decoupled in Radio Unit (RU), Distributed Unit (DU), and Central Unit (CU). RU and DU are connected through the so called fronthaul interface while DU and CU are connected through the so called midhaul. DU and CU are virtualised (i.e., running in containers or virtual machines). Usually, the fronthaul interface requires a high‐bandwidth and low latency connection while midhaul requirements are less stringent. However such requirements depend on the functions that are implemented in the DU
34 11th Indo-German Frontiers of Engineering Conference (INDOGFOE) 2021 A joint undertaking by the Department of Science and Technology, IIT Kharagpur and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation
and in the CU (i.e., their functional split). Additional requirements might also come from the vertical applications exploiting the 5G network that might be less stringent than the one imposed, for example, by the midhaul.
The virtualization of the RAN functions might heavily impact vRAN latency and jitter performance. This talk provides first an overview of possible implementation of vRAN functions. Then, it introduces experimentally evaluation whether latency specification presented by 3GPP standards are met in the fronthaul/midhaul link of a vRAN implementation. Furthermore, it estimates if the virtualized RAN components (e.g. CU, DU) can afflict the fronthaul/midhaul performance when the Option 2, Option 7‐1, and Option 8 splits are applied and different virtualization technologies are considered.
Future Reliable Communication Systems: Machine Learning Based Designs
Prof. Laurent Schmalen, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT).
In addition to being dependent on conventional global resources such as fresh water, fossil fuels and electricity, modern society is becoming increasingly reliant on another critical resource – the speed (bit rate) at which digital data can be transmitted around the world. Today, a large part of the public assumes a ubiquitous access to information and communication technology (ICT) resources. The connection of more individuals in developing countries, machine‐to‐machine communications, the internet of things (IoT), and the emergence of new applications lead to an exponentially increasing demand for data transmission. Traffic from wireless and mobile devices will account for more than two thirds of total internet protocol (IP) traffic by 2022, with video streaming being a major driver with annual growth rates of around 50%. A relentless strive to designing networking infrastructure that can satisfy these growing demands is more important than ever. On top of that, the growing global telecommunication network is also responsible for a significant portion of the global electricity consumption.
Out research aims at overcoming the data rate and energy consumption limitations of today’s networking infrastructure by establishing the methodological and technological foundations of novel transceiver architectures that significantly improve both the performance and the energy efficiency of today’s communication systems. Capitalizing on cutting‐edge results in the fields of machine learning and optimization techniques, we depart from the classical model‐based design
35 11th Indo-German Frontiers of Engineering Conference (INDOGFOE) 2021 A joint undertaking by the Department of Science and Technology, IIT Kharagpur and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation
of transceiver algorithms and employ a data‐driven optimization approach that yields low‐ complexity and more powerful transceivers. In our research, we focus on two topics: channel decoding and design of novel waveforms.
Channel decoding consumes a bulk part of the energy of the core network transceivers. We optimize the complexity of decoders using novel pruning techniques, extending the optimal brain damage paradigm. We have applied a joint optimization of the code representation and the decoder to yield significant complexity savings over standard decoders and simultaneously achieving performance gains. Besides, we show how to combine channel codes with novel modulation formats that aim at improving the overall performance when combined with good channel codes.
In our second line of research, we focus on the end‐to‐end design and optimization of complete transceivers. We use neural networks for realizing the waveform generation and this concept has shown to be well suited for optical communications, with the promise that no expert domain knowledge would be necessary to design the system. We are actively working on removing the necessary expert knowledge to setup the optimization. Our vision is that the system is automatically optimized to obtain complete transceivers of significantly lower complexity and better performance than the state‐of‐the‐art, with only little domain knowledge necessary. On our poster, we will illustrate how this is achieved for an optical communication system (designed for short reach and data center interconnects). We show how the system can be fine‐tuned using generative models and how it is experimentally verified.
Quantum Communication Networks
Prof. Ricardo Bassoli, Techincal University Dresden.
The rise of new fundamental theories in physics have always opened the door for subsequent advancement in practical physics and theoretical engineering. A fundamental theory of the last century is quantum mechanics. In the last decade, quantum phenomena have been started being applied in various fields such as photonics, computing and cryptography. Moreover, quantum‐ mechanical resources has become the main suppliers for a revolution of existing communication and computing networks, in order to make them capable of addressing existing open challenges.
36 11th Indo-German Frontiers of Engineering Conference (INDOGFOE) 2021 A joint undertaking by the Department of Science and Technology, IIT Kharagpur and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation
The first worldwide telephone services required direct links between all communications entities. Next, the communication paradigm became the so‐called circuit switching. In this way, a dedicated circuit was set up for the communication between a source and a destination
Next, the communication networks evolved to packet switching. This paradigm allows the organization of the information to be sent into messages of variable specific sized. That permitted the communication among multiple heterogeneous entities in a flexible manner. The Internet first realised this via the protocol suite called transport control protocol (TCP) and the internet protocol (IP). This had implied the communication policy called store‐and‐forward.
Nevertheless, with the advent of 5G and future networks, communication networks will have a completely different nature. In fact, future networks will be an ecosystem (or pan infrastructure), capable of interconnecting highly heterogeneous networks, achieving concurrently demanding requirements and supporting several different verticals. This will be possible via network virtualization, which is the software‐based implementation of network functions and task, running on a general purpose hardware. This breakthrough opened the way for a new policy, called compute‐and‐forward. This term reveals the new role that computing assumes in communication networks’ management and operations.
Regarding performances of future communication networks, some of the desired key performance indicators (KPIs) are: 1 ms round trip latency, billions of connected devices, perceived availability of 99.999% and reduction in energy usage by almost 90 %. These KPI goals will allow 5G and beyond networks to support several possible end‐to‐end communication paradigms/services. Such services/verticals are usually grouped into three main categories: Extreme Mobile Broadband (xMBB), ultra‐reliable Machine‐Type Communications (uMTCs) – also called Ultra‐Reliable Low‐Latency Communications (URLLCs) – and massive Machine‐Type Communications (mMTCs).
In order to exceed the intrinsic limitations imposed by the above network characteristics, quantum‐mechanical communications and computing have been considered as the pivotal solutions. By employing distributed quantum computing instead of classical computing, the exploitation of entangled qubits within several interconnected devices can achieve an exponential speed‐up of a network’s computing capabilities with just a linear increase in physical resources. Thus, the limitations imposed by classical paradigms and ‘softwarization’ can be solved
37 11th Indo-German Frontiers of Engineering Conference (INDOGFOE) 2021 A joint undertaking by the Department of Science and Technology, IIT Kharagpur and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation
by exploiting quantum‐physical parallelism based on the concepts of quantum superposition, entanglement and quantum measurement.
Network-Application Integration in the 5G Era: A Case Study of OTT Media Services
Prof. Sandip Chakraborty, Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur.
5G provides new opportunities for applications by supporting high bandwidth and ultra‐low latency. In this context, our research focuses on developing AI‐empowered intelligent applications by exploiting the opportunities provided by the network while optimizing the service cost. Over the top (OTT) media services like NetFlix, Amazon Prime, YouTube, etc. now dominate the Internet traffic; a recent Cisco VNI prediction says that video traffic will contribute 82% towards the global Internet traffic by the end of 2022 while 48% of globally connected devices will be video‐capable. While streaming media traffic demands for ultra‐low latency delivery, supporting high definition (HD) videos need high network bandwidth to satisfy the quality of experience (QoE) for the end‐users.
In this backdrop, AI‐empowered adaptive video streaming services can play a big role in supporting the best QoE to the end‐users while minimizing the cost to host the services over the network. We developed an AI‐enabled edge computing framework to host streaming middlewares over a virtualized network function (VNF) where the streaming VNF works as a proxy to the media client and communicates with the CDN network to fetch the best quality video data on‐the‐fly. Our framework is an example of how the lower layer developments in 5G technology can be exploited by an intelligent application to provide the best services by optimizing both the network cost and the QoE of the end‐user. The developed streaming VNF sniffs the channel parameters and communication measurements to understand the network quality on‐the‐fly and accordingly tunes the application parameters to support the best service to the end‐users.
38 11th Indo-German Frontiers of Engineering Conference (INDOGFOE) 2021 A joint undertaking by the Department of Science and Technology, IIT Kharagpur and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation
Coexistence of LTE/5G-Unlicensed and WiFi using techniques from Optimization, Game-theory, and Q-learning
Prof. Naveen K. P., Indian Institute of Technology Tirupati.
Since the deployment of LTE technologies, we have been witnessing an ever‐increasing demand for mobile data. Indeed, with more and more data‐intensive applications (e.g., live streaming, video chatting, online gaming, etc.,) becoming part of our daily digital life, it is only natural for the demand for mobile data to increase. Further, the current pandemic crisis has given rise to a situation where all academic and business activities (e.g., online classes, meetings and conferences) are conducted remotely over the internet. Some of these practices are expected to extend well into the future even after the pandemic is over, thus leading to a scenario in the near future where the demand for mobile data is unprecedented. Hence it is high time that novel technologies and innovative solutions are developed with an objective to meet this future demand for mobile data.
One promising solution towards meeting this future demand is the proposal of LTE‐unlicensed where the LTE operators can increase their throughput by additionally transmitting on the unlicensed spectrum, particularly the 2.4 and 5 GHz WiFi band. Note that the idea of LTE‐ unlicensed is applicable to 5G, or in general to any other future cellular technology as well (hence LTE‐unlicensed can also be referred to as 5G‐unlicensed). However, before the proposal of LTE‐ unlicensed can become fully operational one needs to address the question of how LTE (or 5G) can coexist with the WiFi technology that is already operating in the above unlicensed bands? This question serves as a primary motivation for the work that I will present in this conference. We propose to address this question by adopting a time‐division based approach referred to as Carrier Sense Adaptive Transmission (CSAT). Specifically, in CSAT, time is divided into frames of equal duration, and within each frame a fraction of time is allocated for LTE’s transmissions while the remaining fraction is left for WiFi’s operation (which includes contentions, RTS‐CTS exchanges, acknowledgements, and data transmission). Thus, when viewed across frames we can see that LTE and WiFi take turns in transmitting over the unlicensed spectrum, thus sharing the throughput of the channel in a time‐division fashion. To employ CSAT efficiently we however need to first solve the following important design problem: what fraction of air‐time should be allocated to LTE and WiFi within each frame?
39 11th Indo-German Frontiers of Engineering Conference (INDOGFOE) 2021 A joint undertaking by the Department of Science and Technology, IIT Kharagpur and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation
Towards addressing the above question, we first formulate an utility maximization problem by carefully identifying the necessary and sufficient set of constraints (including an interesting clique‐constraint) that arise while time‐sharing the available WiFi spectrum among the LTE base‐ stations. Implementing the optimal air‐time solution however requires strong coordination among the LTE base‐stations which is not possible in practice as the base‐stations may belong to several different competing operators. In order to model such a competitive scenario we propose a detailed game‐theoretic framework where the solution is characterized in terms of Nash equilibrium air‐times. Performance analysis of the optimal and the Nash equilibrium solutions is conducted via an extensive simulation study. The above solutions are applicable to static scenarios where the traffic load remains constant over a time duration of interest. For dynamic scenarios, where the load varies across frames, using techniques from Markov decision processes and Q‐learning we propose an online algorithm that can enable LTE and WiFi to share the unlicensed spectrum in an efficient fashion. The efficacy of the online algorithm is demonstrated via a simulation study.
Finally, an interesting future scope for this work lies in deriving working protocols based on our theoretical solutions. We also intend to develop experimental testbeds (using USRP) to validate the performance of these protocols.
Theme: Energy Materials
Ab Initio Microkinetic Modeling Augmented with Machine Learning Approaches to Design Catalyst Materials for Renewable Energy and Chemicals
Prof. M. Ali Hyder, Indian Institute of Technology Delhi.
Design of nanoscale materials with superior catalytic or electrocatalytic properties, essentially holds the key to success for developing renewable energy and chemicals. In our efforts, a bottom‐up approach is adopted, wherein quantum mechanical ab initio density functional theory (DFT) simulations of reactions occurring on the material surface are guiding the rational design of heterogeneous catalysts. Towards fulfilling, this goal, we have recently demonstrated the application of a machine learning (ML) approach combined with ab inito microkinetic modeling to design novel catalyst materials for industrial applications. For heterogeneous catalysis, ML based methods are showing potential to significantly reduce the experimental as well as computation
40 11th Indo-German Frontiers of Engineering Conference (INDOGFOE) 2021 A joint undertaking by the Department of Science and Technology, IIT Kharagpur and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation
cost. Availability of ML algorithms (in open source libraries like Scikit‐Learn) and materials database (like CatApp and Materials Project) further augments this realization.
Ref: Shivam Saxena, Tuhin S. Khan, Fatima Jalid, Manoj C. Ramteke, M. Ali Haider, “In Silico High Throughput Screening of Bimetallic and Single Atom Alloys Using Machine Learning and Ab Initio Microkinetic Modelling” Journal of Materials Chemistry A 8 (2020) 107‐123. Cover illustration of the Journal, Editor's Choice Collection on Machine Learning for Materials Innovation.
Probing Functional Interfaces in Li-Ion Batteries
Prof. Julia Maibach, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology.
It is widely recognized that interfaces play a crucial role in secondary batteries such as lithium ion batteries. The interfaces govern lifetime and performance but also the battery’s safety. This is particularly true for the solid electrolyte interphase (SEI). Therefore, significant research efforts have been focused on understanding its composition and functionality. However, almost 40 years after the first SEI model was described, we still do not have a complete picture of its formation and aging processes. This indicates on the one hand the complexity of the electrode/electrolyte interactions in Li‐ion batteries and on the other hand the scarcity of suitable characterization tools.
In this presentation, battery interface characterizations based on x‐ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) will be discussed addressing also some challenges that arise from XPS measurements on cycled battery electrodes. Special focus is given on comparing non‐destructive depth profiling approaches using synchrotron radiation with depth profiling using sputtering techniques. In addition, novel experimental possibilities based on ambient pressure x‐ray photoelectron spectroscopy (AP‐XPS) to create more realistic measurement environments will be presented.
41 11th Indo-German Frontiers of Engineering Conference (INDOGFOE) 2021 A joint undertaking by the Department of Science and Technology, IIT Kharagpur and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation
Novel mixed anionic hydrides and structurally and thermally sensitive luminescence
Prof. Nathalie Kunkel, Georg-August-University Göttingen.
Extensive studies of the cation chemistry in materials have been carried out during many years, however, there is a lot to be discovered yet in the field of mixed anionic compounds. At the moment, especially mixed anionic hydrides are in the focus of attention. The partial substitution may significantly change both physical and chemical properties [1].
For the characterization of such materials, on one hand, the combined use of neutron and X‐ray diffraction is essential due to the low scattering power of hydride. Beside these methods, also the use of local probes, such as doping with optically‐active rare earth metal ions can be helpful. We have recently studied a number of new mixed‐anionic hydrides and borohydrides, especially with a focus on the optical properties of doped compounds. Among other, a new substance class, borate hydrides were discovered and the first representative Sr5(BO3)3H:Eu2+ shows an interesting orange luminescence. A number of methods, including neutron powder diffraction, 1H solid state MAS NMR, vibrational spectroscopy and quantum chemical calculations are applied in order to prove the successful incorporation of hydride.
Beamtime at the SPODI, Research Neutron Source Heinz Maier‐Leibnitz (FRM II) and the D2b, Institute Laue‐Langevin is gratefully acknowledged.
Reference: [1] Y. Kobayashi, T. Yoshihiro, H. Kageyama, Ann. Rev. Mater. Res. 2018, 48, 11.1.
Towards High Capacity NASICON Cathodes for Sodium ion Batteries
Prof. Premkumar Senguttuvan, JNCASR, Bangalore.
Electrochemical energy storage is an attractive option to store intermittent energy produced from renewable sources such wind and solar and to deliver it to consumer utilities. Batteries have advantages such as high round trip efficiency and low maintenance. Despite their continuous domination in the portable electronics and electric vehicles market, Li‐ion batteries could not be a viable choice for the grid energy storage due to their high cost and limited geographical distribution of the lithium sources. Therefore, to circumvent this issue, researchers have turned their attention towards the development of other cation intercalation chemistries, including Na+, 42 11th Indo-German Frontiers of Engineering Conference (INDOGFOE) 2021 A joint undertaking by the Department of Science and Technology, IIT Kharagpur and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation
K+, Mg2+, Ca2+, Al3+ and Zn2+, due to their inexpensive and earth abundant precursors. Sodium‐ ion Batteries (SIBs) are striking since sodium has similar chemical character and higher electrochemical reduction potential as compared to lithium (‐2.71 V vs. NHE).1 On the cathode side, phosphate compounds are known for high intercalation voltages and structural stabilities.2 Among them, NASICON‐Na3V2(PO4)3 cathode is attractive because of its high intercalation voltage (3.45 V vs. Na+/Na0), moderate capacity (~120 mAh g‐1) and excellent rate capability.3 The sodium (de)intercalation process in the NVP cathode proceeds via a two‐phase mechanism and the corresponding redox activity is ascribed to the operation of V4+/V3+ couple. Further, other cations are substituted in the place of vanadium of the NVP lattice to seek the participation multiple redox centres, thereby enhancing intercalation capacities. Particularly, the NASICON end member Na4VMn(PO4)3 has garnered significant attention due to its reduced cost, improved insertion voltage and the participation of V5+/V4+, V4+/V3+ and Mn3+/Mn2+ redox couples.4 Herein, we will present a comprehensive study on the structural and electrochemical properties of Na3+xV2‐xMnx(PO4)3 series.5 Galvanostatic and rate studies have shown that Na3.75V1.25Mn0.25(PO4)3 has highest capacity and rate performances (100 and 89 mAh g‐1 at 1 and 5C rates, respectively) among the other cathodes in this series. Such enhanced performance is ascribed to its modulated V‐ and Mn‐redox centers and optimum bottleneck size. Through this study, we will show how it is important to modulate electronic and crystal structures of the NASICON framework to attain high capacity and high rate performance.
References (1) N. Yabuuchi, K. Kubota, M. Dahbi and S. Komaba, Chem. Rev. 2014, 114, 11636. (2) C. Masquelier, L. Croguennec, Chem. Rev. 2013, 113, 6552. (3) S. Chen, C. Wu, L. Shen, C. Zhu, Y. Huang, K. Xi, J. Maier, Y. Yu, Adv. Mater. 2017, 29, 1700431 (4) W. Zhou, L. Xue, X. Lü, H. Gao, Y. Li, S. Xin, G. Fu, Z. Cui, Y. Zhu, J. B. Goodenough, Nano Lett. 16 (2016) 7836‐7841. (6) S. Ghosh, N. Barman, M. Mazumder, S. K. Pati, G. Rousse, P. Senguttuvan, Adv. Energy Mater. 10 (2020) 1902918.
43 11th Indo-German Frontiers of Engineering Conference (INDOGFOE) 2021 A joint undertaking by the Department of Science and Technology, IIT Kharagpur and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation
Scalable Coating of Solution-Processed Inks for OER Electrocatalysis and Energy Storage Devices
Prof. Ritu Gupta, Indian Institute of Technology Jodhpur.
Major breakthroughs in energy‐related technologies are required to address many fundamental issues related to the scalability, reproducibility, durability and stability for commercialization of the energy materials and devices. The design of electrode, device architecture, and functional properties of the material play an important role. A solution processing method can enable the manufacturing of electrodes with the flexibility of tuning the material composition for best performance in energy storage devices and electrocatalysis. The large‐scale fabrication of non‐ precious metal oxide electrocatalysts with reasonable control over catalytic active surface sites is critical for oxygen evolution reaction (OER).
An industrially scalable, dip‐coating method of Co and Ni thiolate hybrid inks on 3D substrates following solventless thermolysis to form 2D nanoplates of Ni‐Co oxide (NCO) with spinel structure is developed. The loading of Ni ink is optimized with respect to electrochemical performance. The NCO electrocatalyst exhibits excellent OER performance in alkaline media with low overpotential values of 310 mV and long‐term stability. XPS studies reveal that Ni3+ and Co3+ species on the surface of NCO‐20 nanoplates enhances the OER activity. The superparamagnetic nature of NCO with 20% Ni shows enhancement in OER with external magnetic field owing to the polarization of electron spin and is thus, of high technological potential in terms of performance and possible commercialization with scalable production.
References: 1. B. Urgunde, Hamid, P. K.,Kamboj,V., Ritu Gupta,* Layer‐by‐Layer Dip coating of Cobalt‐ based Ink on Carbon Cloth for Large‐Scale Fabrication of Co3O4 based Electrocatalyst for OER, Energy Technology, 7, 1900603, 2019 2. B. Urgunde, Bahuguna G., Kamboj V., Ritu Gupta* Scalable Production of Nickel Cobaltite Nanoplates using Solution‐Processed Inks for OER Electrocatalysis, in review, 2021 3. A. B., Urgunde, Bhauguna, G, Dhamija, A., Das, P. P. and Ritu Gupta*, Ni‐Ink Catalysed Conversion of Waste Polystyrene‐Sugar Composite to Graphitic Carbon for Electric Double Layer Supercapacitor, ACS Applied Electronics Materials, 2020, DOI:10.1021/acsaelm.0c00542.
44 11th Indo-German Frontiers of Engineering Conference (INDOGFOE) 2021 A joint undertaking by the Department of Science and Technology, IIT Kharagpur and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation
4. Ritu Gupta* and T. S. Fisher, Scalable Coating of Single Source Ni Hexadecanethiolate Precursor on 3D‐Graphitic Petals for Asymmetric Supercapacitors, Energy Technol. 5, 740, 2017 (appeared on cover page).
Conversion and storage of energy: pyroelectrics and solid electrolytes
Prof. Tilman Leisegang, Technische Universität Bergakademie Freiberg.
In 1900, Thomas A. Edison began developing a new battery for electronic vehicles. His final patented battery became the most commercially successful product of his life. It took him around 10 years, more than 50,000 experiments, and a withdrawal of the first version of the battery from the market before coming up with the right combination of materials to finally provide the best commercial battery available. Today, a 10‐year product development time is no longer acceptable, and even a merely‐superior product is no longer sufficient for market success. Aspects such as resource and energy efficiency, socio‐economics and CO2 emissions along the entire value chain and recycling are becoming important drivers for novel technologies and materials. Particularly in the light of the considerable amount of waste heat losses in primary energy conversion – estimated at 72% worldwide –, the rapid expansion of renewables, and the increase of electric vehicles and mobile devices, this requires diversification of conversion and storage technologies and materials, including their rapid and resource‐efficient realization. Therefore, experimental efforts should go hand in hand with theoretical methods to identify and evaluate promising materials. The Materials Genome Initiative of the USA is an example of this.
The use of low‐grade waste heat in combination with water splitting, i.e. pyroelectrocatalysis, can be realized by pyroelectrics. These are crystalline materials characterized by spontaneous temperature‐dependent electric polarization. This new technology converts thermal energy directly into chemical energy, i.e. waste heat into hydrogen. We describe this process by a new thermodynamic charge‐voltage‐cycle, the pyroelectrocatalytic threshold cycle. Conversion and storage of energy are thus combined here in one process at temperatures below 100°C.
All solid‐state electrochemical energy storages with high‐valent mobile ions from abundant elements (e.g. Zn2+, Al3+) promise high volumetric capacities and energy densities with an already established and secure supply of raw materials. For novel battery chemistries, however, novel materials must also be identified and synthesized. Therefore, we have developed a high‐
45 11th Indo-German Frontiers of Engineering Conference (INDOGFOE) 2021 A joint undertaking by the Department of Science and Technology, IIT Kharagpur and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation
throughput algorithm to identify and evaluate crystalline ionic conductors that can be used as solid electrolytes or intercalation electrodes. In addition to crystallochemical methods, we apply machine learning to evaluate doping influences on ionic conduction. The results are made available through the online database batterymaterials.info.
Financial support from the German BMBF (CryPysConcept: 03EK3029A, R2R‐Battery: 03SF0542A), the BMWi (LiIonSK: ZF4751502JO9), the Ministry of Science and Art of Saxony, the Sächsische Aufbaubank and the European Union (PyroConvert: 100109976, 100152607), the German‐Russian Interdisciplinary Science Center (G‐RISC: P‐2018a‐9), the Russian Science Foundation (project: 19‐ 73‐10026), and the Russian Foundation for Basic Research (project: 20‐33‐90018) is gratefully acknowledged.
Oxygen-redox cathode & control of first cycle voltage hysteresis
Prof. Urmimala Maitra, Indian Association for the Cultivation of Science, Kolkata.
Batteries will play a big role in achieving the renewable future while also meeting our ever‐ increasing energy demands. To do so the charge storage capacity of today’s state of the art cathode materials has to increase manifold while also simultaneously increasing the voltage at which they deliver this charge. Li rich cathodes which operate by utilizing the redox of the oxide ion provide a way to achieve this. However, oxygen redox cathodes suffer from large first cycle voltage hysteresis. In this post I will present to you our work on elimination of this first cycle voltage hysteresis by fine tuning of crystal structure. Superstructure order of the transition metal layer in these layered oxide cathodes play key role in this. In general, all Li rich cathodes crystallize in honey comb ordered structure. On charge molecular O2 is formed in these cathodes and remains bound to the lattice. Reduction of O2 back to O2‐ requires extra energy which leads to the large voltage hysteresis. We were able to design a compound with crystal structure such that no molecular O2 is formed and therefore oxidation and reduction of lattice oxide can happen without significant voltage hysteresis. This work therefore provides design strategy for simultaneous high voltage and high‐capacity cathodes utilizing Oxygen redox without the unwanted first cycle voltage hysteresis.
46 11th Indo-German Frontiers of Engineering Conference (INDOGFOE) 2021 A joint undertaking by the Department of Science and Technology, IIT Kharagpur and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation
Waste as a Resource?
Prof. Daniel Pleissner, Leuphana University Lüneburg and Institute for Food and Environmental Research
Biogenic resources appear in form of wood, straw, green biomass, food supply chain waste, food waste etc. Due to the persistency of petroleum‐based compounds, climate change and resource scarcity, biogenic resources have been considered as raw materials and feedstocks to establish a bio‐based and sustainable economy. Utilisation of biogenic resources is also an environmentally benign, waste'' treatment and allows recycling of organic waste'' constituents in form of bio‐based products! Existing utilisation strategies of biogenic resources open the way to various bio‐based products, but can we switch totally from a petroleum‐based to a bio‐based society? Are we using available resources efficiently?
Theme: Machine Learning Multimodal Machine Learning for Enhancing Image Understanding
Prof. Anand Mishra, Indian Institute of Technology Jodhpur.
Abstract of the poster: The world wide web is a source of enormous unlabelled data (e.g., images, videos, structured knowledge base, unstructured text, sketches, audio). In my research group, we focus on leveraging multimodal data to enhance image understanding. In this poster, I shall discuss some of our recent findings on knowledge‐aware visual question answering and open‐set object localization using sketches, and show our steps towards enhanced image understanding.
Automatic Detection of Informative Tweets During Crisis Events
Prof. Anna Kruspe, Technical University of Munich.
Messages on social media can be an important source of information during crisis situations, be they short‐term disasters or longer‐term events like COVID‐19. They can frequently provide details about developments much faster than traditional sources (e.g. official news) and can offer personal perspectives on events, such as opinions or specific needs. In the future, these messages can also serve to assess disaster risks. One challenge for utilizing social media in crisis situations is the reliable detection of relevant messages in a flood of data.
47 11th Indo-German Frontiers of Engineering Conference (INDOGFOE) 2021 A joint undertaking by the Department of Science and Technology, IIT Kharagpur and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation
Researchers have started to look into this problem in recent years, beginning with crowd‐sourced methods. Lately, approaches have shifted towards an automatic analysis of messages. A major stumbling block here is the question of exactly what messages are considered relevant or informative, as this is dependent on the specific usage scenario and the role of the user in this scenario.
We present methods for the automatic detection of crisis‐related messages (tweets) on Twitter. We start by showing the varying definitions of importance and relevance relating to disasters, leading into the concept of use case‐dependent actionability that has recently become more popular. We then compare approaches for solving the detection problem based (1) on filtering by characteristics like keywords and location, (2) on crowdsourcing, and (3) on machine learning techniques. In particular, we show two novel methods for discovering tweets based on examples with few‐shot models, and for novelty detection in the tweet stream. We then point out particular challenges, such as the linguistic issues concerning social media data. Finally, we suggest future avenues of research, and show connections to related tasks, such as the subsequent semantic classification of tweets.
More information can be found in our upcoming paper: Kruspe, A., Kersten, J., and Klan, F.: „Review article: Detection of informative tweets in crisis events”. Natural Hazards and Earth System Sciences (NHESS), Special Issue: Ground‐breaking technologies, big data, and innovation for disaster risk modelling and reduction.
Anomaly Event Detection in Surveillance Videos
Prof. Maheshkumar H Kolekar, Indian Institute of Technology Patna.
With the rapid growth of video data, there is an increasing need not only for recognition of objects and their behaviour, but in particular for detecting the rare, interesting occurrences of unusual objects or suspicious behaviour in the large body of ordinary data. Finding such abnormalities in videos is crucial for applications ranging from automatic quality control to visual surveillance. Meaningful events that are of interest in long video sequences, such as surveillance footage, often have an extremely low probability of occurring. As such, manually detecting such events, or anomalies, is a very painstaking job that often requires more manpower than is generally available. Thus automatic anomaly detection in video is very important and also challenging. 48 11th Indo-German Frontiers of Engineering Conference (INDOGFOE) 2021 A joint undertaking by the Department of Science and Technology, IIT Kharagpur and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation
Video data is challenging to represent and model due to its high dimensionality, noise, and a huge variety of events and interactions. Anomalies are also highly contextual, for example, running in a restaurant would be an anomaly, but running at a park would be normal. Moreover, the definition of anomaly can be ambiguous and often vaguely defined. A person may think walking around on a subway platform is normal, but some may think it should be flagged as an anomaly since it could be suspicious. These challenges have made it difficult for machine learning methods to identify video patterns that produce anomalies in real‐world applications.
We have used signal processing and machine learning techniques to detect abnormal activities from few online databases, data recorded at IIT Patna and data recorded at airport. Since many online databases are available now, we have started using deep learning techniques for anomaly detection. For automatic anomaly detection, autoencoder play an important role. Presently, we are working on hybrid autoencoder (mixture of Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) and Long Short‐Term Memory network (LSTM)) for anomaly detection. CNN has been used to detect good and prominent spatial features in a frame of videos while LSTM plays a very good role for temporal information between consecutive frames of videos and then the features extracted from convolutional network and LSTM are merged together to find anomaly in videos.
Machine and Deep Learning for Clinical Neuroimaging
Prof. Kirsten Ritter, Charité - Universitätsmedizin Berlin
At my lab, we develop (explainable) machine learning methods for diagnosing and characterizing neurological and psychiatric diseases based on neuroimaging data. Whereas previous disease decoding approaches mostly relied on expert‐based extraction of features in combination with standard classification algorithms and thus strongly depend on the choice of data representation, deep learning approaches, in particular convolutional neural networks, are capable of learning hierarchical information directly from raw imaging data. By this, they have a great potential for finding unexpected and latent data characteristics and might perform as a real "second reader". While we have a focus on neurological diseases such as Alzheimer's disease and multiple sclerosis, we also analyze data from patients with psychiatric diseases including schizophrenia or depression. Methodological challenges are small sample sizes, heterogeneous data sets, and the presence of confounding variables. In the poster, I present some challenges and solutions
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regarding transfer learning for neuroimaging data and explaining individual network decisions in patients with Alzheimer's disease.
Meaningful Information Extraction from documents
Prof. Mayank Singh, Indian Institute of Technology, Gandhinagar.
Abstract of the poster: In this poster, we showcase several extractive tools that extract information from PDF documents and how this information can be used to create meaningful knowledge graphs and repositories. Particularly, we demonstrate information extraction from scientific documents and present interesting use cases in multiple other domains such as healthcare digitization, climate data digitalization, digitization of data generated in manufacturing industries, cultural data digitization, etc.
Research area code: K904
DataLad - Decentralized Management of Digital Objects for Open Science
Prof. Michael Hanke, Forschungszentrum Jülich.
With a general awareness of a reproducibility crisis in many scientific areas and increasing importance of research data management in science and policy making, data‐driven fields require convenient and scalable data management solutions. Standing on the shoulders of Git and git‐ annex (git‐annex.branchable.com/, Joey Hess), DataLad provides a decentralized solution that enables the joint management of code, data, and complete containerized computational environments in a scalable and distributed fashion. With features such as unambiguous version control, a wide spectrum of data transport mechanisms, convenient provenance capture, and re execution for verification or as an alternative to storage and transport, it enables and facilitates many aspects of open and reproducible science: collaboration, sharing, analytical transparency, computational reproducibility of digital research objects, and disk‐space aware storage and computing workflows on infrastructure that ranges from personal laptops up to supercomputers. This contribution will introduce DataLad, present its main features which should be of interest to the audience regardless of their relation to any field of science.
50 11th Indo-German Frontiers of Engineering Conference (INDOGFOE) 2021 A joint undertaking by the Department of Science and Technology, IIT Kharagpur and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation
Principal metabolic flux mode analysis
Prof. Sahely Bhadra, Indian Institute of Technology Palakkad.
We propose a new methodology for the analysis of metabolism, called Principal Metabolic Flux Mode Analysis (PMFA), which marries the PCA and stoichiometric flux analysis approaches in an elegant regularized optimization framework. In short, the method incorporates a variance maximization objective form PCA coupled with a stoichiometric regularizer, which penalizes projections that are far from any flux modes of the network. For interpretability, we also introduce a sparse variant of PMFA that favours flux modes that contain a small number of reactions. Our experiments demonstrate the versatility and capabilities of our methodology. The proposed method can be applied to genome‐scale metabolic network in efficient way as PMFA does not enumerate elementary modes. In addition, the method is more robust on out‐of‐steady steady‐state experimental data than competing flux mode analysis approaches.
CogXAI (Cognitive neuroscience inspired techniques for eXplainable AI)
Prof. Sebastian Stober, Otto von Guericke University Magdeburg.
The development of artificial intelligence is progressing rapidly. Artificial neural networks (ANNs) have become particularly popular in a wide range of applications. These self‐learning systems are inspired by natural brains and model their structure and function on an elementary level. Powerful computing infrastructure already allows to train deep ANNs with billions of neurons. However, the complexity of these networks makes it difficult to understand their inner processes and decisions. To use ANNs safely, however, it is necessary to fully understand how they work.
Natural brains have been studied for over 50 years. Since ANNs are inspired by the brain, methods from neuroscience can be used to analyse highly complex ANNs and to visualize their functioning. In the CogXAI project, established neuroscientific methods are applied to ANNs. This also makes their learning processes more comprehensible. In this way, learned misbehaviour can be detected as it arises and appropriate countermeasures can be taken.
In addition, cognitive neuroscience also offers many insights into the learning behaviour of the human brain. This wealth of experience is used in the CogXAI project to design novel cognitively inspired ANN architectures. This transfer of cognitive concepts to ANNs will likewise improve the comprehensibility of ANN‐based systems. 51 11th Indo-German Frontiers of Engineering Conference (INDOGFOE) 2021 A joint undertaking by the Department of Science and Technology, IIT Kharagpur and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation
As an example for an ANN analysis technique inspired by cognitive neuro‐science, I present Gradient‐adjusted Neuron Activation Profiles (GradNAPs)1 as means to interpret features and representations in deep ANNs. GradNAPs are characteristic responses of ANNs to particular groups of inputs, which incorporate the relevance of neurons for prediction. Using GradNAPs allows to gain insights about how data is processed in ANNs. This includes different ways of visualizing features and clustering of GradNAPs to compare embedding of different groups of inputs in any layer of a given network. I demonstrate our proposed techniques for a fully‐ convolutional automatic speech recognition model.
1 A full article describing GradNAPs is available at https://arxiv.org/abs/2002.08125
Machine learning for detecting negative communication practices in digital media
Prof. Tatjana Scheffler, Ruhr-Universität Bochum.
Almost all text that we read today is represented in digital format. Being active in online social networks also means that people encounter social harms such as disinformation or hate speech. The field of digital forensic linguistics uses machine learning approaches to identify such negative communication practices in digital media. I will show three case studies from digital forensic linguitics.
1. Hate speech recognition deals with identifying offensive language or texts that may cause harm online. Many current methods rely overly much on lexical features. This means that they can easily identify slurs and pejoratives, but fail to address more complex or implicit cases of offensive language. We are working on incorporating the linguistic and extralinguistic discourse context in our models.
2. We are working on disinformation detection, which is another field where a clear definition of the central terms is still elusive. In our previous work on identifying hyperpartisan news articles we found that models tend to overfit on the publisher style of an article.
3. Forensic linguistics is also interested in identifying the author(s) of objectionable (e.g., false or hateful) posts on social media. I show an approach to large‐scale authorship attribution using CNNs based on different types of linguistic features, in the domain of song lyrics authorship.
52 11th Indo-German Frontiers of Engineering Conference (INDOGFOE) 2021 A joint undertaking by the Department of Science and Technology, IIT Kharagpur and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation
Generative Machine Learning for Spin Systems in Statistical Physics
Prof. Vipul Arora, Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur.
Recently, generative machine‐learning models have gained popularity in physics, driven by the goal of improving the efficiency of Markov chain Monte Carlo techniques and of exploring their potential in capturing experimental data distributions. Motivated by their ability to generate images that look realistic to the human eye, we studied generative adversarial networks (GANs) as tools to learn the distribution of spin configurations and to generate samples, conditioned on external tuning parameters, such as temperature. We developed ways to efficiently represent the physical states, e.g., by exploiting symmetries, and to minimize the correlations between generated samples. We present this work using the two‐dimensional XY model as an example, where we find considerable improvements with our proposed implicit generative model. It is also shown that the model can reliably generate samples in the vicinity of the phase transition, even when it has not been trained in that critical region. On top of using the samples generated by the model to capture the phase transition via evaluation of observables, we show how the model itself can be employed as an unsupervised indicator of transitions, by constructing measures of the model's susceptibility to changes in tuning parameters.
Theme: Sustainable Earth
Generalized Linear Models to Study Non-stationarity in Hydrology: Some Applications using Linear and Circular Statistics
Prof. Arpita Mondal, Indian Institute of Technology Bombay.
This talk will discuss applications of generalized linear models (GLMs) to study changes in characteristics of hydrological extremes under non‐stationarity. Such models allow parameters of statistical distributions fitted to extremes to vary with time. The method of maximum likelihood is used for estimation of parameters. Similar to GLMs, non‐stationary extreme value models are also applied to model transient behaviour of tails of hydrological variables. Applications using linear statistics include studying both heavy rainfall and low‐flow conditions. We first investigate changes in the intensity, duration and frequency of heavy rainfall in India. For droughts, we analyse the teleconnections between low‐flow events in South‐east Australia and large‐scale climate variability such as the El‐Nino Southern Oscillation (ENSO) and the Indian Ocean Dipole
53 11th Indo-German Frontiers of Engineering Conference (INDOGFOE) 2021 A joint undertaking by the Department of Science and Technology, IIT Kharagpur and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation
(IOD). Further, I will also discuss how GLMs can be extended to circular statistics to study changes in flood peak seasonality and to identify possible drivers of such changes.
References and bibliography: 1. Mondal, A. and D. Daniel (2019), Return Levels under Nonstationarity: The Need to Update Infrastructure Design Strategies, Journal of Hydrologic Engineering, 24(1), pp. 04018060‐ 1‐11. 2. Mondal, A. and P. P. Mujumdar (2015), Modeling non‐stationarity in intensity, duration and frequency of extreme rainfall over India, Journal of Hydrology, 521, pp 217‐231. 3. Mondal, A. and P. P. Mujumdar (2014), Return levels of hydrologic droughts under climate change, Advances in Water Resources, 75, pp 67‐75. 4. Kalai, C. and A. Mondal (2020), Identification of drivers of flood seasonality using Circular Generalized Linear Models, AGU Fall Meeting, Dec 1‐17, Online. 5. Goswami, P., Mondal, A., Rudiger, C. and T. J. Peterson (2020), Non‐stationary influences of large‐scale climate drivers on low‐flow characteristics of stream flows in Southeast Australia, AGU Fall Meeting, Dec 1‐17, Online. 6. Dr. Arpita Mondal’s public lecture on Statistical extreme value theory to analyse floods, droughts, and heat waves as part of the 7th e‐School on Climate Science and Policy, 17‐28 Aug, Online. Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7lnUoD1WcYg&t=15s
Complexation of arsenic species with oxygen-containing functional groups of natural organic matter: Insight from X-ray absorption spectroscopic (XAS) study
Prof. Ashis Biswas, Indian Institute of Science Education and Research (IISER) Bhopal
The natural and anthropogenic occurrences of elevated concentrations of arsenic (As) in surface waters, groundwaters, and agricultural soils have been highlighted as a potential environmental concern in many parts of the world.1 It is necessary to characterize different biogeochemical processes that regulate the mobility of As in aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems. Natural organic matter (NOM) is the decomposition product of the animal, plant, and soil biomass, is abundant in both aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems. The NOM can influence As biogeochemistry in aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems in several ways. Being negatively charged at circumneutral pH, NOM has a high affinity for adsorption onto mineral surfaces and can potentially compete with As species' adsorption onto mineral surfaces.2 The microbial degradation of NOM under anoxic 54 11th Indo-German Frontiers of Engineering Conference (INDOGFOE) 2021 A joint undertaking by the Department of Science and Technology, IIT Kharagpur and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation
conditions enhances the reductive dissolution of As‐carrying mineral phases such as Fe oxyhydroxides, which has been specified as a key As mobilization mechanism in aquifers of Southeast Asia.1 It is suggested that NOM can also extensively bind As and thus, regulates As mobility in the surface and sub‐surface environments. Arsenic is reported to be effectively sorbed onto NOM via thiol coordination3,4 and polyvalent metal cation bridged ternary complexation.5 However, the extent of sorption via complexation with oxygen‐containing functional groups of NOM is poorly understood.
By equilibrating As species (viz arsenite, arsenate, and monothioarsenate) with purified model‐ peat, followed by As K‐edge X‐ray absorption spectroscopic (XAS) analysis, this study6 shows that complexation with oxygen‐containing functional groups can be an additional or alternative mode of As sorption to NOM. The extent of complexation was greatest for arsenite, followed by monothioarsenate and arsenate. Complexation was higher at pH 7.0 compared to 4.5 for arsenite and arsenate, while at pH 4.5 for monothioarsenate due to partial conversion into arsenite. Modeling of the As K‐edge EXAFS data revealed that As…C interatomic distances were relatively longer in arsenate‐ (2.83 ± 0.01 Å) and monothioarsenate‐treated peat (2.80 ± 0.02 Å) compared to arsenite‐treatments (2.73 ± 0.01 Å). This study suggests that arsenite was predominantly complexed with carboxylic groups, while arsenate and monothioarsenate were complexed with alcoholic groups of the peat. The higher sorption of arsenite and arsenate at pH 7.0 compared to 4.5 is attributed to the increased nucleophilicity of these functional groups at pH 7.0. This study implies that in systems where NOM is the major sorbent, arsenate and monothioarsenate can have higher mobility than the arsenite. Therefore, the interaction of As species with the oxygen‐ containing functional groups needs to be accounted for to accurately predict the behavior of As in NOM‐rich sediments.
References: (1) Fendorf, S.; Michael, H. A.; Van Geen, A. Science 2010, 328 (5982), 1123–1127. (2) Wang, S.; Mulligan, C. N. Environ. Geochem. Health 2006, 28 (3), 197–214. (3) Langner, P.; Mikutta, C.; Kretzschmar, R. Nat. Geosci. 2012, 5 (1), 66–73. (4) Hoffmann, M.; Mikutta, C.; Kretzschmar, R. Environ. Sci. Technol. 2012, 46, 11788–11797. (5) Hoffmann, M.; Mikutta, C.; Kretzschmar, R. Environ. Sci. Technol. 2013, 47 (21), 12165–12173. (6) Biswas, A.; Besold, J.; Sjöstedt, C.; Gustafsson, J. P.; Scheinost, A. C.; Planer‐Friedrich, B. Environ. Sci. Technol. 2019, 53 (18), 10723–10731. 55 11th Indo-German Frontiers of Engineering Conference (INDOGFOE) 2021 A joint undertaking by the Department of Science and Technology, IIT Kharagpur and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation
Geographic Perspectives on India’s urban transformation
Prof. Carsten Butsch, University of Cologne.
Currently India is witnessing an unprecedented transformation. In the next decades it will become a predominantly urban country with the number of urban dwellers almost doubling between now (483m) and 2050 (877)(according to the World Urbanisation Prospects). Given this fundamental transformation that will have a far‐reaching impact on the Indian society, the economy and the country’s physical geography, my research focusses on four specific aspects of the Indian urbanisation:
The periurban spaces, surrounding the metropolises can be conceptualized as spaces of flows. Here urban and rural processes and actors meet to form unique spaces. And: here India’s urban future will be shaped. Currently I am studying in a project funded by the Belmont Forum, how the periurban waterscape is changing and how this affects periurban livelihoods. Going beyond the scope of this concrete project, I am interested in studying these very specific zones in transition in much greater detail.
A second area of interest is urban health. In my PhD I studied access to health care services in Pune, India. In a follow up project, we developed a blueprint for an urban health monitoring system, involving the private health care sector. Future directions of research will focus on the urban health sector (especially the plurality of medical systems and how this shapes access to health care), migrants’ health (as the health of the most vulnerable population group) and the issues arising from India’s demographic transition (what will India’s cities have to look like for an ageing population)?
Especially India’s megacities and emerging megacities are complex systems, which are at risk of facing severe disasters. Applying a complex adaptive systems perspective, we have in the past researched the genesis of disasters and reorganization processes. In future I would like to especially study cascading risks, emerging in the aftermath of disasters.
After studying migration from India to Germany from a transnational perspective, I would like to study in future trans‐local practices of internal migrants in India. These migrants create important networks across India, shape India’s cities in multiple ways and contribute to rural development through financial and social remittances, yet they are highly vulnerable.
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In these four fields of investigation, I am especially interested in the effect of social disparities and the specific challenges and the societal production of vulnerability.
Earth Observation Techniques for Spatial Disaggregation of Exposure Data
Prof. Christian Geiß, German Aerospace Centre (DLR).
Exposure describes the elements which are exposed to a natural hazard and susceptible to damage. The affiliated vulnerability characterizes the likelihood to incur damage for a given level of hazard intensity. Frequently, the compilation of exposure information is the costliest component (in terms of time and labor) in risk assessment. Existing data sets and models describe exposure frequently in a rather aggregated manner, e.g., by relying on statistical/census data for certain administrative entities. Nowadays, earth observation techniques allow to collect spatially continuous information for large geographic areas while enabling a high geometric and temporal resolution. In parallel, modern data interpretation tools related to the field of Artificial Intelligence enable the extraction of thematic information from such data with a high accuracy and detail. Consequently, I exploit measurements from the TanDEM‐X mission and Sentinel‐2 constellation, which collect data on a global scale, to characterize built environments in terms of fundamental morphologic properties, i.e., built‐up density and height. Subsequently, I use this information to constrain existing exposure data in a spatial disaggregation approach. Thereby, I compare different methods for disaggregation and evaluate how different resolution properties of the earth observation data affect the risk assessment result. Empirical findings are presented for the city of Santiago de Chile, Chile, which is prone to natural hazards such as earthquakes. I present loss estimations and corresponding sensivity with respect to the resolution properties of the exposure data used in the model. Thereby, it becomes traceable that loss estimations vary substantially and that aggregated exposure information underestimates losses in our scenarios. As such, this work underlines the benefits of deploying modern earth observation technologies and data interpretation tools for refined exposure estimation and affiliated loss estimation.
57 11th Indo-German Frontiers of Engineering Conference (INDOGFOE) 2021 A joint undertaking by the Department of Science and Technology, IIT Kharagpur and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation
Organic carbon dynamics of oxbow lakes in Gangetic plains
Prof. Devanita Ghosh, Centre for Earth Sciences, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore.
The Ganges Delta Plain is a key area where elemental contamination of groundwater constitutes a human catastrophe. The delta plain geomorphology comprises a large number of abandoned meander bends, or oxbow lakes (Donselaar et al., 2017; Ghosh et al., 2021) characterized by an anoxic environment in the lower part of the lake water column (hypolimnion). In my talk I will present the critical role of these abandoned‐river channels forming oxbow lakes. The geomorphological juxtaposition of (a) abandoned channels (or: oxbow lakes) where the cocktail of organic matter and sediment leads to the release of various elements from its solid state, and (b) the topographically‐higher point bars where the released elements accumulates in the aquifer and is consumed by the inhabitants, provides a blueprint to explain the origin and localization of elemental toxicity. Dissolved organic matter (DOM) is implicated in mobilization of elements via microbial metabolic processes (Ghosh et al., 2015). Organic matter (OM) is preserved in this environment and provides a perfect environment for microbial oxidation and mobilization of Fe‐ oxides. Additional deposition of human introduced sewage wastes into the lake waters adds to a rich source of nutrients to the indigenous microbial communities.
A multidisciplinary approach has been effective in understanding the geomorphology of river meanders, forming abandoned channels, which can act a growth bed for biomass. While acting as an incubator for primary production (lake vegetation dynamics), and subsequent organic debris accumulation (anoxic, hypolimnion water column), where a selective preferential preservation of organic carbon compound classes (anoxic sediment base) occur. I would describe how the organic compound infiltration, deposition and abundance depends on their hydrophobicity, molecular weights and bioavailability and further, due to diagenetic alteration (microbial metabolic oxidation). Different classes of surface derived organic carbon from vegetation (terrestrial plants and macrophytes) with anthropogenic input (surrounding villages and agricultural practices), can have different effects on the mineral weathering and in controlling the downstream cationic fluxes such as, Fe, Mn, As, F etc. and contamination of aquifers in various river plains across the world.
58 11th Indo-German Frontiers of Engineering Conference (INDOGFOE) 2021 A joint undertaking by the Department of Science and Technology, IIT Kharagpur and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation
References Donselaar, M.E., Bhatt, A.G., Ghosh, A.K. (2017) On the relation between fluvio‐deltaic flood basin geomorphology and the wide‐spread occurrence of arsenic pollution in shallow aquifers. Science of the Total Environment, 574, 901–913. Ghosh, D., Routh, J., Bhadury, P. (2015) Characterization and microbial utilization of dissolved lipid organic fraction in arsenic impacted aquifers (India). Journal of Hydrology, 527, 221‐233. Ghosh, D., Kumar, S., Donselaar, M.E., Corroto, C., Ghosh, A. (2021). Organic Carbon transport model of abandoned river channels‐ a motif for floodplain geomorphology influencing biogeochemical swaying of arsenic. Science of the Total Environment, 762‐144400.
Urban Regional Resilience and Land-use Strategies
Prof. Sonja Deppisch, HafenCity Universität Hamburg.
Dealing with future climate change impacts is especially important in urban areas due to their concentration of population, of sensible functions and physical infrastructure. In urban regions, potential climate change impacts are not only depending upon specific characteristics such as their location and topographic situation, but also upon the vulnerability of the society and of ecological assets, upon their institutional as well as socio‐economic structure and infrastructure as well as the urban region’s capacity to adapt to potential impacts. Land‐use planning is also attributed a key role in dealing with climate change impacts as many of them have a spatial connotation and an effect on land‐use and related issues. Coastal urban regions will probably (depending on their specific location) be impacted by sea‐level rise and increases in intensity and frequency of storm surges while they are also affected by temperature rise and changed precipitation patterns. In Europe, for instance, not only the number of national strategies on how to adapt to these potential climate change impacts increased, but also the number of local adaptation strategies increased. A challenge for urban regions is to identify the main future climate risks and the related social as well as physical and ecological vulnerabilities and to develop strategies how to deal with the potential climate change impacts. One of the key problems in doing so in urban and regional development is the question on how to deal with the uncertainty concerning concrete local climate change impacts but also in the urban setting as well as key drivers for land‐use development, which are characterized by complexity and uncertainty.
59 11th Indo-German Frontiers of Engineering Conference (INDOGFOE) 2021 A joint undertaking by the Department of Science and Technology, IIT Kharagpur and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation
It is not only climate change impacts which alter the urban regions but also their interaction with assets of the urban regions as well as with other influences on their land‐use development such as e.g. demographic or economic change. City growth can also affect further floods due to increased soil‐sealing which again, might then interact with storm surges, changed precipitation patterns and lead to floods or severe sewage system problems.
Within this problem setting climate change adaptation strategies for coastal urban regions require a broad integration of different methods, disciplines, world views and knowledge forms in order to address the inherent complexity, uncertainty and not yet known future developments of climate change impacts therewith making a strong case for integrative, transdisciplinary approaches.
Groundwater storage quantification in India and its influence in food security
Prof. Soumendra Nath Bhanja, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore.
Groundwater is the sole source of water demand for many of the Indian societies to support their daily activities. Major parts of Indian population rely entirely on groundwater due to limited supply of surface water. More than 90% of the groundwater usage in India is attributed to irrigation, groundwater management is also crucial to food production (FAO, 2013).
Groundwater use in irrigation getting intensified in recent years in terms of irrigation area increase and withdrawal from deeper zones mostly linked to inexpensive cost of electricity as well as the high‐efficiency pumps (Bhanja et al., 2017). Estimates of usable groundwater storage (UGWS) show different parts of India subjected to variable amount of UGWS change (Bhanja and Mukherjee, 2019). Rapid UGWS depletion is observed in north‐east India and also in parts of north‐west India. Southern and central parts of India has been subjected to UGWS renewal. The regions with higher rates of groundwater storage depletion coincides with water intensive cropping practice observed in those regions. Further depletion of groundwater storage from the deeper (non‐renewable) layers, may have strong influence on future food security as the deeper groundwater usage would be limited due to unavailability.
References: Bhanja, S.N. and Mukherjee, A., 2019. In situ and satellite‐based estimates of usable
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groundwater storage across India: Implications for drinking water supply and food security. Advances in Water Resources, 126, pp.15‐23. Bhanja, S. N., Mukherjee, A., Wada, Y., Chattopadhyay, S., Velicogna, I., Pangaluru, K., Famiglietti, J. S., 2017. Groundwater rejuvenation in parts of India influenced by water‐policy change implementation, Scientific Report, 7. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations, 2013. FAO Statistical Yearbook 2013: World Food and Agriculture, 289 pp.
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Bio-sketch of Participants Abhijit Mukherjee
Associate Professor Department of Geology & Geophysics Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur West Bengal, India 721302 E-mail: [email protected] Home page: https://www.abhijitmukherjeegroup.com/
Abhijit Mukherjee, PhD graduated from the University of Kentucky, USA and completed postdoctoral work at the University of Texas at Austin, USA. He also served as the Physical Hydrogeologist at the Alberta Geological Survey in Canada. He is currently an Associate Professor at the Department of Geology and Geophysics, and School of Environmental Science and Engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur (IIT Kharagpur), India. His main research areas are physical, chemical and isotope hydrogeology, including modelling and contaminant transport, as well as water resource management and the effects of climate change on the hydrosphere. He has worked in 12 countries across Asia, North and South America for safe and sustainable groundwater-sourced drinking water. He has authored about 90 international journal articles and sole-authored/edited the book titled, “Groundwater of South Asia”. He has served in Editorial role of several prestigious journals, and also has worked as an advisor and expert to various ministries of Government of India and West Bengal. He has been conferred many awards from various national and international organizations, including the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Award in 2020 and the National Geoscience Award by the President of India. He is regarded as heading the strongest and most prolific groundwater research group in South Asia. Abhishek Gupta
Assistant Professor Department of Electrical Engineering Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur, India 208016 E-mail: [email protected] Home page: http://home.iitk.ac.in/~gkrabhi/
Abhishek K. Gupta received his B.Tech.- M.Tech dual degree in Electrical Engineering from IIT Kanpur in 2010 and PhD degree in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Texas at Austin in 2016. He is currently working as an assistant professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering at Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur where he currently leads the modern wireless network group. His research interests include stochastic geometry and its application to communication networks. His research group focuses on identifying new analytical framework and deriving 62 11th Indo-German Frontiers of Engineering Conference (INDOGFOE) 2021 A joint undertaking by the Department of Science and Technology, IIT Kharagpur and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation
mathematical tools for modern communication paradigms including molecular communication, heterogeneous networks, vehicle to vehicle communication, visible light communication, and millimeter wave communications. He was recipient of General Electric (GE) Foundation Leadership Award in 2009 and IITK Academic Excellence Award for four consecutive years. He is author of the books MATLAB by Examples (Finch, 2010) and Numerical Methods using MATLAB (Springer Apress, 2014). Previously he was working as Sr. Standards Engineer at Samsung Research America in Dallas, TX. In past, he has worked in Applied Microelectronics Circuit Corporation (Pune), Futurewei Technologies (NJ) and Nokia Networks (IL). Aditi Mukherji
Principal Researcher International Water Management Institute, New Delhi Office. E- mail: [email protected] Home page: https://www.iwmi.cgiar.org/about/staff-list/aditi-mukherji/
Aditi Mukherji is a Principal Researcher at the International Water Management Institute. Her areas of specialization are groundwater governance, energy-irrigation nexus, climate change adaptation and community management of water resources. She has worked in South Asia including the Hindu Kush Himalayan region, Nile basin and in Central Asia. She has published over 60 peer reviewed research papers. In 2012, she was awarded the Inaugural Norman Borlaug Field Award by the World Food Prize Foundation, USA. She is the Coordinating Lead Author of the Water Chapter in the Working Group II of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and a member of Core Writing Team for the IPCC’s AR6 Synthesis Report. Aditi is a human geographer by training and has a PhD from Cambridge University, United Kingdom.
Ali Haider
Associate Professor Renewable Energy and Chemical Research Group, Department of Chemical Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Delhi, India E-mail: [email protected] Home page: https://web.iitd.ac.in/~haider/
M. Ali Haider has completed his M.S. and Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering at the University of Virginia and B.Tech from Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Guwahati. He has joined the Department of Chemical Engineering at IIT Delhi in 2013. He visited the Catalysis Center for Energy Innovation at the University of Delaware for an year. His research interests are 63 11th Indo-German Frontiers of Engineering Conference (INDOGFOE) 2021 A joint undertaking by the Department of Science and Technology, IIT Kharagpur and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation
focused on experimental and density functional theory (DFT) based theoretical heterogeneous catalysis applied to the development of biorenewable fuels/chemicals, fuel cells and batteries. He is a recipient of the Amar Dye-Chem Award for ‘Excellence in Basic Research and Development in Chemical Engineering’ by the Indian Institute of Chemical Engineers, ‘Bioenergy-Award for Cutting Edge Research’ by the Indo–US Science and Technology Forum, DAE-BRNS Young Scientist Award, Gandhian Young Technological Innovation Award, Institution of Engineers (India) Young Engineers Award, ‘Emerging Investigator’ invite from Reaction Chemistry & Eng. (RSC Journal), Editor's Choice Collection in Journal of Materials Chemistry A and a certificate of appreciation from RSC as highly cited author in the Energy & Sustainability Portfolio of Journals. At IIT Delhi, his contributions in teaching and research are noted at several occasions as ‘Industry Relevant Best PhD Thesis Supervision’, ‘Teaching Excellence Award’ and ‘Early Career Research Award’. Currently, he is serving as a member of Indian National Young Academy of Sciences to popularize science education at various forums in India.
Anand Mishra
Assistant Professor CSE-210, Department of Computer Science and Engineering Indian Institute of Technology Jodhpur Jodhpur - 342037 (RJ), India E-mail: [email protected] Home page: http://home.iitj.ac.in/~mishra
Anand Mishra is a faculty member at the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at IIT Jodhpur where his group focuses on problems intersecting vision, language, and knowledge graphs. Previously, Anand was a postdoctoral fellow at IISc Bangalore working with Dr. Partha Talukdar and Dr. Anirban Chakraborty on knowledge-aware computer vision. He received Ph.D. from IIIT Hyderabad working on Scene Text Understanding under the supervision of Prof. C. V. Jawahar and Dr. Karteek Alahari (Inria). Anand is a recipient of the prestigious Microsoft Research India Ph.D. Fellowship (2012) and the XRCI doctoral dissertation award-first runner up (2015).
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Anna Kruspe
Professor Deputy Head of Department Data Science in Earth Observation, Technical University of Munich E-mail: [email protected] Home page: https://www.lrg.tum.de/en/sipeo/team/dr-lei-ma-copy-1/
Anna Kruspe holds a diploma degree in Media Technology from the Technical University of Ilmenau. She finished her PhD under the supervision of Karlheinz Brandenburg at the Fraunhofer Institute for Digital Media Technology (IDMT) Ilmenau in 2018. Thereafter, she worked as a postdoc at the Citizen Science group of the DLR Institute of Data Science Jena, and established a new Machine Learning group starting in 2019. Since December 2020, she is deputy head of the Data Science in Earth Observation chair at Technical University of Munich. Her present research is focused on developing novel Machine Learning algorithms for applications in earth observation, as well as automatic analysis of social media data.
Anshuman Nag
Associate Professor Department of Chemistry Indian Institute of Science Education and Research (IISER), Dr. Homi Bhabha Road, Pune 411008 E-mail: [email protected], [email protected] Home Page: http://www.iiserpune.ac.in/~angshuman
Angshuman Nag received his Master of Science in Chemistry from Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Guwahati and PhD from Indian Institute of Science (IISc) Bangalore, India. Then he completed two terms of postdoctoral fellowship at IISc Bangalore and at University of Chicago. In 2012, Angshuman started his research group in IISER Pune. At present, he is an Associate Professor of Chemistry in IISER Pune. The major focus of their research is to design perovskite semiconductors with interesting optoelectronic properties. They work on three kinds of metal halide perovskites, namely, (i) colloidal CsPbX3 (X = Cl, Br, I) nanocrystals, (ii) lead‐free perovskite derivatives like Cs3Sb2I9, and Cs2AgInX6, and (iii) 2D layered hybrid perovskites. They also dope perovskite semiconductor achieving new optical absorption and emission in visible to near-infrared range.
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Arpita Mondal
Assistant Professor Department of Civil Engineering Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, India. e-mail: [email protected] Home page: https://www.climate.iitb.ac.in/en/employee-profile/prof- arpita-mondal
Arpita Mondal is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Civil Engineering and in the Interdisciplinary Program in Climate Studies at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Bombay. Arpita's research focuses on hydroclimatic extremes - how they can be characterized, what causes them, and how they are likely to evolve with climate change. Arpita serves as an Associate Editor of the Springer journal Regional Environmental Change. She received the Early Career Research Award from the Science and Education Research Board (SERB), and the INSPIRE Faculty Award. She also received Asian University Alliance (AUA) Scholars' Award. Arpita completed her PhD at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bangalore, MTech at IIT Bombay and Bachelor (Gold Medalist) in Civil Engineering at Jadavpur University, Kolkata. As a PhD student, Arpita had received the Endeavour Research Fellowship, Fulbright-Nehru Research Fellowship (USIEF), and the Berkner Travel Grant of the American Geophysical Union (AGU).
Ashis Biswas
Assistant Professor, Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences Indian Institute of Science Education and Research (IISER) Bhopal Room: 30, AB-II, Bhopal Bypass Road, Bhauri, 462066, MP, India E-mail: [email protected] Homepage: http://home.iiserb.ac.in/~ashis/
Currently, Ashis Biswas is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences, IISER Bhopal. He completed Ph.D. from KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden as an Erasmus Mundus fellow. Following Ph.D., he completed postdoctoral research of one year at the University of Saskatchewan, Canada, and two years at the University of Bayreuth, Germany as an Alexander von Humboldt fellow. His research investigates the mobilization and transport of inorganic and organic contaminants in natural and anthropogenically polluted soil and aquatic environments. The goal is to develop the mechanistic geochemical understanding for the contaminant mobilization and transport to better tackle current and future challenges of contamination of the soil and water resources
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and related ecosystems. Aqueous and solid-phase speciation (redox and molecular) of trace elements by ion chromatography (IC) hyphenated with inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometer (ICP-MS) and synchrotron-based X-ray absorption spectroscopy (XAS: XANES & EXAFS) are the key components in the research program.
Benedikt Schmülling
Professor Bergische Universität Wuppertal, Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Information Technology and Media Technology, Freudenberg Campus Rainer-Gruenter-Straße 21, Room: FD 02.16, D-42119 Wuppertal. E-mail: [email protected] Home page: https://ees.uni-wuppertal.de/en/staff/prof-dr-ing-benedikt- schmuelling.html
Benedikt Schmuelling received the M.Sc. degree (Dipl.-Ing.) in electrical engineering from the Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Information Technology of Dortmund University, Germany, in 2005. From 2005 until 2010, he worked as a researcher at the Institute of Electrical Machines, RWTH Aachen University, Germany, where he also received his PhD in 2009. From 2010 until 2012 he was with Vahle Inc., Kamen, Germany, where he worked as an engineer on the development of wireless charging stations for electric vehicles. Since 2012 he is with the University of Wuppertal, Germany, where he was head of the E-Mobility Research Group at the School of Electrical, Information and Media Engineering until 2018. Since 2018 he is full professor and holder of the chair of electric mobility and energy storage systems at the same university. His research fields include electric mobility, wireless power transfer, renewable energies, energy storage systems, and efficiency topics.
Ben is the German co-chair of the conference for 2020-2022.
Bheemarjuna Reddy Tamma
Professor Department of Computer Science and Engineering Indian Institute of Technology Hyderabad Kandi, Telengana 502285, India E-mail: [email protected] Homepage: https://www.iith.ac.in/~tbr/
Bheemarjuna Reddy Tamma is a Professor in the Dept. of Computer Science and Engineering at IIT Hyderabad. He obtained his Ph.D. degree from IIT Madras, India in 2007 and then worked as a post-doctoral fellow at the University of California San Diego (UCSD)
67 11th Indo-German Frontiers of Engineering Conference (INDOGFOE) 2021 A joint undertaking by the Department of Science and Technology, IIT Kharagpur and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation
division of California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (CALIT2) prior to taking up faculty position at IIT Hyderabad, India in 2010. His research interests are in the areas of Converged Cloud Radio Access Networks, SDN/NFV for 5G, Mobile Social Networks in Proximity, Network Security, and Green ICT. He has published over 100 articles in refereed international journals and conferences. Dr. Reddy is a recipient of Visvesvaraya Young Faculty Research Fellowship at IIT Hyderabad and iNautix Research Fellowship for his Ph.D. tenure at IIT Madras. He is a co-recipient of Top Cited Article Award from Elsevier publishers, Best Academic Demo Award at COMSNETS 2018, Best Poster Award at ICACCI 2018, 2nd Best Paper Award at IEEE ANTS 2017, and Best Paper award at ICACCI 2015 conferences. Dr. Reddy is a prolific reader and an amateur runner!
Carsten Butsch
Priv.-Doz. Südbau, Room 2.22, Otto-Fischer-Straße 4, 50674 Cologne, Germany. E-mail: [email protected] Home page: https://geographie.uni-koeln.de/en/research/working- groups/urban-and-social-geography/staff/scientific-staff/butsch-carsten
Carsten Butsch holds a diploma-degree in geography from the University of Bonn. He finished his PhD on access to healthcare services in Pune (India) under supervision of Frauke Kraas at the University of Cologne. He thereafter worked on projects related urban health in India and risk management in megacities. He also worked as scientific assistant for the German Advisory Council on Global Change. From 2015-2018 he worked on transnational networks, practices and identities of Indian migrants in Germany, which was the topic of his habilitation thesis (University of Cologne). After completing one term as visiting professor at the University of Heidelberg, he works as senior lecturer at the University of Cologne. He is PI in a research project on water in periurban areas in India (Pune, Hyderabad, Kolkata) and works on urban health, the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic and risks in urban areas.
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Cathrin Zengerling
Assistant Professor HafenCity University Hamburg Überseeallee 16 20457 Hamburg, Germany. E-mail: [email protected] Home page: https://www.hcu-hamburg.de/en/bachelor/urban- planning/projektleitungen/dr-cathrin-zengerling-llm/
Cathrin Zengerling is a legal scholar and works primarily in the areas of (international) environmental, energy and planning law as well as sustainable urban development. She holds a PhD in international environmental law from the University of Hamburg and a Master of Laws from the University of Michigan. She heads the junior professorship "Transformation to Sustainable Energy Systems" and the research group "Urban Footprints", funded by a Freigeist-Fellowship of the Volkswagen Foundation, at the Faculty of Environment and Natural Resources at the University of Freiburg. Her current research focuses on the role of cities in combating climate change and resource depletion, legal steering of the energy transition in a multi-level governance system, climate litigation as well as climate change and trade.
Chandra Murthy
Professor Dept. of Electrical Communication Engineering, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore 560012, India. E-mail: [email protected] Home Page: https://ece.iisc.ac.in/~cmurthy/doku.php?id=home
Chandra R. Murthy is a Professor in the department of Electrical Communication Engineering at the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, India. His research interests are in the areas of multiuser MIMO systems, 5G/6G communications, and sparse signal recovery techniques applied to wireless communications. He has 68 journal papers and 98 conference papers to his credit. He was an associate editor for the IEEE Signal Processing Letters during 2012-16 and an elected member of the IEEE SPCOM Technical Committee during 2014-19. Currently, he is serving as a senior area editor for the IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing, an associate editor for IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, and IEEE Transactions on Communications
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Christian Geiß
Researcher German Aerospace Center (DLR), German Remote Sensing Data Center Geo-Risks and Civil Security, Oberpfaffenhofen, 82234 Weßling E-mail: [email protected] Home page: https://www.dlr.de/eoc/en/desktopdefault.aspx/tabid- 5242/8788 read-25320/sortby-lastname/
Christian Geiß (M’15) received the M.Sc. degree in applied geoinformatics from the Paris Lodron University of Salzburg, Salzburg, Austria, in 2010 and the Ph.D. degree (Dr. rer. nat.) from the Humboldt University of Berlin, Berlin, Germany, in 2014. Since 2010, he is with the German Remote Sensing Data Center (DFD) of the German Aerospace Center (DLR). In 2017, he was also with the Cambridge University Centre for Risk in the Built Environment (CURBE), University of Cambridge, UK, as a visiting scholar. He is currently pursuing a habilitation project in Geography with the Julius-Maximilians University of Würzburg, Würzburg, Germany, with the title “Collective Sensing Techniques and Artificial Intelligence for Natural Hazard Risk and Impact Assessment”. Consequently, his research interests include the development of machine learning methods for the interpretation of earth observation data, multimodal remote sensing of the built environment, exposure and vulnerability assessment in the context of natural hazards, as well as techniques for automated damage assessment after natural disasters.
Christian Senger
Deputy Director Room: 2.340, Institute of Telecommunications, University of Stuttgart, Pfaffenwaldring 47, 70569 Stuttgart, Deutschland E-mail: [email protected] Home page: http://work.senger.eu/
Christian Senger is Deputy Director of the Institute of Telecommunications at the University of Stuttgart. He received a diploma degree (M.Sc. equiv.) in Computer Science from Universität Karlsruhe (now Karlsruhe Institute of Technology) in 2006 and a Dr.-Ing. degree (Ph.D. equiv.) in Electrical Engineering from Ulm University in 2011. From May 2013 to October 2015, he was a postdoctoral research fellow at the Communications Group at the University of Toronto. His main field of interest is error control coding with its modern applications in fiber-optical high-speed networks, distributed data storage, and flash memories.
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Daniel Pleissner
Professor University Luneburg, 21335 Lüneburg, Universitätsallee 1, C13.203 E-mail: [email protected] Home page: https://www.leuphana.de/en/institutes/isec/persons/daniel- pleissner.html
Daniel Pleissner obtained an international university and research education in Germany, Poland, Denmark, and Hong Kong in biotechnology, environmental engineering and biology. Daniel Pleissner’s research activities focus on developing concepts to create sustainable urban and rural areas, and green chemical and biotechnological processes based on organic waste as feedstock. In his research, Daniel Pleissner uses innovative approaches by combining knowledge and technologies from several engineering disciplines with natural sciences. Daniel Pleissner published more than 80 peer-review articles and participated in and presented at more than 35 international conferences. He is currently an adjunct prof. at Leuphana University in Lüneburg (Germany), head of science at the Institute for Food and Environmental Research in Bad Belzig (Germany) and member of the advisory board of the DECHEMA “Algae Biotechnology” group. Devanita Ghosh
INSIRE Faculty Centre for Earth Science, Indian Institute of Science, C.V. Raman Avenue, Bangalore 560012 Email: [email protected] Home Page: http://ceas.iisc.ac.in/fellows.html
Devanita Ghosh holds a Masters' degree in Microbiology from the University of Burdwan. She finished her PhD under the supervision of Prof. Joyanto Routh and Prof. Punyasloke Bhadury jointly at the Linköping University, Sweden and IISER Kolkata in 2015. Thereafter, she worked as a Research Fellow in the School of Environmental Science and Engineering at IIT Kharagpur (India) with Prof. Abhijit Mukherjee. Since May 2016 she is working at the Centre for Earth Sciences, IISc Bangalore as a tenure track faculty fellow, under the DST INSPIRE program by Gov. of India. Her present research is focused on studying the microbial taxonomic and metabolic dynamics that are linked to various geochemical processes, in particular the processes leading to environmental contamination and health hazard. She uses organic chemistry proxies like nucleic acids, amino acids, fatty acids, lipids etc. to understand natural samples. 71 11th Indo-German Frontiers of Engineering Conference (INDOGFOE) 2021 A joint undertaking by the Department of Science and Technology, IIT Kharagpur and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation
Eirini Ntoutsi
Associate Professor Institute of Distributed Systems/ Intelligent Systems Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Leibniz University Hannover Appelstrasse 4, 30167 Hannover, Germany E-mail: ntoutsikbs.uni-hannover.de Home page: https://kbs.uni-hannover.de/~ntoutsi/
Eirini Ntoutsi holds a diploma and a master in Computer Engineering and Informatics from the Polytechnic School of the University of Patras, Greece. She finished her PhD under the supervision of Prof. Yannis Theodoridis at the University of Piraeus, Athens, Greece. Thereafter she worked for one year as a data mining expert at the Hellenic Telecommunications Organization (OTE), Greece before joining the group of Prof. Hans.- Peter. Kriegel at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich (LMU), Germany with an Alexander von Humboldt Foundation fellowship. Since 2016 she is an associate professor at the Leibniz University of Hannover, Germany and a member of the L3S Research Center. Her present research lies in the areas of adaptive machine learning for non-stationary data streams and responsible Artificial Intelligence, in particular fairness-aware machine learning, with application areas including social networks and industrial streams.
Georg Martius
Research Group Leader Autonomous Learning, Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems, Office: N-1.015, Max-Planck-Ring 4, Tübingen, Germany. E-mail: [email protected] Home page: http://georg.playfulmachines.com/
Georg Martius received his Computer Science Diploma from the University in Leipzig and earned his Ph.D. at the University Göttingen in 2009. After a postdoc position at the Max Planck Institute (MPI) for Mathematics in the Sciences in Leipzig and as a fellow at the IST Austria, he became a group leader at the MPI for Intelligent Systems in Tübingen. He is interested in autonomous learning, that is how an embodied agent can determine what to learn, how to learn, and how to judge the learning success. His aim is to make robotic agents learn from little supervision and more in a developmental fashion. His research group studies machine learning methods for applications in robotics, empowers deep networks with reasoning capabilities, and investigates artificial intrinsic motivations.
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Jan Mietzner
Professor Hamburg University of Applied Sciences (HAW) Faculty of Design, Media, and Information (DMI) Finkenau 35, D-22081 Hamburg, Germany e-mail: [email protected] Home page: http://www.ece.ubc.ca/~janm/
Jan Mietzner received his Ph.D. degree in electrical and information engineering from the Christian-Albrechts University (CAU), Kiel, Germany in 2006. From 2007 to 2008, he was with the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada, as a post-doctoral research fellow sponsored by the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), where he worked on algorithms for relay-assisted ultra-wideband and cognitive-radio systems. In 2009, he joined Airbus DS (now Hensoldt), Ulm, Germany, where he worked in the areas of jamming and radar systems and was Technical Project Manager for multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) radar development. In September 2017, he became a professor for communications engineering at Hamburg University of Applied Sciences (HAW). His research interests include theoretical and practical aspects of wireless communications and radar systems, in particular visible light communications, MIMO radar, compressed sensing techniques, and joint radar & communication (RadCom) schemes.
Julia Maibach
Professor Karlsruher Institut für Technologie (KIT), Institut für Angewandte Materialien (IAM-ESS), Hermann-von-Helmholtz-Platz 1 D-76344 Eggenstein-Leopoldshafen, Germany. E-mail: julia maibach@kit edu Home page: http://www.iam.kit.edu/ess/english/21_1085.php
Julia Maibach studied Materials Science at TU Darmstadt and Chalmers University of Technology (Gothenburg, Sweden) and obtained her PhD in Materials Science at TU Darmstadt in 2014. Following her postdoctoral stay at Uppsala University (Sweden), she started her independent line of research at the Institute for Applied Materials – Energy Storage Systems (IAM-ESS) at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) in 2017 after being awarded a young investigator grant for the project InSEIde from the German Ministry of Education and Research. She also heads the surface and interface analysis group at IAM-ESS. Her research focusses on understanding and designing interface layers in rechargeable batteries based on insights from existing photoelectron spectroscopy techniques and newly developed in-situ approaches combining electrochemistry and photoelectron spectroscopy.
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Karin Kleine
Professor Room: L.2.017, Corrensstrasse 46 D-48149 Münster, Germany. E-mail: [email protected] Home page: https://www.uni-muenster.de/MEET/en/team/kleiner.shtml
Karin Kleiner is the head of the focus group “Mechanistic understanding” at MEET (University of Münster) unraveling the physical origin of energy density limitations of state of the art and future battery materials. She was working for the BMW group Munich from 2011 till 2014 and received her PhD from the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) in 2014. For the development of analyzing strategies of commercial Li-ion batteries out of automotive field tests she got the GDCh career grant of the Electrochemistry division. Dr. Kleiner joined the Department of Technical Electrochemistry at the Technical University of Munich and the scientific network of BASF in 2015 where she investigated high energy cathode materials for Li-ion batteries. Later she was working at the Diamond Light Source (UK’s synchrotron facility) where she developed operando techniques to investigate energy storage devices.
Kerstin Ritter
Junior Professor Berlin Center for Advanced Neuroimaging,Sauerbruchweg 4, Charitéplatz 1, 10117 Berlin, Germany. E-mail: [email protected] Home page: https://sites.google.com/site/hayneslab/people/current/kerstin-hackmack
Kerstin Ritter is a junior professor for Computational Neuroscience and leads the group "Machine Learning in Clinical Neuroimaging" at the Department of Psychiatry and Psychotherapy at Charité - Universitätsmedizin Berlin. Trained as a mathematician, she did her PhD at the Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience Berlin (2012). Since 2020, she is PI in the CRC 1404 "Foundations of Workflows for Large-Scale Scientific Data Analysis" and the TRR 265 "Losing and Regaining Control over Drug Intake". In 2018, she was awarded a NARSAD Young Investigator Grant from the Brain & Behavior Research Foundation (USA) for "Studying mental health via research domain criteria, neuroimaging and convolutional neural networks". Her expertise lies at the intersection of artificial intelligence (explainable machine/deep learning), neuroimaging and neurological/psychiatric diseases (e.g. multiple sclerosis, Alzheimer's disease or schizophrenia).
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Koteswararao Kondepu
Assistant Professor India Institute of Technology Dharwad WALMI Campus, Near High Court, PB Road, Dharwad 580011, Karnataka E-mail Id: [email protected] Home page: https://iitdh.irins.org/profile/192551
Koteswararao Kondepu holds a Master degree in Computer Applications (Gold Medalist) from Indian School of Mines (IIT) Dhanbad in 2007. He obtained his PhD degree in Computer Science and Engineering from Institute for Advanced Studies Lucca (IMT), Italy in 2012. Thereafter, he worked as a Research Fellow in the TeCIP institute at Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna of Pisa, Italy. Since December 2020 he is an assistant Professor at the Indian Institute of Technology Dharwad, India. He is also co-author of IEEE Communications Society Charles Kao Award (2018) for the Best Optical Communications and Networking Paper. He also won SoftFire Challenges award for “VERIFIRE” project, 2018. His present research is focused on 5G, softwarization and virtualization of mobile network and communication networks reliability.
Laurent Schmalen
Professor Room 106, Building 06.45, Hertzstr. 16, D-76187 Karlsruhe, Germany. E-mail: laurent narrow@kit edu Home page: https://www.cel.kit.edu/team_schmalen.php
Laurent Schmalen holds a diploma degree in Electrical Engineering and Information Technology from RWTH Aachen University. He finished his PhD under the supervision of Prof. Peter Vary at RWTH Aachen University in 2011. Thereafter, he worked as a Research Engineer and later as a Department Head in Alcatel-Lucent (later Nokia) Bell Labs on ultra- high-speed communication systems. Since April 2019, he is a full professor at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) where he leads the Communications Engineering Lab (CEL). His present research is focused on algorithms for reliable communication systems, channel coding algorithms and modulation formats for optical communication systems and in particular the application of machine learning algorithms to design and optimize communication systems.
75 11th Indo-German Frontiers of Engineering Conference (INDOGFOE) 2021 A joint undertaking by the Department of Science and Technology, IIT Kharagpur and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation
Maheshkumar H. Kolekar
Associate Professor Department of Electrical Engineering Indian Institute of Technology Patna, Bihar 801106, India E-mail: [email protected] Home page: https://www1.iitp.ac.in/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id =253&Itemid=225
Maheshkumar H. Kolekar is working as Associate Professor in Dept of Electrical Engg at Indian Institute of Technology Patna, India, where he is holding post of Associate Professor. He received the Ph.D. degree in Electronics and Electrical Communication Engg from the IIT Kharagpur in 2007. From 2008 to 2009, he was a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow with the Department of Computer Science, University of Missouri, Columbia, USA where he worked on intelligent video surveillance systems. During May to July 2017, he worked as DAAD fellow in Technical University Berlin where he worked on EEG signal analysis using machine learning and deep learning. He has authored a book titled, “Intelligent Video Surveillance Systems: An Algorithmic Approach”, CRC Press, Taylor and Francis Group, (2018). He served as a Head, Dept of Electrical Engg, IIT Patna in 2013 for one year and Head of the Center (HoC) for Advanced Systems Engineering, IIT Patna during 2014 to 2016 for two years. He served as Professor-in-charge, National Knowledge Network of IIT Patna during August 2017 to Sept 2019. He has successfully completed R and D project sponsored by Principal Scientific Advisor to Govt of India on abnormal human activity recognition Manisha Jain
Post-Doctoral Fellow Leibniz Institute of Ecological Urban and Regional Development Weberplatz 1, 01217 Dresden, Germany. E-mail: [email protected] Home page: https://www.ioer.de/ioer-im-ueberblick/beschaeftigte/jain/
Manisha Jain holds a Master of Science in Infrastructure Planning from the University of Stuttgart. She finished her PhD under the supervision of Prof. Stefan Siedentop at the University of Stuttgart in December 2012. Thereafter, she worked as a PostDoc researcher in the Department of Urban Planning and Regional Development at the HafenCity University in Hamburg. Since September 2015 she is a senior researcher at the Leibniz Institute of Ecological and Regional Development in Dresden. Her present research is focused on modelling urban growth dynamics in the Global South, in particular understanding land use change as an outcome of complex human-environmental interactions.
76 11th Indo-German Frontiers of Engineering Conference (INDOGFOE) 2021 A joint undertaking by the Department of Science and Technology, IIT Kharagpur and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation
Martin Franz
Professor Room 02/206, University of Osnabrück, Institute for Geography, Seminarstr. 19 a / b, 49074 Osnabrück, Germany. E-mail: [email protected] Home page: https://www.geographie.uni- osnabrueck.de/personen/mitglieder_des_instituts/profs/franz_martin_prof_dr. html
Martin Franz holds a diploma degree in Geography from the Ruhr-University, Bochum. He did his Ph.D. on the "Development of Brownfields in Europe and the Institutional Dimension of Sustainability" in 2008. In 2011 he finished his Habilitation thesis on "Changing Power Structures in Agrofood Networks – Case Studies from India". Since 2014 he is professor for Human Geography at Osnabrück University and since 2018 he is the head of the Institute of Geography of Osnabrück University. His research is focussed on geography of Trade, globalization, rural development and sustainability transition.
Mayank Singh
Assistant Professor Department of Computer Science and Engineering, AB 4/304, IIT Gandhinagar, Palaj, Gandhinagar, Gujarat, India 382355 e-mail: [email protected] Home page: https://mayank4490.github.io/
Mayank Singh received the Bachelor of Technology degree in computer science and engineering from IIT Jodhpur, Jheepasani, India, in 2012, and the Ph.D.degree in computer science and engineering from IIT Kharagpur, Kharagpur, India, in 2019.From 2018 to 2019, he was an Assistant Research Professor with IIT Gandhinagar, Palaj, India, where he has been working as an Assistant Professor with the Department of Computer Science and Engineering since February 2019. His main research interests are in applying data mining, machine learning (ML), natural language processing (NLP), and network science techniques to differ- ent problems in scholarly information science. He has published extensively in data mining/NLP conferences like SIGKDD, CIKM, NAACL, ECIR, etc. He has been the recipient of the GYTI award by SRISTI in 2017 and the early career research award, SERB India 2019.
77 11th Indo-German Frontiers of Engineering Conference (INDOGFOE) 2021 A joint undertaking by the Department of Science and Technology, IIT Kharagpur and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation
Michael Hanke
Professor Institute of Neuroscience and Medicine (INM-7) Wilhelm-Johnen-Straße 52425 Jülich E-mail [email protected] Home page: https://www.fz-juelich.de/SharedDocs/Personen/INM/INM- 7/EN/Hanke_m.html
Michael Hanke studied psychology in Halle (Saale) and Magdeburg, Germany. After being a postdoc in the lab of James Haxby at Dartmouth College, together with Yaroslav O.Halchenko working on NeuroDebian and PyMVPA, he moved back to Magdeburg as a Juniorprofessor. Since 2019, he is a professor at Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf and head of the Psychoinformatics lab at the Institute of Neuroscience and Medicine (Brain and Behavior) of the Research Center Jülich. His group contributes to the development of the DataLad software, and develops workflows and training materials for research data management in neuroscience.
Narayanan C Krishnan
Assistant Professor Department of Computer Science and Engineering Indian Institute of Technology Ropar Rupnagar, Punjab, India – 140001. E-mail: [email protected] Home page: https://cse.iitrpr.ac.in/ckn/people/ckn.html
Narayanan C Krishnan (CK) joined the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Indian Institute of Technology Ropar in 2013. Prior to that, he was an assistant research professor at the center for advanced studies in adaptive systems (CASAS) at Washington State University. He worked in the area of data mining applied to activity recognition and smart home technologies. He completed his PhD in 2010 from Arizona State University. He likes to work on fundamental machine learning/data mining problems that are inspired by application domains such as activity recognition, multimedia, pervasive health care and recently from ICT4D. He enjoys trekking in the Himalayas.
78 11th Indo-German Frontiers of Engineering Conference (INDOGFOE) 2021 A joint undertaking by the Department of Science and Technology, IIT Kharagpur and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation
Nathalie Kunkel
Junior Professor Room 108/1.146, Georg-August-Universität Göttingen Institut für Anorganische Chemie Tammanstr. 4, 37077 Göttingen E-mail: [email protected] Home page: https://kunkel-nathalie.de/dr-nathalie-kunkel
Nathalie Kunkel studied chemistry at the Saarland University and obtained her diploma in 2010. After completing her PhD in 2014 and a short postdoctoral stay at Leipzig University, she moved to Philippe Goldner’s group at the IRCP in Paris as a postdoctoral fellow. In October 2016, she established a junior research group at the Technical University of Munich, Chemistry Department, supported by a Liebig fellowship of the Fonds der Chemischen Industrie and became a TUM Junior Fellow. Since 2019 she is a junior professor at the University of Göttingen where she she is working on solid state materials, mainly with the focus on optical properties or energy applications.
Naveen K P
Assistant Professor Department of Electrical Engineering Indian Institute of Technology Tirupati, Renigunta Road, Settipalle Post, Tirupati – 517506, Andhra Pradesh, India E-mail: [email protected] Home page https://iittp.ac.in/dr-k-p-naveen
K. P. Naveen obtained his Batchelor of Engineering degree in Electronics and Communication Engineering from the Visvesvaraya Technological University in 2005. Thereafter, he worked as Scientist/Eng-SC for a brief period at the ISRO Satellite Centre, Bangalore (Jan. 2006 - July 2007). Later he finished his Ph.D. under the supervision of Prof. Anurag Kumar at the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore in 2013. Subsequently, he worked as a post-doctoral fellow at INRIA Saclay, France (Jan. 2014 - Dec. 2015), and then as an INSPIRE Faculty at the Department of Electrical Engineering, IIT Madras (Jan. 2016 - July 2017). Since July 2017 he has been working as an Assistant Professor at the Department of Electrical Engineering, IIT Tirupati. His research interests broadly include stochastic modeling and performance analysis of wireless networks, network economics, game theory, and optimal control. Currently, his research group is extensively working on the specific topics of LTE-unlicensed, mobile-data offloading, network pricing, and coverage and percolation properties of next-generation wireless networks
79 11th Indo-German Frontiers of Engineering Conference (INDOGFOE) 2021 A joint undertaking by the Department of Science and Technology, IIT Kharagpur and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation
Oliver Clemens
Professor Head of the Department of Materials Science, Room: 2S5 Chemical Materials Synthesis, Heisenbergstrasse 3 70569 Stuttgart, Germany E-mail: [email protected] Home page: https://www.imw.uni-stuttgart.de/mc/
Oliver Clemens (born 1983) studied chemistry at Saarland University, Germany, where he also obtained his Ph.D. in solid state chemistry in the group of Prof. Beck in 2012. After a postdoctoral stay at the University of Birmingham, UK, in the groups of Prof. Slater, Prof. Berry and Dr. Wright, he became group leader of the Joint Research Laboratory Nanomaterials, TU Darmstadt and KIT, Germany, at TU Darmstadt. There he got promoted to the level of Assistant Professor in 2017. In 2020, he accepted an offer for Full Professor at University of Stuttgart, Germany, and is leading the group of Material Synthesis since. His work is focusing on materials for fluoride ion batteries and perovskite compounds for electrocatalytic applications, recycling of battery materials, as well as magnetic or superconducting properties and their tunability via chemical and electrochemical reactions.
Peter Dannenberg
Professor Südbau, Raum 2.12 Otto-Fischer-Straße 4, 50674 Köln, Germany. E-mail: [email protected] Home page: https://geographie.uni-koeln.de/en/research/working- groups/human-geography-urban-and-regional- development/staff/dannenberg-peter
Peter Dannenberg holds a Master in City and Regional Planning at Cardiff University, a Diploma in Geography at Leibniz Universität Hannover, and a PhD in Geogrpha at Humboldt-University at Berlin. There after he hold different positions and guest stipends at Humboldt-University, Stellenbosch University, and University of North Carolina. Since 2013 he is Professor at the University of Cologne at the Global South Studies Center and the Institute of Geography. His research focusses on economic geography and regional development. In particular Dannenberg is interested regional economic development in the context of globalization, digitalization and development policies. He currently works on retail and agricultural value chains and the dynamics of underlying infrastructures. 80 11th Indo-German Frontiers of Engineering Conference (INDOGFOE) 2021 A joint undertaking by the Department of Science and Technology, IIT Kharagpur and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation
Prathosh A. P.
Assistant Professor Department of Electrical Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Delhi Pin 110016, New Delhi, India e-mail: [email protected] Home page: https://sites.google.com/view/prathosh
Prathosh received his Ph. D from the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bangalore in 2015, in the area of temporal data analysis and applied machine learning. He submitted his PhD thesis in a record time of three years after his B.Tech. with many top-tier journal publications. Subsequently, he worked in corporate research labs including Xerox Research India, Philips research and a start-up in CA, USA. His work in industry led to the generation of several IP, comprising 15 US patents of which 10 are granted and 6 are commercialised. He joined IIT Delhi as an Assistant Professor (the youngest faculty on campus at 27 yrs) in the computer technology group of Electrical Engineering where is currently engaged in research, the teaching of machine and deep learning courses and guidance (first PhD student is close to submission in a month). His current research includes guided deep-representational learning, signal processing, cross-domain learning and their applications in healthcare. His work in these areas has resulted in recent papers in major AI-conferences such as AAAI, AUAI, ECCV, Interspeech, EMBC, and journals such as IEEE Trans. Medical Imaging, IEEE Transaction signal processing, IEEE Trans. Speech and Lang. Proc., IEEE Signal Proc. Letters etc. He has also co-founded a startup Cogniable.Tech which builds computer vision algorithms for behavioural healthcare (First place winner of the recent AI startup challenge of Govt. of India) and works as a consultant for several industries and start-ups
Preeti Jyoti
Assistant Professor Department of Computer Science & engineering Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay Pin 400076, Powai, Mumbai, Maharashtra, India E-mail: [email protected] Home page: https://www.cse.iitb.ac.in/~pjyothi/
Preethi Jyothi is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at IIT Bombay. She was a Beckman Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign from 2013 to 2016. She received her Ph.D. in computer science from The Ohio State University. Her Ph.D. thesis dealt with statistical learning methods for pronunciation models. Her work on this topic received a Best Student Paper Award at
81 11th Indo-German Frontiers of Engineering Conference (INDOGFOE) 2021 A joint undertaking by the Department of Science and Technology, IIT Kharagpur and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation
Interspeech, 2012. Her research interests are broadly in machine learning applied to speech and language, especially in low-resource settings. Her recent work focuses on accent adaptation for speech recognition and computational models for code-switched speech and text. Premkumar Senguttuvan
Assistant Professor New Chemistry Unit, International Centre for Materials Science and School of Advanced Materials, Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research, Jakkur, Bangalore-560064, India. E-mail: [email protected] Home Page: https://energystoragejncasr.wixsite.com/energylab
Premkumar Senguttuvan completed his B.Tech from CECRI, India (2007) and M.S. from UPJV-France (2010). He pursued his PhD on the development of New Negative Electrode Materials for Sodium-ion Batteries under the guidance of Prof. J. –M. Tarascon and Dr. M. R. Palacin at UPJV-France and ICMAB-Spain (2010-2013). Thereafter, he worked as a Postdoctoral Associate in Dr. C. S. Johnson’s group at Argonne National Laboratory, USA (2014-2016). Since Nov. 2016, he has been jointly working as a Faculty at New Chemistry Unit and International Centre for Materials Science, JNCASR-India. His research interests are synthesis, structural and electrochemical characterizations of new electrode materials for Li-, Na- and multivalent-ion batteries.
Rabibrata Mukherjee
Professor Department of Chemical Engineering Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur Pin 721302, West Bengal, India E-mail: [email protected] Home page: http://www.iitkgp.ac.in/department/CH/faculty/ch-rabibrata
Rabibrata Mukherjee obtained his Bachelor of Engineering from Jadavpur Univerity in 1994, M. Tech from IIT Kharagpur in 2001 and Ph. D from IIT Kanpur in the year 2007. Rabibrata joined the Department of Chemical Engineering, IIT Kharagpur as an Assistant Professor in May 2009 and became a Professor in February 2018. Prior to joining IIT Kharagpur, he was a Scientist at CSIR - Central Glass & Ceramic Research Institute, between 1997 and 2009. He is an internationally acclaimed expert in soft nano patterning and thin film instability, with specific emphasis on ordering and arranging objects by confined self- organization at the nano and meso scale. So far he has published more than 80 journals papers and holds 7 Indian patents. He has received the CSIR Young Scientist Award in 2007, the MRSI Medal in 2014, Faculty Excellence Award from IIT Kharagpur in 2017 and the SERB- 82 11th Indo-German Frontiers of Engineering Conference (INDOGFOE) 2021 A joint undertaking by the Department of Science and Technology, IIT Kharagpur and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation
STAR award in 2020. Since February 2020, he is heading the DST funded Sophisticated Analytical & Technical Help Institute (SATHI) at IIT Kharagpur. He is an extremely popular teacher, passionate mentor, and an avid aviation enthusiast! Rabibrata is the Indian co-chair of the conference for 2020-2022.
Radha Krishna Ganti
Associate Professor Department of Electrical Engineering, IIT Madras, Chennai, Tamilnadu, Pin 600036, India e-mail: [email protected] Home page: http://www.ee.iitm.ac.in/rganti/
Radha Krishna Ganti is an Associate Professor at the Indian Institute of Technology Madras, Chennai, India. He was a Postdoctoral researcher in the Wireless Networking and Communications Group at UT Austin from 2009-11. He received his B. Tech. and M. Tech. in EE from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, and a Masters in Applied Mathematics and a Ph.D. in EE from the University of Notre Dame in 2009. His doctoral work focused on the spatial analysis of interference networks using tools from stochastic geometry. He is a co-author of the monograph Interference in Large Wireless Networks (NOW Publishers, 2008). He received the 2014 IEEE Stephen O. Rice Prize, the 2014 IEEE Leonard G. Abraham Prize and the 2015 IEEE Communications society young author best paper award. He was also awarded the 2016-2017 Institute Research and Development Award (IRDA) by IIT Madras. In 2019, he was awarded the TSDSI fellow for technical excellence in standardization activities and contribution to LMLC use case in ITU.
Rafael Schaefer
Junior Professor Technische Universität Berlin Information Theory and Applications Chair Einsteinufer 25, 10587 Berlin, Germany E-mail: [email protected] Home page: https://www.user.tu-berlin.de/rafaelfs/
Rafael F. Schaefer received the Dipl.Ing. degree in electrical engineering and computer science from the Technische Universität Berlin, Germany, in 2007, and the Dr.Ing. degree in electrical engineering from the Technische Universität München, Germany, in 2012. From 2013 to 2015, he was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow with Princeton University. Since 2015, he has been an Assistant Professor with the Technische Universität Berlin. Starting March 2021, he will be a full professor at University of Siegen, Germany, for Communications, Cryptography and Security. Among his publications is the recent book Information Theoretic 83 11th Indo-German Frontiers of Engineering Conference (INDOGFOE) 2021 A joint undertaking by the Department of Science and Technology, IIT Kharagpur and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation
Security and Privacy of Information Systems (Cambridge University Press, 2017). He was a recipient of the VDE Johann-Philipp-Reis Prize in 2013. He received the Best Paper Award of the German Information Technology Society (ITG-Preis) in 2016. His research interests are in the area of information theory and machine learning; in particular topics related to physical layer security and machine learning for communications. Ricardo Bassoli
Senior Researcher Technische Universität Dresden Dresden, Saxony, Germany e-mail: [email protected] Home page: https://riccardobassoli.com/
Riccardo Bassoli is a senior researcher at the Deutsche Telekom Chair of Communication Networks, Faculty of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Technische Universität Dresden (Germany). He received his B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees in Telecommunications Engineering from the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia (Italy) in 2008 and 2010 respectively. Next, he received his Ph.D. degree from the 5G Innovation Centre at the University of Surrey (UK), in 2016. He was also a Marie Curie ESR at the Instituto de Telecomunicações (Portugal) and visiting researcher at Airbus Defence and Space (France). Between 2016 and 2019, he was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Trento (Italy). He is an IEEE and ComSoc member. He is also a member of Glue Technologies for Space Systems Technical Panel of IEEE AESS. His research interests include: Quantum Communication Networks and Computing, High- Altitude Platforms (HAP) and Cloud Radio Access Network (C-RAN) in Space, 5G and Beyond networks, network virtualization and slicing, and intelligent networks.
84 11th Indo-German Frontiers of Engineering Conference (INDOGFOE) 2021 A joint undertaking by the Department of Science and Technology, IIT Kharagpur and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation
Ritu Gupta
Assistant Professor Department of Chemistry Indian Institute of Technology Jodhpur NH-65, Karwar, Jodhpur-342037, Rajasthan, India E mail: [email protected]; [email protected] Home page: https://iitj.ac.in/department/[email protected]&dept=che mistry
Ritu Gupta obtained her PhD in Materials Science under supervision of Professor Giridhar U. Kulkarni at Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research (JNCASR), Bangalore in 2013. Thereafter, she worked as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow with Nanomanufacturing group of Prof. Timothy S. Fisher at Brick Nanotechnology Centre, Purdue University, USA. Since August 2015, she is Assistant Professor at Department of Chemistry, Indian Institute of Technology Jodhpur. She served as one of the youngest Head of Department during 2017-2020. Her present research is focused on the development of functional nanomaterials for electrochemical energy devices and sensors, in particular printable inks for energy storage devices, electrochemical and resistive sensors for healthcare and environmental monitoring applications. She is also a recipient of INSA young scientist medal-2020, SEB Women Excellence Award 2021 and member of INYAS since Jan 2021.
S. Suresh Babu
Head and Scientist SG Space Physics Laboratory, Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala, India 695 022 E-mail: [email protected] / [email protected] Home Page: https://www.spl.gov.in/SPL/images/CVs/ARFI- SURESH.pdf
S. Suresh Babu conducted doctoral research at the Space Physics Laboratory, Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre of ISRO and obtained PhD (Physics) from University of Kerala in 2005, after obtaining his Masters (MSc) in Physics from University College, Thiruvananthapuram. Currently, he is the Head of the Aerosols Trace Gases and Radiative Forcing Branch, Space Physics Laboratory (SPL) of Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre (VSSC), Thiruvananthapuram. His area of interest is space borne and ground-based observations as well as theoretical studies of earth’s atmosphere for climate science research. He has published more than 160 papers in internationally reputed journals and edited books. He has received several awards which include Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize (2017) from Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), Government of India and National Award of
85 11th Indo-German Frontiers of Engineering Conference (INDOGFOE) 2021 A joint undertaking by the Department of Science and Technology, IIT Kharagpur and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation
Excellence in Atmospheric Science & Technology (2020) from Ministry of Earth Sciences, Government of India. He is a Fellow of the Indian Academy of Sciences (FASc) and Associate Editor of Journal of Earth System Science.
Sahely Bhadra
Assistant Professor Computer Science and Engineering Indian Institute of Technology Palakkad Ahalia Integrated Campus, Kozhippara, Kerala 678557, India. E-mail: [email protected] Home page: https://sites.google.com/iitpkd.ac.in/sahelybhadra/home
Sahely Bhadra works in the broad area of Machine Learning and Optimization. She is interested in multi view kernel learning from noisy incomplete data with structural properties. Dr. Sahely has published in top venues in ML and bioinformatics such ICML(2), JMLR, MLJ, ICDM, Bioinformatics. She received her PhD from Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, She has postdoctoral research experience in MPI-INF, Germany, Alto University, Finland and Northeaster University, USA. Since 2017, Sahely is Assistant Professor in Indian Institute of Technology Palakkad.
Sandip Chakraborty
Assistant Professor Department of Computer Science & Engineering Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur Pin 721302, West Bengal, India E-mail: [email protected], home page: https://cse.iitkgp.ac.in/~sandipc/index.html.
Sandip Chakraborty is working as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Kharagpur. He obtained his Bachelor of Engineering (BE) degree from Jadavpur University, Kolkata in 2009 and Master of Technology (M Tech) and Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), both from IIT Guwahati, in 2011 and 2014, respectively. The primary research interests of Dr. Chakraborty are on various aspects of computer systems and networks, the development of assistive technologies for societal well-being, and the design of distributed, pervasive, and ubiquitous technologies over mobile devices and smartphones. Sandip is leading multiple high-valued projects, sponsored by the GoI as well as various industries like Intel, HPE, TCS, IGCAR, and BEL. Dr. Chakraborty has published ~100 86 11th Indo-German Frontiers of Engineering Conference (INDOGFOE) 2021 A joint undertaking by the Department of Science and Technology, IIT Kharagpur and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation
conference papers and ~40 journal papers till now at top-tier venues like IEEE INFOCOM, IEEE PerCom, ACM RecSys, ACM MobileHCI, The Web Conference (Erstwhile WWW), IFIP Networking, IEEE ICNP, and various IEEE Transactions. He is an active member of the COMSNETS Association India, IEEE COMSOC, ACM SIGCOMM, and ACM SIGMOBILE. He is one of the founding members of ACM IMOBILE, the ACM SIGMOBILE chapter in India. He is working as an Area Editor of Elsevier Ad Hoc Networks journal. He has received various awards and accolades including INAE Young Engineers’ Award, Fellow of National Internet Exchange of India (NIXI), and so on.
Sebastian C Peter
Associate Professor, New Chemistry Unit & School of Advanced Materials Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research (JNCASR) Jakkur, Bangalore-560064 E-mail: [email protected], [email protected] Founder and Director Breathe Applied Sciences Pvt Ltd, Bengaluru Jakkur, Bangalore-560064, https://breathesciences.com/
Sebastian C. Peter received his MSc (2000) from St. Thomas College, Thrissur, Calicut University and MTech (2002) from Cochin University of Science and Technology. He received his Ph. D. in chemistry from the University of Münster, Germany (2006). He was a post-doctoral fellow at Max Plank Institute for Chemical Physics of Solids, Dresden, Germany (2006-07) and Northwestern University, USA (2007-10). Dr. Peter joined as Ramanujan faculty fellow at New Chemistry Unit, Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research, Bangalore in 2010. His broad research interests include the development of solid-state inorganic materials for various applications ranging fuel cell, CO2 reduction and in condensed matter physics. He has more than 165 peer reviewed publications and five patents. He was invited and attended around 80 national and international conferences. He is the recipient of Young Investigator awards from ACS (2013), RSC (2017) and IOP (2016). He was awarded Ramanujan fellowship in 2010 and MRSI medal in 2016. In 2018, he received SwarnaJayanti Fellowship in the category of Chemical Science. He is a member of American Chemical Society, Royal Society of Chemistry, ASM international, Chemical Research Society of India, Material Research Society of India, International Union of Crystallography, Indian National Young Academy of Science and Society for Material Chemistry of India. He co-founder the start-up “Breathe Applied Sciences Pvt Ltd” and enters into final round of the NRG-COSIA XPRIZE 20 million USD prize on waste CO2 utilization. His team is the only one team in final round of the competition earning half a million USD as milestone prize. Breathe Applied Sciences Pvt Ltd has been selected as one of the best 100 start-ups by Karnataka state Government in 2017 through ELEVATE-100. CleanEquity, Monaco (2019) selected CO2 reduction technology as the second best in the global level.
87 11th Indo-German Frontiers of Engineering Conference (INDOGFOE) 2021 A joint undertaking by the Department of Science and Technology, IIT Kharagpur and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation
Sebastian Stober
Professor Artificial Intelligence Lab, Faculty of Computer Science Otto von Guericke University Magdeburg Universitipatsplatz 2, 39106 Magdeburg, Germany E-mail: [email protected] Home Page: https://sebastianstober.de/
Sebastian Stober is Professor for Artificial Intelligence at the Otto von Guericke University Magdeburg. In his interdisciplinary research, he combines machine learning, music information retrieval and cognitive neuroscience. Since 2013, he.has been pioneering deep learning techniques for studying brain activity during music perception and imagination. His current work also explores the transfer of techniques from cognitive neuroscience to study artificial neural networks as main driver for the recent advances in artificial intelligence.
Selina Olthof
Professor University of Cologne, UOC, Institute of Physical Chemistry E-mail: [email protected] Home page: https://meerholz.uni-koeln.de/group-members- alt/staff/habilitands/dr-selina-olthof
Selina Olthof holds a diploma degree in Physics from the University Stuttgart. In 2010, she received her Ph.D. from the University of Dresden under the supervision of Karl Leo, followed by a DAAD funded postdoctoral research stay at Princeton University in the group of Antoine Kahn. Since 2013 she is head of a Surface Science Research Group at the University of Cologne in the Department of Chemistry. Here, her focus is on novel semiconductors, like halide perovskites or organic semiconductors. Next to her current position, she was also Visiting Professor at the Technical University Dresden for 6 months in 2018 and currently holds a 3-year part time professorship at Shaanxi Normal University in Xi’an, China.
88 11th Indo-German Frontiers of Engineering Conference (INDOGFOE) 2021 A joint undertaking by the Department of Science and Technology, IIT Kharagpur and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation
Sonja Deppisch
Head of Research Area Global Change and Spatial Strategies Überseeallee 16 (Room3.010) 20457 Hamburg E-mail: [email protected] Home page: https://www.hcu-hamburg.de/en/bachelor/urban- planning/projektleitungen/dr-ing-sonja-deppisch/
Sonja Deppisch holds a diploma degree in Landscape Planning from the University of Hanover and finished her Doctorate in Engineering 2007. Thereafter, she headed a social- ecological research group working on climate change impacts on urban regions at HafenCity University Hamburg. Since 2014 she is heading the research theme global change and land- use strategies at that University. Her present research is focused on studying urban and regional resilience and their relation to land-use planning as well as impacts of global change phenomena (climate change, biodiversity loss, urbanization) on urban regions and the resulting requests for adapting planning and urban and regional structures accordingly. She has a wide background in applying but also exploring methods of inter- as well as transdisciplinary research.
Soumendra Bhanja
CV Raman Postdoctoral Fellow Indian Institute of Science Bangalore, Karnataka, India – 560012 E-mail: [email protected] Home page: https://soumendrabhanja.wixsite.com/welcome
Soumendra N. Bhanja has obtained his PhD from the Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur. He is currently working as a CV Raman Postdoctoral fellow at the Indian Institute of Science after completing a 2-year postdoctoral stint at the Athabasca University, Canada. He has also worked at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center being a recipient of Fulbright scholarship. His main research areas include, regional-scale groundwater recharge and storage quantification, biogeochemical model development for water quality applications, water resource management and remote sensing in earth sciences. He has won many awards and recognitions such as, CV Raman Postdoctoral fellowship, National Postdoctoral fellowship, Fulbright scholarship, CSIR Shyama Prasad Mukherjee fellowship, Shastri Indo-Canadian Institute's student mobility grant etc.
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Suman Jain
Principal Scientist Head, Synthetic Chemistry & Petrochemicals Area Chemical & Material Sciences Division CSIR-Indian Institute of Petroleum, Dehradun-248005, India E-mail: [email protected] Home Page: https://www.iip.res.in/synthetic-chemistry-and-petrochemicals/v-v-d-n-
prasad-principal-scientist/
Suman L. Jain obtained her MSc. from Univeristy of Rajasthan, Jaipur in 1998 with first class first and received gold medal. After completion of the Ph. D from CSIR-Indian Institute of Petroleum, Dehradun in 2004, she moved to Germany for post doc as a Av-Humboldt Fellow in Univeristy of Regensburg with Prof. Oliver Resier. In 2011 she got permanent position as Senior Scientist in Chemical Sciences Division at CSIR-Indian Institute of Petroleum, Dehradun. Presently she is working as a principal scienitst and heading the Synthetic Chemistry and Petrochemicals area of the Institute. She is a receipient of many awards like, INSA-Young Scientist Medal-2005, NASI-Platinum Jubilee Young Scientist Award-2007, CSI-Young Scientist Award-2010, CRSI-medal-2013, MRSI-award-2019 SERB-Women Excellence Award and founder member of INYAS. She is also served as an Associate Editor of New Journal of Chemistry, RSC (UK). She has published more than 240 research publications in SCI- journals of Chemistry and 7 book chapters. Also she has 21 patents (6 granted in US and 4 in India) in her credit. Tatjana Scheffler
Junior Professor Germanistisches Institut Fakultät für Philologie, Ruhr-Universität Bochum, Universitätsstr. 150, 44780 Bochum, Germany. E-mail: [email protected] Home page: https://tscheffler.github.io/contact/
Tatjana Scheffler studied computational linguistics in Saarbrücken, Shanghai, and Beijing. In 2008, she completed her PhD in formal linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania, USA, under the supervision of Maribel Romero and Aravind Joshi. After researching multimodal interaction at the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI) in Berlin, she was a postdoc in applied computational linguistics at the University of Potsdam, Germany. In September 2020 she was appointed to the professorship for Digital Forensic Linguistics, at the Ruhr-Universität Bochum. Her research focuses on analysing conversations in digital media. On the application side, she is developing methods for detecting and analysing negative communication practices in social media, for example hate speech and disinformation, using statistical and neural machine learning. 90 11th Indo-German Frontiers of Engineering Conference (INDOGFOE) 2021 A joint undertaking by the Department of Science and Technology, IIT Kharagpur and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation
Tilmann Leisegang
Principal Investigator Energy Materials, Room: EG.05 Technische Universität Bergakademie Freiberg Akademiestraße 6 09599 Freiberg, Germany. E-mail: [email protected] Home page: https://tu-freiberg.de/exphys/energiematerialien/leitung
Tilmann Leisegang holds a diploma degree in physics from the TU Dresden. In 2010, he received his PhD from the TU Bergakademie Freiberg (TUBAF). He then worked at different research institutions and as a company founder. Since 2016, he has been head of the Energy Materials Group at the Institute of Experimental Physics at TUBAF. As a Highly Qualified Specialist and visiting scientist, he has been working at Samara University and Samara Polytech (Russia) since 2015. Since 2016, he is a member of the Young Forum of the Saxon Academy of Sciences. His current research interests include battery materials, solid electrolytes, pyroelectrics, and rare earths using experimental and theoretical methods from solid state physics and chemistry, crystallography, and X-ray analysis. Urmimala Maitra
Assistant Professor School of Materials Sciences Indian Association for the Cultivation of Science 2A & 2B Raja S. C. Mullick Road, Jadavpur, Kolkata, India E-mail: [email protected]; [email protected] Home Page: http://iacs.res.in/faculty-profile.html?id=157#
Urmimala Maitra received her Ph.D. in Materials Science from Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research, Bangalore, India in 2014 under the Supervision of Prof. C. N. R. Rao, researching on two-dimensional nanomaterials and their application in photocatalytic water splitting. Following this she moved to University of Oxford to work with Prof. Peter Bruce on High Voltage Li and Na ion battery cathodes. During 2018-2020 she had a brief research stays at Justus Leibig University, Giessen, Germany and Max Planck Institute for Microstructure Physics, Germany. She joined as an Assistant Prof. at Indian Institute for Cultivation of Sciences, Kolkata, India. Primary focus of her research group is to develop fundamental understanding and improvement of high-energy and high-power batteries like Na- and Li-ion batteries and all solid-state batteries. Other research interests of the group include energy storage devices like metal-oxygen, Mg-ion batteries and supercapacitors.
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Vahed Aref
Staff Member Nokia Solution and Networks GmbH, Lorenzstr. 10, 7435 Stuttgart, Germany. E-mail: [email protected] Home page: https://www.bell-labs.com/about/researcher- profiles/vahidaref/
Vahid Aref is a member of technical staff in Nokia Bell Labs since 2015. He received his PhD degree in computer and communication sciences from École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland, in 2014. Prior joining Bell Labs, he conducted post-doctoral research in the institute of telecommunications (INÜ) at University of Stuttgart. Since 2016, Dr. Aref also serves as guest lecturer at the University of Stuttgart. He has published more than 80 peer-reviewed articles in prestigious journals and conference proceedings. Dr. Aref has received several awards for his works including the best journal award 2018 (ITG-Preis 2018) from German Society of Information technology (ITG). His fields of research include coding and information theory, communications theory, machine learning and deep learning.
Vipul Arora
Assistant Professor Department of Electrical Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur Pin 208016, Uttar Pradesh, India E-mail: [email protected] Home page: https://vipular.github.io/
Vipul Arora received his B.Tech. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Kanpur, India. His Ph.D. thesis was titled “Analysis of Pitched Polyphonic Music for Source Transcription”, where he worked on analyzing music audio to identify and transcribe different instruments/voices playing simultaneously. During postdoc at Oxford University (UK), he developed speech recognition systems using linguistic principles, with applications in automatic language teacher and speech recognition for low- resource languages. At Amazon in Boston (USA), he worked on audio classification for developing Alexa home security system, with research focusing on classification with imbalanced data. Since 2018, he has been serving as an assistant professor at IIT Kanpur. His research is focused on machine learning for Physics as well as audio processing.
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Panel Discussion
(new event added from this year’s conference) Topic: Reflections and Outlook on “Indo‐German Cooperation in Science and Technology: Fostering Knowledge Transfer for Society” 26 February 2021 / 15:25‐16:15 IST / 10:55‐11:45 CET online on Let’s Get Digital (upon invitation)
Outline:
For more than ten years, the Indo‐German Frontiers of Engineering conference have been bringing together established and rising researchers from India and Germany. Touching upon different fields of engineering and applied natural sciences, the conferences have led to the establishment of numerous research collaborations between both countries, often pioneering innovative fields of knowledge and becoming an important driver of Indo‐German knowledge circulation.
At this year’s 11th Frontiers Conference, this panel discussion takes stock of these collaborations and of Indo‐German research opportunities in broader terms. With a special focus on the transfer of knowledge from research to societal application, panellists from science, practice and policy will draw lessons from current collaborations and discuss potentials and avenues for further cooperation in the coming years.
Panellists: Prof. Dr. Sarit Kumar Das, IIT Madras, INDOGFOE‐Chair 2009/2010 (Moderator) Prof. Dr. Sandeep Verma, Secretary, Science and Engineering Research Board, INDOGFOE‐ Chair 2015/2016 Prof. Dr. Arijita Dutta, Head of Department of Economics, Calcutta University Dr. Madhusudan Reddy Nandineni, Counsellor Science & Technology, (science attaché) Indian Embassy Berlin Mr. Philipp von Ritter, Counsellor, Head of Science & Technology Section, German Embassy Delhi Dr.‐Ing. Martina Scheer, Engineering Consultant, INDOGFOE Alumna
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Bio Sketch of Panelists Prof. Dr. Sarit Kumar Das
Institute Chair Professor Department of Mechanical Engineering Indian Institute of Technology Madras Chennai, Tamilnadu, Pin 600036, India
Prof. Sarit Kumar Das is an Institute Chair Professor of Mechanical Engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras. He received his PhD from Sambalpur University in 1994 and worked as Post‐Doctoral Fellow at University of BW Hamburg, Germany before joining IIT Madras in 1995. His research interests include nanofluids, nano‐biotechnology, multiphase flow in microsystems, thermal hydraulics in nuclear and fuel cell systems, heat exchangers etc. He has authored more than 250 journal and conference publications and is one among the highest cited mechanical engineers in the country. He served as the Director of IIT Ropar between 2015 and 2021. Prof Das is a Humboldt fellow and is largely responsible for successful initiation of the INDOGFOE conference series serving as the First Indian Co‐chair in 2009 and 2010.
Prof. Dr. Sandeep Verma
Secretary Science & Engineering Research Board, Government of India and Professor, Department of Chemistry Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur Uttar Pradesh, Pin 208016, India
Prof Sandeep Verma currently serves as Secretary, Science and Engineering Research Board (SERB), India, and he is also a Professor at Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur. His research interests include chemical neuroscience, small molecule‐stem cell modulation, and new antibiotics. With about 200 publications till date, his work has been recognized by the Distinguished Alumnus Award, Banaras Hindu University, J C Bose Fellowship, Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize, DAE Outstanding Investigator Award, and Swarnajayanti Fellowship, to name a few. He is an elected Fellow of all the three national academies; Indian National Science Academy, Indian Academy of Sciences, and National Academy of Sciences, India. He is an Associate Editor of Chemical Communications (RSC) and serves on the Editorial Advisory Board of ChemBioChem (Wiley) and Journal of Peptide Science (Wiley). As Secretary, SERB, he is responsible for formulation and execution of R&D funding programs for all areas of science and engineering. Prof Verma was the Fourth Indian Co‐chair of the INDOGFOE conference series in 2015 and 2016.
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Prof. Dr. Arijita Dutta
Professor and Head Department of Economics Calcutta University Kolkata, India
Dr Arijita Dutta is a Professor and the current Head in the Department of Economics in University of Calcutta. An alumnus of Centre for Economic Studies and Planning, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi and University of Calcutta, Prof Dutta’s research interest is Health Economics, Quantitative Development Economics and applied Econometrics. Lately she has started working on entrepreneurship and impact investment. She has many publications in National and International Journals to her credit and has completed many research projects funded by Indian and international agencies, including IGC (London), ICSSR, New Delhi, UGC, Asiatic Society etc. She has been closely associated with health policy making of the state of West Bengal and has published policy documents on health care in West Bengal. She has taught in a number of Universities and has been a visiting professor at University of Le Havre, France; UNU Merit, Maastricht, the Netherlands; ZEF, University of Bonn, Germany and Yamaguchi University, Japan. Currently she is engaged in a project funded by the US Government, which deals with women entrepreneurs of India. Dr.-Ing. Dipl.-Wirt. Ing. Martina Scheer
Managing Director Engineering Consultants Scheer (Ingenieurbuero Scheer) Schlosserstrasse 11, 87561 Oberstdorf, Germany
Dr.‐Ing. Dipl.‐Wirt. Ing. Martina Scheer, owner of Engineering Consultants Scheer (Ingenieurbuero Scheer) is working in planning and research projects in the field of infrastructure, especially urban drainage, systems. In her planning projects the focus is to provide functional and affordable technical solutions. In her research projects integrated approaches, considering technical, economical, ecological and social aspects, are investigated. Dr.‐Ing. Scheer has diplomas in civil engineering and business administration. In her doctoral thesis she investigated effects and evaluation of real time control in integrated urban drainage systems. Dr.‐Ing. Scheer is project leader of the IGSTC (Indo‐German Science & Technology Centre) project “SMART&WISE ‐ Smart and reliable water and wastewater infrastructure systems for our future cities in India and Germany”.
Current Indo‐German Activities: http://smart‐water.solutions/project Past Indo‐German Activities: Coordinator of http://indo‐german‐water.net/targets‐of‐indo‐german‐water‐network.html In the frame of the Indo‐German‐Water networks workshops were carried out in Bangalore, Chennai, Delhi und Mumbai. Cooperation partner were, amongst others, Indian Institute of 95 11th Indo-German Frontiers of Engineering Conference (INDOGFOE) 2021 A joint undertaking by the Department of Science and Technology, IIT Kharagpur and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation
Science, Anna University, TERI, IIT Bombay, IIT Madras, GIZ and Bangalore Water Supply and Sewerage Board. At Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore and at Anna University trainings concerning planning of sewerage and water supply systems were carried out. http://indo‐german‐water.net/mitglieder‐members.html Incubator for Indo‐German activities: AvH‐CONNECT‐Cooperation with Ligy Philip: 07/2013: Technologies for Dezentralized Wastewater Management Systems 12/2014 Sewerage System Management; Dezentralized Wastewater Management & Treatment 06/2017: Concept for joint publication on application oriented research and innovation implementation into infrastructure projects Dr Scheer was the INDOGFOE 2013 German Session Chair on the topic Clean Water (counterpart: Prof. Ligy Philip) Mr. Philipp von Ritter
Head, Science & Technology Division German Embassy, New Delhi
Philipp von Ritter is Head of the Science and Technology Section at the German Embassy New Delhi. In this capacity, he oversees Indo‐German partnership in research, innovation and higher education . Previously, he worked in the Middle East section of the Federal Foreign Ministry in Berlin. Before joining the Foreign Service, he worked in an internationale Catholic charity and in the Secretariat of the Economic and Financial Committee of the European Union. He holds a Master’s degree in politics and economics at Sciences Po Paris.
Dr. Madhusudan Reddy Nandineni
Counsellor Science & Technology (science attaché) Indian Embassy Berlin
Dr. Madhusudan Reddy Nandineni is the Scientific Attaché/Counsellor (Science and Technology) at the Embassy of India, Berlin. Prior to this he was Staff Scientist and Group Leader, Laboratories of DNA Fingerprinting Services and Genomics and Profiling Applications at the Centre for DNA Fingerprinting and Diagnostics, Hyderabad, India. He obtained his Master of Science Degree in Biotechnology from University of Hyderabad, Hyderabad. He did his Ph.D. from the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology (CCMB), Hyderabad (in Molecular Genetics). After his Doctoral work, he joined the department of Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry at the Yale University School of Medicine, USA for his postdoctoral research work (in Yeast genetics and biochemistry).His current research interests include studies on human genetic diversity in Indian
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populations, development of novel methodologies for human forensic DNA profiling, and plant‐ microbe interaction studies. He has been the recipient of several awards, like Innovative Young Biotechnologists Award (IYBA‐2006) from Govt. of India, BioAsia‐2007 Innovation Award for Young Scientists, Max Planck India Visiting Scientist Fellowship (2007‐10), Head of the Max Planck Partner Group Programme (2011‐2017), Best Scientist Award from the Government of Telangana State (2018), etc.
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Alexander von Humboldt (AvH)Foundation
The Alexander von Humboldt Foundation promotes academic cooperation between excellent scientists and scholars from abroad and from Germany. To this end it grants more than 700 research fellowships and research awards annually. These allow foreign scientists and scholars to conduct a research stay in Germany and to collaborate closely with their hosts and partners. Scientists or scholars from Germany can carry out a research project abroad as a guest of one of well over 30,000 Humboldt Foundation alumni around the globe – the Humboldtians. Nowadays the foundation’s network embraces scientists and scholars from all disciplines in more than 140 countries ‐ including 55 Nobel Prize winners. Each year, the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation grants Humboldt Research Fellowships to highly qualified foreign scholars and scientists who have either completed their doctorates in the last four years (postdoctoral researchers) or less than twelve years ago (experienced researchers), enabling them to undertake long‐term periods of research in Germany; Georg Forster Research Fellowships to postdoctoral and experienced researchers from transition and developing countries; Humboldt Research Awards to internationally recognized foreign scholars and scientists (nominations by German scholars/scientists); Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel Research Awards to outstanding scholars and scientists from abroad who have completed their doctorates less than eighteen years ago; Feodor Lynen Research Fellowships to highly qualified German scholars and scientists who have either completed their doctorates in the last four years (postdoctoral researchers) or less than twelve years ago (experienced researchers), enabling them to spend periods of research abroad; Alexander von Humboldt Professorships to top‐rank researchers of all disciplines working abroad who are eligible to be appointed to full professorships in Germany to carry out ground‐breaking and long‐term research (nominations by German universities); German Chancellor Fellowships for prospective leaders in fields such as politics, public administration and business as well as society and culture from the United States of America, the Russian Federation, the People’s Republic of China, Brazil and India (From March 2021 young professionals from South Africa will be able to apply for a German Chancellor Fellowship as well.). For more information please refer to our web page http://www.humboldt‐foundation.de or contact our main office at [email protected] .
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Details of Alexander von Humboldt Officials
Enno Aufderheide Secretary General Alexander von Humboldt Foundation Jean- Paul-Straße 12 53173 Bonn, Germany
www.humboldt-foundation.de
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Department of Science & Technology (DST), Government of India
The department of science and technology (DST) was established in May 1971, with the objective of promoting new areas of Science and Technology and to play the role of a nodal department for organizing, coordinating and promoting S&T activities in the country. India is one of the top – ranking countries in the field of basic research. Indian Science has come to be regarded as one of the most powerful instruments of the growth and development. In the wake of the recent developments and the new demands that are being placed on the S&T system, it is necessary for us to embark on some major science projects which have relevance to national needs and which will also be relevant for tomorrow's technology. The Department of Science & Technology plays a pivotal role in promotion of science & technology in the country. The Department has wide ranging activities, ranging from promoting high end basic research and development of cutting edge technologies on one hand to service the technological requirements of the common man through development of appropriate skills and technologies on the other. DST has the following as the mandate and major responsibilities 1. Formulation of policies relating to Science and Technology (S&T). 2. Matters relating to the Scientific Advisory Committee to Cabinet (SAC‐C). 3. Promotion of new areas of S&T with special emphasis on emerging areas. I. R&D through its research institutions or laboratories for development of indigenous technologies concerning bio‐fuel production, processing, standardization and applications, in co‐ordination with the concerned Ministry or Department; II. R&D activities to promote utilization of by‐products to develop value added chemicals. 4. Futurology. 5. Coordination and integration of areas of S&T having cross‐sectoral linkages in which a number of institutions and departments have interest and capabilities. 6. Undertaking or financially sponsoring scientific and technological surveys, research design and development, where necessary. 7. Support and Grants‐in‐aid to Scientific Research Institutions, Scientific Associations and Bodies. 8. All matters concerning: I. Science and Engineering Research Council/Board (SERC/SERB); II. Technology Development Board (TDB) and related Acts such as the R&D Cess Act,1986 and the TDB Act,1995; III. National Council for Science and Technology Communication;
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IV. National S&T Entrepreneurship Development Board; V. International S&T Cooperation including appointment of scientific attaches abroad.; VI. Autonomous S&T Institutions relating to the subject under DST including Institute of Astro‐physics and Institute of Geo‐magnetism; VII. Professional Science Academies promoted and funded by DST; VIII. The Survey of India and National Atlas & Thematic Mapping Organisation; IX. National Spatial Data Infrastructure and promotion of G.I.S; X. The National Innovation Foundation, Ahmedabad. 9. Matters commonly affecting Scientific and technological departments/ organisations/ institutions e.g. financial, personnel, purchase and import policies and practices. 10. Management Information Systems for S&T and coordination thereof. Matters regarding Inter‐Agency/Inter‐Departmental coordination for evolving S&T missions. 11. Matters concerning domestic technology particularly the promotion of ventures involving the commercialization of such technology other than those under the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research. 12. All other measures needed for the promotion of S&T and their application to the development and security of the nation. 13. Matters relating to institutional S&T capacity building including setting up of new institutions and institutional infrastructure. 14. Promotion of S&T at the State, District, and Village levels for grass‐ roots development through State S&T Councils and other mechanisms. 15. Application of S&T for weaker sections, women and other disadvantaged sections of Society.
Source: www.dst.gov.in/about‐us/introduction For more information, please visit: https://dst.gov.in/
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Details of DST Officials
Prof. Ashutosh Sharma Secretary to the Government of India Department of Science & Technology Technology Bhawan, New Mehrauli Road, New Delhi – 110016, India e-mail: [email protected] Phone: +91-11-26510068
Sri. S. K. Varshney Adviser & Head International Bilateral Cooperation Division Department of Science & Technology Technology Bhawan, New Mehrauli Road, New Delhi – 110016, India e-mail: [email protected] Phone: +91-11-26961912
Dr. Chadaram Sivaji Scientist-F / Director International Bilateral Cooperation Division Department of Science & Technology Technology Bhawan, New Mehrauli Road, New Delhi – 110016, India e-mail: [email protected] Phone: +91-11-26590489
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About the Host Institute: Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur
Dedicated to the service of the Nation
Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur was the first IIT to be inaugurated on 18th August 1951 soon after the independence of India, in the site of Hijli detention camp in Midnapore, West Bengal, about 120 km west of Kolkata (then Calcutta). IIT Kharagpur started its journey in the old Hijli Detention Camp where some of our great freedom fighters toiled and sacrificed their lives for the independence of our country. The history of IIT Kharagpur is thus intimately linked with the history of the Hijli Detention Camp. This is possibly one of the very few Institutions all over the world which started life in a prison house.
There were 224 freshers and 42 teachers in August 1951 when the first session started. The class rooms, laboratories and the Administrative office wer ehoused in the historic building of the Hijli Detention Camp. The Institute started its academic programme with only ten Departments. On March, 1952, Pandit Nehru, the then Prime Minister of the country laid the foundation stone of the New Building. 103 11th Indo-German Frontiers of Engineering Conference (INDOGFOE) 2021 A joint undertaking by the Department of Science and Technology, IIT Kharagpur and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation
The layout of the present campus and the design of our buildings were carried out by a host of engineers and architects under the guidance of an eminent Swiss architect Dr. Werner M. Moser. A large amount of financial help was available for procuring a number of machine tools from the ministry of industry and supply. The Institute Workshop was supposed to be one of the best in the country. The Institute was fortunate enough to have Sir J.C.Ghosh, an eminent Scientist as its first Director under whose able stewadship the Institute grew in its formative years. The first Board of Governors was constituted with Dr. B.C. Roy, as the chairman and Mr. N.R.Sarkar, Sir Jehangir J. Gandhi, Dr. Tarachand, Mr. K.R.K. Menon, Mr. T. Sivasankar, Dr. S.S. Bhatnagar, Mr. H. Kabir and Dr. J.C. Ghosh as memebers. Some eminent scholars from Europe had joined this Institute in its formative years and the first two of them were Prof. R.A. Kraus and Prof.H. Tischner, who was incidentally the first Head of Electronics and ECE Department.
On Sept. 15, 1956, the Parliament of India passed an act known as the Indian Institute of Technology(Kharagpur) Act declaring this Institute as an Institute of national importance. The Institute was also given the status of an autonomous University. From this modest start in 1950, IIT Kharagpur has been engaged in a steady process of development with large number of academic departments, centers, schools and center of excellence. The vast tree-laden campus, spreading over 2100 acres presently has about 13,000 students and 850 faculty members.
Motto The motto of IIT Kharagpur is "Yogah Karmasu Kaushalam". This literally translates to "Excellence in action is Yoga", essentially implying that doing your work well is (true) yoga. This can be traced to Sri Krishna's discourse with Arjuna in the Bhagavad Gita. The quote, in the larger context of the Gita, urges man to acquire equanimity because a mind of equanimity allows a man to shed distracting thoughts of the effects of his deeds and concentrate on the task before him. Equanimity is the source of perfection in Karmic endeavours that leads to Salvation. Mission The Institute aligns all its activities to serve national interest and seeks
To provide broad-based education, helping students hone their professional skills and acquire the best-in-class capabilities in their respective disciplines To draw the best expertise in science, technology, management and law so as to equip students with the skills to visualize, synthesize and execute projects in these fields To imbibe a spirit of entrepreneurship and innovation in its students To undertake sponsored research and provide consultancy services in industrial, educational and socially relevant areas Vision To be a centre of excellence in education and research, producing global leaders in science, technology and management To be a hub of knowledge creation that prioritises the frontier areas of national and global importance To improve the life of every citizen of the country
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IIT Kharagpur Main Building
IIT Kharagpur student Gymkhana (Student Activity Center)
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Panoramic view of IIT Kharagpur during the monsoon
All pictures of IIT Kharagpur campus taken by the Indian Conference co-Chair, Rabibrata Mukherjee
CONNECT – AvH Follow up Program 106 11th Indo-German Frontiers of Engineering Conference (INDOGFOE) 2021 A joint undertaking by the Department of Science and Technology, IIT Kharagpur and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation
Follow‐up Program for Participants of Frontiers of Research Symposia Brazilian‐German Frontiers of Science and Technology Symposium British‐German Frontiers of Science Symposium German‐American Frontiers of Engineering Symposium German‐American Frontiers of Humanities Symposium German‐American Frontiers of Science Symposium German‐Israeli Frontiers of Humanities Symposium Indo‐German Frontiers of Engineering Symposium Japanese‐American‐German Frontiers of Science Symposium Japanese‐German Frontiers of Science Symposium Sino‐German Frontiers of Science Symposium Turkish‐German Frontiers of Research Symposium UK‐German Frontiers of Humanities Symposium
How to apply for residence allowances for short working visits in Germany, the USA, Japan, United Kingdom, China, India, Israel, Brazil, or Turkey
It is a general aim of the Frontiers of Research Symposia to enable young scholars and scientists to establish long‐term bi‐national cooperations in order to strengthen the scientific relationship between Germany and the respective cooperating country. To achieve this goal every participant is given the opportunity to keep in contact with other participants of the partner nationality after the conferences have taken place. The Follow‐up Program CONNECT allocates residence allowances for working visits in the partner country for up to 30 days per conference. Grants are provided for working visits to prepare joint research articles or research projects.
Application requirements
The applicant must have participated in one of our Frontiers of Research Symposia in the USA, in Japan, in United Kingdom, in China, in India, in Israel, in Brazil, in Turkey or in Germany and must have started a cooperation with at least one participant of the partner nationality. Cooperating partners must have participated in the same conference. Either the applicant or the hosting partner must be based in Germany. Instances of successful long‐term cooperation resulting from these grants have to be announced to the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation (AvH). The applicant is obliged to submit a short report (max. 3 pages) to the AvH within 2 months after termination of the working visit.
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Allowance rates
For working visits lasting up to 22 days the allowance is calculated on the basis of daily rates valid at the time of the application. There are three different grades according to the position held by the applicant:
Grade A: EUR 112 per day (Assistant Professor, Lecturer, Researcher, Junior Professor, Post‐Doc)
Grade B: EUR 135 per day (Associate Professor, Senior Lecturer, Reader)
Grade C: EUR 162 per day (Full Professor, Head of Research Institute)
For working visits lasting longer than 22 days a monthly lump sum is granted:
2,500 per (Assistant Professor, Lecturer, Researcher, Junior Professor, Grade A: EUR month Post‐Doc)
3,000 per Grade B: EUR (Associate Professor, Senior Lecturer, Reader) month
3,600 per Grade C: EUR (Full Professor, Head of Research Institute) month
The AvH does not cover any additional costs such as travel costs. Payments are made to German bank accounts only. Grants for German applicants are transferred to their German bank accounts whereas grants for American, Japanese, British, Chinese, Indian, Israeli, Brazilian, and Turkish applicants are transferred either to a private German bank account, to the German host institute's bank account, or to the German university register office where the allowance is paid out in cash to the applicant.
Online application for CONNECT residence allowances
Please find further information on the online application at: https://www.humboldt‐ foundation.de/en/apply/sponsorship‐programmes/frontiers‐of‐research‐symposia/connect
Please note the following points:
Submit your application well in advance of your planned working visit. The AvH needs approx. three months to process your application.
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Discuss all details of your planned working visit ‐ including the dates of your planned visit ‐ with your academic host before you submit your online application. Please also send him/her your research proposal and your list of publications.
Complete applications for residence allowances in the CONNECT program must include the following documents which have to be submitted in English:
completed application form curriculum vitae description (up to 5 pages) of the research proposal of both cooperating partners with exact objectives (possibly with indications of planned visits of both cooperating partners to conferences or lectures at the partner institute) invitation letter of the academic host list of publications of previous five years
Once all the relevant documents have been received, processing takes up to three months. Retrospective approval is not possible. The applicants are informed in writing about the result of their application. The Humboldt Foundation assumes that candidates will abide the “Rules of Good Scientific Practice” as stated on our website https://www.humboldt‐foundation.de/web/connect.html and the legally binding principles of scientific ethics during the application and sponsorship periods.
Applicants who have participated in an UKGFOH, a GAFOS, GAFOH, GISFOH or TUGFOR Symposium can address questions on the application process to:
Stephanie Dill Alexander von Humboldt‐Foundation Berlin Office Markgrafenstr. 37 10117 Berlin, Germany Phone: +49 (30) 20 45 45 26 E‐mail: [email protected]
109 11th Indo-German Frontiers of Engineering Conference (INDOGFOE) 2021 A joint undertaking by the Department of Science and Technology, IIT Kharagpur and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation
Applicants who have participated in a BRIGFOS, GAFOE, trilateral JAGFOS or JGFOS Symposium can address questions on the application process to:
Anke Teubner Alexander von Humboldt‐Foundation Berlin Office Markgrafenstr. 37 10117 Berlin, Germany Phone: +49 (30) 20 45 45 52 E‐Mail: [email protected]
Applicants who have participated in a BRAGFOST, INDOGFOE or SINOGFOS Symposium can address questions on the application process to:
Matthias Hergenhan Alexander von Humboldt‐Foundation Berlin Office Markgrafenstr. 37 10117 Berlin, Germany Phone: +49 (30) 20 45 55 38 E‐Mail: [email protected]
110 11th Indo-German Frontiers of Engineering Conference (INDOGFOE) 2021 A joint undertaking by the Department of Science and Technology, IIT Kharagpur and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation
Berlin Office Wissenschaftsforum Markgrafenstraße 37 10117 Berlin, Germany
www.humboldt-foundation.de
The Indian conference co-chair would like to put on record deep appreciation towards his students, Ms. Anuja Das and Ms. Sumita Sahoo in helping him compile the Agenda Book.
111 11th Indo-German Frontiers of Engineering Conference (INDOGFOE) 2021 A joint undertaking by the Department of Science and Technology, IIT Kharagpur and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation