V Padmanabhan
Microsoft Research India, Bengaluru
Venkat Padmanabhan is a Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research India, where he founded the Mobility, Networks, and Systems group in 2007. He was previously with Mi-crosoft Research Redmond, USA, for nearly nine years. His research interests are broadly in networked and mobile systems, and his work over the years has led to highly cited pa-pers and paper awards, technology transfers within Microsoft, and also industry impact. He received the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize and the inaugural ACM SIGMOBILE Test-of-Time paper award, both in 2016. Venkat holds a B.Tech. from IIT Delhi and an M.S. and a PhD from UC Berkeley, all in Computer Science, and has been elected a Fellow of the INAE, the IEEE, and the ACM.
Session 1D: Symposium: ‘New Technologies Changing our lives’
Chairperson: N Viswanadham, Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru
Low-cost IoT to address societal challenges View Presentation
The Internet of Things (IoT) promises to transform industries across the spectrum, by em-bedding sensing and communication capabilities in things that then push a steady stream of data to the cloud, where this data is converted into actionable intelligence. After surveying the landscape, the speaker will address the question of how IoT could play a transformative role in the socio-economic context of India and the challenges to be overcome, such as the need to keep costs low and not depend on always-on connectivity. The talk will focus specifically on two domains where research is being pursued at Microsoft Research India: road safety and agriculture. In the former, the speaker will present a system called HAMS that leverages smartphones and other low-cost sensors to monitor drivers and their driving, with a view to providing targeted feedback on unsafe behaviours. In the latter, he will dis-cuss a system called FarmBeats that uses balloon-mounted airborne sensors together with ground sensors to enable data-driven farming.