Dr. Kamakoti, Associate Professor, IIT Madras.

Dr. Suryakanth V. Gangashetty, Dept. of Computer Science and Engineering, IIT Madras.
Bio-data:
Dr. Suryakanth completed his PhD from IIT Madras in 2005, and is currently working as Senior Project Officer at Speech and Vision Laboratory, IIT Madras. He has obtained his M.Tech degree in 1998 from NITK Surathkal and B.E. (CSE) degree in 1991 from Government (BDT) college of engineering Davangere. He has worked as a member of faculty at BIET Davangere karnataka, from 1991 to 1999. He has also worked as a visiting research scholar at OGI Portland (USA) for three months during the summer of 2001. He is a author of 35 papers published in national as well as international conferences and journals. He has co-authored two book chapters in edited volumes published by Springer and World Scientific publishing company. He is a life member of the CSI, IE, IUPRAI and ISTE. He has reviewed papers for reputed conferences and journals. His research interests include neural networks, pattern recognition and speech signal processing.

A phonetic engine converts an acoustic speech signal into a sequence of symbols. It uses the acoustic-phonetic knowledge to perform the speech signal-to-symbol transformation independent of syntax or semantics of the speech utterance. The main issues in speech signal-to-symbol transformation are the choice of an appropriate subword unit, its representation, and the recognition of a large number of highly confusable classes of subword units. Pronunciation variation is systematic at the level of syllables, and hence we consider syllable as the subword unit for recognition. Further, since the consonant-vowel (CV) units are the most frequently occurring syllables in Indian languages, they are chosen for our studies. The information necessary for recognition of CV units is present around the vowel onset point (VOP) and hence the VOPs are considered as anchor points to obtain fixed length representations of the CV units. A method for detection of VOPs in continuous speech, using autoassociative neural network (AANN) models, is developed. The dimension of the fixed length patterns obtained by concatenation of frames around the VOPs is large. So, we have explored nonlinear compression using AANN models for reducing the dimension of pattern vectors. A system based on support vector machines (SVMs) is developed for recognition of CV units. SVMs are capable of discriminating large number of highly confusable classes and generalising from limited amount of training data. Since there exists commonality among CV classes across Indian languages, we propose to use a data sharing approach for the development of a multilingual CV unit classifier. We have addressed certain issues in spotting CV units in continuous speech in three Indian languages namely Tamil, Telugu and Hindi. About 74.63% of the CV segments, detected by locating VOPs in continuous speech, have been correctly hypothesised to be among the first five alternatives. The proposed approach for recognition of CV units in multiple languages can be used to build a phonetic engine. To develop a complete phonetic engine for Indian languages, one still needs to include all possible syllable units that are not considered in this study, namely vowels, less frequently occurring CV units and syllables with multiple consonants.

shore Kothapalli, Assistant Professor, IIIT Hyderabad.

An important problem for wireless ad hoc networks has been to design overlay networks that allow time- and energy-efficient routing. Many local-control strategies for maintaining such overlay networks have already been suggested, but most of them are based on an oversimplified wireless communication model. In this paper, we suggest a model that is much more general than previous models. It allows the path loss of transmissions to significantly deviate from the idealistic unit disk model and does not even require the path loss to form a metric. Also, our model is apparently the first proposed for algorithm design that does not only model transmission and interference issues but also aims at providing a realistic model for physical carrier sensing. Physical carrier sensing is needed so that our protocols do not require any prior information (not even an estimate on the number of nodes) about the wireless network to run efficiently. Based on this model, we propose a local-control protocol for establishing a constant density spanner among a set of mobile stations that are distributed in an arbitrary way in a 2-dimensional Euclidean space. More precisely, we establish a backbone structure by efficiently electing cluster leaders and gateway nodes so that there is only a constant number of cluster leaders and gateway nodes within the transmission range of any node and the backbone structure satisfies the properties of a topological spanner. Using the constant density spanner, we propose time- and work-efficient algorithms for broadcasting and information gathering in wireless ad hoc networks. Our protocols have the advantage that they are locally self-stabilizing, i.e., they can recover from initial configuration, even if adversarial nodes participate in it, as long as the honest nodes sufficiently far away from adversarial nodes can in principle form a single connected component. Furthermore, we only need constant size messages and a constant amount of storage at the nodes, irrespective of the distribution of the nodes. Hence, our protocols would even work in extreme situations such as very simple wireless devices (like sensors) in a hostile environment.

P. Chakravarthy.

A knowledge base is a special kind of database for knowledge management. It provides the means for the collection, organization,and retrieval of knowledge. There are many approaches and tools available to develop a knowledge base. These approaches are limited by low scalability and take long time to develop. The aim of the talk is to present a new approach to develop knowledgebase in a dynamic environment, which is easily scalable and can be developed in short span of time. This approach uses Ontology to specify the structure of the knowledgebase and the platform chosen is CLOS, Prolog and Allegro Cache (an object database).

Prof. Viktor Prasanna, University of Southern California.
BioData:
Viktor K. Prasanna (V. K. Prasanna Kumar) (ceng.usc.edu/~prasanna) is Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering as well as in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles. He is also an associate member of the Center for Applied Mathematical Sciences(CAMS) at USC. He served as the Division Director for the Computer Engineering Division during 1994-98. His research interests include parallel and distributed systems including networked sensor systems, embedded systems, configurable architectures and high performance computing. Dr. Prasanna has published extensively and consulted for industries in the above areas. He has served on the organizing committees of several international meetings in VLSI computations, parallel computation, and high performance computing. He is the Steering Co-chair of the International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium [merged IEEE International Parallel Processing Symposium(IPPS) and the Symposium on Parallel and Distributed Processing(SPDP)] and is the Steering Chair of the International Conference on High Performance Computing(HiPC). He has served on the editorial boards of the Journal of Parallel and Distributed Computing, Proceedings of the IEEE, IEEE Transactions on VLSI Systems, and IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems. He is the Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Transactions on Computers. He was the founding Chair of the IEEE Computer Society Technical Committee on Parallel Processing. He is a Fellow of the IEEE.

Reconfigurable devices and systems have evolved over the past decade. Recently, several state of the art high end platforms have incorporated FPGAs for application acceleration. This talk explores algorithmic optimizations for accelerating a wide variety of applications on such systems. We discuss early theoretical underpinnings and illustrate the performance improvements for embedded as well as scientific computing on such platforms. We develop algorithmic optimizations for such systems and demonstrate the suitability of FPGAs for floating point intensive computations. We discuss the design of a BLAS library for such systems. The performance of FPGAs is also compared against those of state-of-the-art embedded processors, general purpose processors, and DSPs for floating point intensive applications. We conclude by highlighting the challenges in further exploiting this technology for application acceleration.

microarrays can screen thousands of genes in a single experiment identifying altered expression levels for hundreds of genes. Many of these altered genes are often outside the field of expertise of the investigator. Interpretation of such large quantities of information by non-experts using traditional literature research (reading biomedical journals and searching related databases one gene at a time) is slow and inaccurate. This inefficiency hampers the understanding and discovery of the subtle functional relationships between the genes of interest. This talk will present our work that helps in interpretation of the results of microarray experiments. Keywords are identified using a statistical algorithm and are extracted from MEDLINE citations containing specific gene names. This talk will outline the various investigations we have done related to the extraction of meaningful keywords associated with genes and the clustering of these genes based on similarity of function from the entire Medline database We have developed our own clustering algorithm called BEA_PARTITION1 which has been shown to outperform the common algorithms like K-means, Hierarchical clustering etc. Tests have been conducted with various datasets from microarray experiments from neurological and cardiovascular diseases. We showed the potential for discovering new functional information about genes that is hitherto not represented in public databases. We have further applied the extracted keywords as features to help in classifying literature related to epidemiology at CDC. Current research is directed toward enriching our approach with biomedical ontologies. We hope that this research has broader utility and that it will be an asset to the growing research community utilizing experimental DNA microarray data. This work is in collaboration with Ying Liu, UT-Dallas, and Profs. Dingledine (Pharmacology) and Ciliax (Neurology) of Emory University.
Reference: Ying Liu, S.B. Navathe, et al. "Text Mining Biomedical Literature for Discovering Gene-to-Gene Relationships: A Comparative Study of Algorithms" IEEE/ACM Transactions on Computational Biology and Bioinformatics, Vol. 2, No. 2, April 2005.

Shamkant Navathe is a Professor at the College of Computing, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta. He is well-known for his work on database modeling, database conversion, database design, distributed database allocation, and database integration. His current research interests include human genome data management, intelligent information retrieval, text mining, mobile database applications, engineering and design applications, security risk modeling in information systems, and ontology and web services integration. He was the General Co-chairman of the 1996 International VLDB (Very Large Data Base) conference in Bombay, India. He was also program co-chair of SIGMOD 1985 and General Co-chair of the IFIP WG 2.6 Data Semantics Workshop in 1995. He has been an associate editor of ACM Computing Surveys, and IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering. He is also on the editorial boards of Information Systems (Pergamon Press), Distributed and Parallel Databases (Kluwer Academic Publishers) and Information Technology and Management. He is an author of the book, Fundamentals of Database Systems, with R. Elmasri (Addison Wesley, Edition 5, just published) which is currently the leading database text-book worldwide. He also co-authored the book "Conceptual Design: An Entity Relationship Approach" (Addison wesley , 1992) with Carlo Batini and Stefano Ceri. Navathe holds a Ph.D. from the University of Michigan and has over 150 refereed publications. He is on the advisory board of I2IT in Pune and is also a board member of the GTL corporation in Mahape.

Bhaskar D. Rao received the B. Tech. degree in electronics and electrical communication engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, India, in 1979, and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Southern California in 1981 and 1983 respectively. Since 1983, he has been with the University of California, San Diego, where he is currently a Professor in the Electrical and Computer Engineering department. He is a fellow of IEEE and has been a member of the signal processing theory and methods technical committee. He is currently a member of the signal processing for communication technical committee and also serves on the EURASIP signal processing journal editorial board. His interests are in the areas of digital signal processing, estimation theory, and optimization theory, with applications to digital communications, speech signal processing, and human-computer interactions.

In this talk, we will discuss vector quantization (VQ) techniques in the context of multiple-antenna systems with finite-rate feedback. For MISO systems, we introduce a new design criterion and develop the corresponding iterative design algorithm for quantization of the beamforming vector. Extension of the method to MIMO channels will also be presented. High resolution quantization theory results from source coding theory will be used to analyze the performance of VQ-based feedback systems.

Prof. Yagnanarayana, IIIT Hyderabad.
Prof. Yegnanarayana is currently professor and Microsoft Chiar at IIIT Hyderabad. He was a professor at IIT Madras during the period 1980-2006. Prior to joining IIT, he was a visiting associate professor of Computer Science at Carnegie-Mellon University in USA from 1977-1980. He was a member of faculty at the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore from 1966 to 1978. He did BE, ME and PhD from IISc Bangalore, in 1964, 66, and 1974, respectively. His research interests are in speech, image processing and neural networks. He has published several papers in these areas in IEEE and other international journals. He is also the author of the book "Artificial Neural Networks", published by Prentice-Hall of India, in 1999. He is a Fellow of the Indian National Academy of Engineering, a Fellow of the Indian National Science Academy, and a Fellow of the Indian Academy of Sciences.

Human beings effortlessly perform sophisticated pattern recognitions tasks such as speech recognition, speaker recognition, signature matching, handwriting recognition, face recognition, etc. We have no simple way of dealing with these problems with the existing mathematical models, which are primarily based on statistical methods. The answer to this dilemma lies in developing new models of computing, which are primarily motivated by our (though limited) understating of the structure and function of the biological neural networks. The objective of this talk is to justify the need for exploring new models of computing for human pattern recognition tasks, using illustrations from speech and image processing tasks.

Dr. Ashwin Ram, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta.
Dr. Ashwin Ram is Associate Professor and Director of the Cognitive Computing Lab in the College of Computing at Georgia Tech, Associate Professor of Cognitive Science, and Adjunct Professor in the School of Psychology. He received his PhD from Yale University in 1989, his MS from University of Illinois in 1984, and his BTech from IIT Delhi in 1982. He has published 2 books and over 80 scientific articles in international forums. He is the co-founder of Enkia Corporation which specializes in AI software for intelligent maintenance.

We present a novel AI architecture for resource-bounded intelligent agents, where reasoning and learning are performed in parallel, asynchronous processes. Instead of a reasoning step where the system solves a problem, followed by a learning step where the system learns from the experience, the system is continuously performing both functions at the same time. The reasoning process uses knowledge structures that encode the best available knowledge at hand, thereby making progress towards the system's goals. Simultaneously, the learning process modifies that knowledge in situ, even while it is being used for reasoning. A metareasoning system is used to reason about the system's performance and the reasoning/learning tradeoff, deciding when to learn and how to allocate its resources depending on available goals and deadlines. We will discuss example projects in the areas of Game AI, Text Analytics, and Equipment Diagnostics.

Prof. K.V.S. Prasad, Chalmers University.

Dr. Savitha, Department of Chemistry, IIT Kanpur.

Homopolymeric nucleic acids studied as synthetic model systems are found to display more structural variety than Watson-Crick DNA, mainly because base-base recognition through hydrogen bonding is not restricted to complementary bases. This suggests that complementary base pair formation imposes stereo-chemical constraints which ultimately limit structural diversity. Hence it is not surprising that complexes between nucleic acid homopolymers are formed as well, the viability of these non-canonical structures, though not actually realized so far in real systems, is a possibility which remains to be unraveled. Crystal structure investigations on the Cytosine-rich telomeric DNA sequences yield novel intercalated duplexes with lateral loops, which perhaps are not just a curio but has a viable role in the living cell. Observation of such tetraplex structures opens new avenues of research regarding their role as transient structural motifs in the telomeres of eukaryotic chromosomes, and their potential connections with aging and cancer.

Dr. Zafar Taqvi, NASA Johnson Space Center.
Dr. Zafar Taqvi (Ph.D.'69, Electrical Engineering, University of Houston), has been in the space program at NASA Johnson Space Center (JSC) since 1969 and has supported Apollo, Apollo-Soyuz, Space Shuttle and is currently a Systems Engineer and Baseline Manager supporting Boeing International Space Station (ISS) Communication and Tracking (C&T) team since 1994. His technical area of expertise is in Advance Space Communication Systems Design and Project Engineering. He has been concurrently teaching at the University of Houston system for the past 35 years in addition to conducting leadership courses to Lockheed, Boeing and other outside organizations. A Senior Member of Institute of Electical and Electronics Engineers, an Associate Fellow of American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, and a Life Fellow of International Society of Instrumentation Systems and Automation (ISA), he has been very active in local technical societies as well as at the international level. He is a Distinguished Toastmaster and past Lt. Governor Toastmaster District 56.
Dr Taqvi is currently on the Board of Governors of IEEE Aerospace Electronics Systems Society, IEEE AESS COO International Operations and Director-at-Large International Development, Vice-President-Elect of ISA Automation and Technology Department, Scientific Secretary TC-17 International Measurement Federation (IMEKO), Education Chair of IEEE Region 5, Director of ISA Robotics and Expert Systems Division, a Regional Coordinator of Future City Competition and supports a dozen other local technical committees.
He has been honored by IEEE twice with Regional Leadership Award and with IEEE Centennial Medal, by ISA with Distinguished Service Award, Fellow Award, and Donald P. Eckman Education Award (which recognizes an outstanding contributions toward education and training in the science, engineering and technology of instrumentation, systems, and automation), and by AIAA with Sustained Service Award. He is a member of Tau Beta Pi, Eta Kappa Nu, Phi Kappa Phi, Omicron Delta Kappa, and Sigma Xi Honor Societies.

Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) hardware is finding widespread applications from inventory management to defense and security areas. New sensors and readers are being developed to provide versatile uses in industry and new businesses are growing in large numbers. This presentation will focus on the technical aspect of the RFID, its applications in industry and discuss its current trends.

Mr. Navjyothi Singh, NISTADS, New Delhi.

Radically discrete worldview pervades through rich panorama of theorisation in the Indian heritage. The digital spirit seems to invigorate Indian traditions of linguistics, mathematics, logic and philosophy. In the lecture I shall explore fundamental elements of this digital spirit in the backdrop of the understanding of man and reason.

Dr. Madhu Mehta Chief Architect, NirmaLabs
Dr. Mehta is a technocrat, and an entrepreneur who has been involved in innovative applications of technology to make useful products. He was an early player in software exports and exported telecom software to USA in late seventies. During those years he had represented computer industry in shaping Government policies at the national level. He consulted with C-Dot to architect telecom switching system software and to evolve software practices for project management and release control. At Anjaleem, he created attended PCO, an example of a real time embedded application, and shaped the birth of STD PCO markets in India. Later Anjaleem won national awards for export of PC based call metering systems to Saudi Arabia. Currently, besides exporting telecom call metering systems to Egypt and other countries, Dr. Mehta is setting up NirmaLabs which is a high tech incubator to spawn global techno entrepreneurs. Dr. Mehta is very active in IT Forum of Baroda and CII Gujarat.

For India to make headway in knowledge based wealth generation, it is important that students of premier institutes consider becoming high tech entrepreneurs as an alternative to corporate careers. Most of the students are unaware of the challenges and rewards of such a career choice. NirmaLabs is based on the premise that if India's technical people could be leaders in setting up high tech ventures abroad, we should be able to create a similar ecosystem to provide the missing elements to nurture such enterprising individuals to spawn what we call global techno entrepreneurs. NirmaLabs is a high tech incubator set up by Nirma Education and Research Foundation (NERF) on the Nirma University Campus at Ahmedabad. We started our operations last year in June with grooming of the first batch of participants and expect two/three â^À^Øincubatableâ^À^Ù projects by next month. The talk will initiate a discussion on the barriers to high tech entrepreneurship in India, move on to reviewing the â^À^Üseven chasms that high tech entrepreneurs have to crossâ^À^Ý to reach the â^À^Ürichesâ^À^Ý, and then outline how NirmaLabs addresses these needs to enable participants to become global techno entrepreneurs.

Prof. Naresh Dadhich Director Inter-university centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics(IUCAA)
Born on September 1, 1944 in the small village of Sarsali in Churu District of Rajasthan, Naresh Dadhich studied at various places, Pilani, Hissar, Vallabh-Vidyanagar and finally at Pune where he did his Ph.D. in General Relativity under the guidance of the doyen of Indian relativists, Professor V. V. Narlikar. Subsequently, he joined the faculty of Mathematics at the Pune University where he continued until 10th Feb. 1988 when he was invited to initiate the setting up of IUCAA as its Projector Coordinator. He became the director of IUCAA in July 2003. He is on the visiting faculty of the University of Natal at Durhan, South Africa and has also ongoing collaboration with gravity research groups in Portsmouth, UK and Billbao, Spain. Prof. Dadhich is an active and accomplished theoretical physicist of repute and works in the area of classical and quantum gravity and relativistic astrophysics. Along with his several collaborators he has published over 100 papers in internationally reputed journals. He has also trained several Ph.D. students. Apart from his academic pursuits, Prof. Dadhich has serious social and environmental concerns and has been associated with various social action groups.

I will attempt to demonstrate in a straightforward and logical manner that it was the consistency of concept and principle which naturally leads to the Einsteininan relativistic world. Further I wish to conjecture that if this line of argument was followed prior to Maxwell's electrodynamics, it would have been perhaps possible to predict it all.

Perraju Bendapudi and Rajesh Jalan Microsoft Research
Perraju Bendapudi worked as Development Manager for SFU in the Windows group and is currently Architect for Incubations at IDC. Rajesh Jalan was the Development Lead for SFU and is currently the Development Manager for SFU.

Microsoft Windows Services for UNIX (SFU) provides a range of cross-platform network services that help to integrate Windows and UNIX-based environments. It provides seamless access to information stored in multiple platforms, consolidates network management across platforms, and reuses UNIX applications and scripts on Windows. It provides NFS server and client, POSIX subsystem which provides UNIX layer on NT and Server for NIS and password mapping. It allows you to run your Windows machine through a Unix shell by mapping directly to Active Directory (AD). SFU 3.5 is available as a free download (223MB download, when installed needs 275MB). More information is at http://www.microsoft.com/windows/sfu. The talk will focus on the following: 1. What are NIS and AD (Active Directory)? 2. What problems were we trying to solve with Server for NIS? 3. What support does AD provide? 4. How did the SFU team at Microsoft implement the solution 5. A comparison of other solutions the team came up and reasons for choosing the final solution 6. Limitations due to NIS protocol or AD, other solutions similar to this and pros/cons of those. 7. Conclude with a discussion on future solutions the team plans to work on.