Continuing with its track record of showcasing the latest technological trends, Advanced Computing and Communications Society (ACCS) dedicated its 24th edition of International Conference on Advanced Computing and Communications (ADCOM 2018) to assimilate the advances in Cognitive Computing and Applications. ADCOM 2018 was organized at the Indian Institute of Information Technology, Bangalore (IIIT-B) from 21st September to 23rd September of 2018. The three-day conference saw delegates from industry, academia, government R&D and student community coming together on this common platform to share their knowledge and learn from each other about the research outcomes and potential applications of this new technology area.
ADCOM is the flagship event of ACCS. Its popularity has encouraged us to combine maximum value for the participants. Therefore, apart from carefully chosen keynotes by the technology leaders and presentation of accepted papers, we dedicated a few sessions for research scholars to present their doctoral research work for peer review under “PhD Forum”. ADCOM is also the occasion for us to present the annual ACCS-CDAC Foundation Award on researcher(s) extraordinaire to recognize and honour individual contribution to the body of knowledge in the field of computing and communications. Talking about keynotes, accepted papers and PhD Forum, how can we miss the members of the audience? For the members of the audience, we had an on-the-spot “Just-A-Minute” (JAM) contest with handsome prizes to win. As is customary for any ADCOM, ADCOM 2018 was preceded with a pre conference tutorial on “Tensor Flow”. In addition, a large-scale student design challenge was organised under the banner of “ACCS Design Challenge” (ADC 2018) co-located with ADCOM 2018 for the undergraduate students.
Now, let me take you through a virtual tour of the sessions.
The ACCS-CDAC Foundation Award select committee headed by Prof. S. Sadagopan, Director, IIIT-B, had a tough time zeroing on just one potential awardee. At the end of deliberations, the committee recommended two winners for this year – Prof. P. Vijay Kumar of the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bangalore and Prof. V. Kamakoti of Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Madras. Both the winners were presented citation and cash awards in the inaugural session of ADCOM 2018 in the august presence of the dignitaries on the dias – Prof. H. P. Khincha (Chairman, Karnataka State Innovation Council and former Vice Chancellor, Vishweshvaraya Technological University), Dr. S. Srinidhi (President, ACCS). Mr. K.R. Sanjiv (CTO, Wipro Ltd.), Prof. B. Ravindran (IIT-M) and Prof. R. Chandrashekar (IIIT-B). Following the conferment,
Prof. Kamakoti delivered the ACCS Foundation Lecture on the requirements, design challenges and architectural features of a family of “Indian” high performance reduced instruction set CPU cores, aptly named SHAKTI, and associated library of Analytics Engine, FinLibre. Advent of SHAKTI has a special significance in Indian context because it is indigenous, open source CPU core for commercial applications – something that was missing despite four decades of world leading foray into computing and information technology by the Indian technology professionals. Prof. Vijay Kumar delivered the second ACCS Foundation Lecture on Erasure Coding for Big Data. This work pioneered by Prof. Vijay Kumar, defined a new coding technique to ensure reliability in storage and restoration of big data with the smallest possible storage overhead to account for the node failure in peta-byte scale data centres.
ADCOM 2018 provided a fascinating ensemble of keynotes by the subject matter experts. Dr. P. Anandan, currently the CEO of Wadhwani Institute for Artificial Intelligence and formerly the Managing Director at Microsoft Research India talked about how artificial intelligence can be used for societal causes with particular emphasis on extending healthcare benefits to the deprived. Dr. Manish Gupta, CEO of VideoKen and Infosys Foundation Chair Professor at IIIT-B presented his work on fast cataloguing of a given video stream using artificial intelligence. Mr C. Mohan Ram, CEO, Kaizenvoiz, explained the use of artificial intelligence and behavioural analytics for user authentication obviating the need for password. Dr. Sriram Rajamani, Managing Director of Microsoft Research India, expounded on the path breaking research happening at Microsoft in the area of artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML) and internet of things (IoT). The talk covered theory of data Science, low resource Natural Language Processing (NLP) and low resource ML together with AI/MI solutions for societal scale problems.
Dr. Shailesh Kumar, Reliance Jio, traced the evolution of product strategy, decision approach and AI thinking, and then elaborated how AI can be used in eCommerce to optimize the inventory and delivery, personalize the pricing, and accelerate the mutual discovery of products and customers.
From a large number of submissions, about 15% of papers were accepted for presentation in multiple parallel tracks. The track on “Machine Learning for Healthcare” had interesting papers on analysis of ECG, EEG and hearing through bone conduction, using machine learning and neural networks. The track on “Image Understanding and AI” dealt with papers on compression of images obtained from satellite and detection of headgear for compliance with traffic laws, etc. Yet another track had papers suggesting use of neural network and fuzzy logic for text recognition with applications in language translation and automated query interpretation. There was a track on Deep Learning featuring papers that explored applications as diverse as robotic grasping, relation extraction and Smartphone CPU usage prediction.
ADCOM 2018 provided platform for at least 8 selected researchers to present their doctoral work ranging from data mining and database algorithms to parametric study on printed MIMO Antenna design.
ADCOM would not be what it is, if it is not lively! ADCOM 2018 had fun filled JAM sessions to ensure that audience was very much part of the program. Hosts IIIT-B and ACCS together created an on-the-spot contest for the participants to solve real-life problems using the knowledge and insight gained at the conference. The problem was defined in the morning session on day 2 and the solutions were presented in the last session on day 3. The three teams selected for final presentation provided solution to the problems of (i) communication without exposing the location, (ii) behavioural profiling of suspects for crime prevention, and (iii) cognitive assistance for the blind. All the three teams bagged attractive prizes. Brigadier (Retd.) Satyendra Kumar, Sena Medal, kindly facilitated the conduct of the JAM sessions together with Mr. Ramesh Sundaraman (IIIT-B) and myself representing ACCS.
Dr. Ashish Tendulkar, Google, conducted the pre-conference tutorial on Tensor Flow. The topic and the speaker were so popular that we had to limit the registration for want of space in the lecture hall. In all, over 90 delegates attended the tutorial and half of this number was turned away with a commitment to organize another session for them.
The event saw packed auditorium on all the three days. The passionate organizers are encouraged by the tremendous response and are happy to announce the next edition of ADCOM in 2019 with a theme on 5G Networks at the same venue and around the same time of the year. See you there!
