Abstract

Aadhaar, India's Unique Identity Project, has become the largest biometric identity system in the world, already covering more than 1 Billion people in just 5.5 years since launch. Its strength lies in its design simplicity, sound strategy, and technology backbone! Pramod Varma, who is the Chief Architect of Aadhaar and an iSpirt volunteer helping to design various open APIs as part of Digital India, speaks about the architecture of Aadhaar.

Biography

Dr. Pramod Varma is currently the CTO for EkStep, a not-for-profit creating learner-centric, technology enabled platform to improve applied literacy and numeracy.

He continues to be the Chief Architect and Technology Advisor for Aadhaar (UID) project where he is responsible for entire system architecture and strategic technology decisions. He joined UIDAI in 2009 as part of the founding team and has been pivotal in ensuring an open, scalable, and secure architecture is built to meet the needs of Aadhaar project. In addition, he also sits on the advisory board of National Payment Corporation (NPCI), Goods and Services Tax Network (GSTN), and several technology startups.

Before joining UIDAI in July 2009, he was the Chief Technology Architect and Vice President of Research at Sterling Commerce, now part of IBM. He worked across the organization and customers to evangelize technology and helps product teams make strategic technology and architecture decisions. He joined Sterling in 2005 when Sterling Commerce acquired Yantra Corporation, a leading supply chain software company based in Boston, USA. He was one of the cofounders of Yantra Corporation and has been anchoring all technology and architecture strategies. Before cofounding Yantra Corporation, he began his career as part of the research team at Infosys Technologies.

Over the past 20+ years, he has studied architectures spanning from mainframes to web and has worked extensively with most programming languages and databases. He has researched and taught various courses in Database Tuning, Distributed Computing, Internet Technologies, and Computer Architectures among others.

Pramod holds a Master’s and Ph.D. degree in Computer Science along with a second Master’s in Applied Mathematics. His main areas of interest are Internet scale distributed architectures and intelligent systems. He is passionate about technology, science, society, and teaching.

Abstract

Digital India is a revolutionary program that will empower the masses and leapfrog India into the next generation of government services. As part of this, starting with Aadhaar, Government has designed a powerful technology stack driven by a set of Open APIs that allows all service providers to reimagine their services in a presence-less, paperless, and cashless way. This open API stack, known as "India Stack" is designed as a digital public good that can truly bring inclusive development to a billion people. Vivek Raghavan, who is the Chief product Manager of Aadhaar project and an iSpirt volunteer speaks about India Stack and its transformational power.

Brief Biography of Mr. Surojit Chatterjee

Surojit Chatterjee is a Flipkart SVP (senior vice president)/head of consumer experience and growth across desktop and mobile. Prior to Flipkart, he was at Silicon Valley's Google office heading the mobile search advertising and AdSense for Search (AFS). He helped make mobile search ads a growth engine for Google, developing it into a multi-billion dollar business. Previously, he led payment products for Google in the Asia-Pacific and mobile products for Google India. He holds a BS in Computer Science from IIT Kharagpur, an MS in Computer Science from SUNY Buffalo and an MBA from MIT Sloan School of Management. He has 33 granted US patents to his name.

Abstract

Fast data is a class of Big Data where events streaming at fast rates from hundreds of sources need to be processed and analyzed with low latency. These data sources span social media such as Twitter, transactions from eGovernance applications like Aadhaar, and observations from the Internet of Things. This talk will introduce such fast data applications, identify gaps in existing Big Data platforms to process such applications, and propose research directions on distributed processing abstractions using elastic Cloud computing and wide-area Edge+Cloud execution paradigms to address these gaps.

Brief Biography:

Yogesh Simmhan is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Computational and Data Sciences at the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore. His research explores abstractions, algorithms and applications on distributed systems. These span Cloud Computing, Distributed Graph Processing Platforms and Elastic Stream Processing to support emerging "Big Data" and Internet of Things (IoT) applications. His research advances fundamental knowledge, and offers a practitioner's insight, on building scalable and resilient systems. He has won the IEEE TCSC SCALE Challenge Award and the IEEE/ACM Supercomputing HPC Storage Challenge Award. He is a Senior Member of IEEE and ACM, Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on Cloud Computing and a member of the IEEE Future Directions Initiative on Big Data. Yogesh has a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Indiana University Previously, he was a Postdoc at Microsoft Research, San Francisco, a Research Assistant Professor at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles and Associate Director of the USC Center for Energy Informatics.

Abstract

In secure multi-party computation (MPC) n parties wish to jointly perform a computation on their private inputs in a secure way, so that no coalition of cheating parties can learn more information than their outputs (privacy), nor can they affect the outputs of the computation any more than by choosing their own inputs (correctness). Known as the holy grail problem of cryptography, MPC can be used to solve a vast number of problems that occur in the modern digital era. These problems include auctions, elections, digital cash, anonymous transactions, private database queries, cloud security, privacy-preserving data mining, private statistics aggregation, private biometric verification, and more. In the talk, I will discuss some of my recent results on bridging theoretical gaps between synchronous and asynchronous MPC protocols.

Brief Biography:

Arpita Patra is an Assistant Professor at Indian Institute of Science.  Her area of interest is Cryptography. In cryptography, her research interests include Secure Multiparty Computation, Circuit Garbling, Adaptive Security, Secret Sharing, Secure Communication, Public Key Encryption and Byzantine Agreement. She received her PhD from Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Madras and held post-doctoral positions at University of Bristol, UK, ETH Zurich, Switzerland and Aarhus University, Denmark.

Abstract

A wiretap channel is a physical layer security primitive where for each transmission by the sender an eavesdropper receives a noisy version of the signal received by the legitimate receiver. In his seminal work, Wyner established the capacity of a degraded wiretap channel, namely the maximum number of bits per channel use that can send reliably and securely. Wyner's formulation, and the vast literature that builds upon it, works with vanishing probability of error and leakage. We show the strong converse for this classic result: Even if the probability of error and the leakage remains fixed, the maximum number of bits per channel remain bounded by the aforementioned wiretap channel capacity. This is joint work with Masahito Hayashi and Shun Watanabe.

Brief Biography:

Himanshu Tyagi is an Assistant Professor at the Electrical and Communication Engineering Department of the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bangalore. His research focuses on information theory and its applications in communication, computation, security, statistics, and control. Prior to joining IISc, he was a postdoctoral researcher at the Information Theory and its Applications Centre of University of California, San Diego. Himanshu has a Ph.D. degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Maryland, College Park, an M.Tech. degree in Communication and Information Technology and a B.Tech. in Electrical Engineering, both from the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi.

Abstract

In the context of global warming and potential climate change it is important to limit the emission of carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas, emitted by burning of fossil fuels like coal and natural gas for energy. A low carbon foot print electric power distribution system means increased integration of renewable energy sources into the power grid. Solar energy has been identified as one of the major source of green energy. This is particularly true for India, due to the abundance of sunlight in most parts of the country. We have approximately 300 clear, sunny days in a year. Currently we generate about 6.76 GW from sun. This number is expected to become 100 GW by 2022. Even though the cost of solar cells has fallen dramatically in last few years, the generation of power from solar energy is still not cost competitive and most solar installations require government subsidy. With this in mind the efficiency of the power electronic converter that interfaces the solar cell with the power grid is important. In this talk we will survey the current state of the art and explore new possibilities of more efficient, cost effective solutions of grid integration of utility scale solar energy resources.

Brief Biography:

Kaushik Basu received the BE. degree from the Bengal Engineering and Science University, Shibpore, India, in 2003, the M.S. degree from the IISc, Bangalore, India, in 2005, and the Ph.D. degree from the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, in 2012, respectively, all in electrical engineering. He was a Design Engineer with ColdWatt India in 2006 and an Electronics and Control Engineer with Dynapower Corporation USA, from 2013 to 2015, before joining as an Assistant Professor in the department of Electrical Engineering, IISc. His research interests include High frequency link converters, PWM techniques and Grid tied converters with storage and renewable energy sources.

Abstract

Flexible, Wearable and Light weight electronics as well as nano-scale power electronic system-on-chip are expected to be the next big things, along with few others, from a semiconductor technology point of view. What was always assumed to be (science) fiction, seems to become a reality soon, which is attributed to discoveries of newer materials like Graphene, two-dimensional semiconductors like TMDs and Gallium Nitride. This talk will address properties, capability and potential of these materials while keeping in mind a roadmap for future electronics and required technology.

Brief Biography:

Prof. Mayank Shrivastava is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Electronic Systems Engineering, Indian Institute of Science Bangalore, India. Prof. Shrivastava has over 50 publications in international journals and conferences and 26 patents in the areas of Electron Devices and Nanoelectronics. He was among the first recipient of Indian section of American TR35 award and so far the first Indian to receive IEEE EDS Early Carrier Award. Other than this he has received several other awards and honours including excellence award for his PhD thesis in 2010 and industrial impact award from IIT Bombay in 2008.

Prof. Shrivastava had held short term visiting positions in Infineon Technologies, Munich, Germany from April 2008 to October 2008 and again in May 2010 to July 2010. He worked for Infineon Technologies, East Fishkill, NY; Intel Mobile Communications, Hopewell Junction, NY; and Intel Corp., Mobile and Communications Group, Munich, Germany between 2010 and 2013. He joined Indian Institute of Science as an Assistant professor in year 2013 where he has established Advance Nanoelectronic Device and Circuit Research Group.