IIITH Newsletter – October 2020

Nikhil  Priyatam received his doctorate in Computer Science and Engineering. His  research work was supervised by Prof. Vasudeva Varma . Here’s a summary of  Nikhil’s   thesis, Medical Information Extraction from Social Media as explained by him: Social media has provided new opportunities to users for creating, accessing, and sharing information in a location independent and timeless fashion. Recent years have witnessed exponential rise in the number of individuals and organizations using social media for sharing healthcare information which is publicly accessible. Medical social media is a subset of social media, in which the interests of the users are specifically […]

Vishnu Vidyadhara Raju received his doctorate in Electronics and Communication Engineering.  His  research work was supervised by Dr. Anil Kumar Vuppala. Here’s a summary of  Vishnu’s   thesis, Towards Building a Robust Telugu ASR System for Emotional Speech as explained by him: The performance of speech recognition (ASR) system degrades when there is a mismatch between training and operating environments. The presence of expressive (emotional) speech is one among the mismatches in operating environments as majority of ASR systems are trained using neutral speech. The emotional state of the speaker induces changes in the speech characteristics and effects the ASR […]

Etoori Keerthana received her MS-Dual Degree in Civil Engineering (CE). Her  research work was supervised by Prof. Pradeep Kumar Ramancharla. Here’s a summary of  Keerthana’s M.S thesis, Performance assessment of buildings designed with SSI and without SSI as explained by her: This study consider low (5-storey), medium (10-storey) and high-rise (20-storey) buildings founded on hard, medium and soft soils according to IS code to show importance of soil flexibility in design. These 9 buildings designed for base shear obtained from IS 1893 (Part-1)-2016, fixed base and flexible base respectively show that buildings designed according IS code are over designed when […]

Nagireddy Seshadri Reddy received his MS-Dual Degree in Electronics and Communication Engineering. His  research work was supervised by Dr. Aftab M Hussain. Here’s a summary of  Seshadri’s M.S thesis, Modelling of Multilayered Perforated Electrodes for Dielectric Elastomer Actuator Applications as explained by him:  Dielectric Elastomer Actuators (DEAs) are emerging as pseudo-muscular actuators in the field of soft robotics. DEAs work on the principle of actuation due electrostatic pressure. Since the DEAs are electromechanical transducers they must contract and stretch along with the polymer. Thus, the electrodes should be complaint. In order to achieve this stretchability carbon nanotube (CNT) based electrodes […]

Soumya Tapse received her MS in Electronics and Communication Engineering (ECE). Her  research work was supervised by Dr. Srivatsava Jandhyala. Here’s a summary of  Soumya’s M.S thesis, Analog and analog-mixed-signal system-on-a-chip circuits for internet of things as explained by her: Recent advances in the semiconductor industry for the internet of things have increased the demand for novel, fast and robust circuits. The thirst for high-processing ICs is ever increasing. This has pushed the demand for high data rate in wireless and wireline communication systems in the multi-Gbps range. For high-speed transmission of data, there arises a need for high-speed on-chip […]

Siddharth Bhatore  received his MS-Dual Degree in Computer Science and Engineering. His  research work was supervised by Dr. Raghu Reddy.  Here’s a summary of  Siddharth’s M.S thesis, Software Engineering practices for building MLware applications – credit risk evaluation case study as explained by him:  MLWare applications is an upcoming term used to refer to software applications that use machine learning approaches/algorithms (in part) to address the application’s objective.  The development and utilization  of  such  applications  is  growing  rapidly  in  every  major  sector  with  the  increase  in  speed and volume of data collection/analysis.  These applications tend to be complex and hence […]

Siddhartha Laghuvarapu received his MS-Dual Degree in Computational Natural Sciences. His  research work was supervised by Dr. U Deva Priyakumar. Here’s a summary of  Siddhartha’s M.S thesis, Deep learning for prediction of molecular properties and drug interactions as explained by him:  Accurate and fast estimation of energies is an important problem in Computational Chemistry as they are essential to model various chemical and biological processes. Traditional QM based methods, although very accurate, cannot be scaled to large systems. Deep learning methods offer a computationally tractable alternative while also being accurate. In my work, a novel deep learning model based on […]

Devansh Manu received his MS-Dual Degree in Exact Humanities (EH). His research work was supervised by Dr. Radhika Krishnan. Here’s a summary of  Devansh’s M.S thesis, Lok Sabha Elections 2019: Analysing the Online Political Battlefield in India as explained by him:      The Lok Sabha Elections 2019 in the world’s largest democracy, India, was a significant electoral event. These elections are conducted to elect representatives across the country for a period of 5 years and are also key to the process of selecting the Prime Minister, the highest authority in the Union cabinet. In keeping with global trends, the […]

Vinoo Alluri and her students presented the following  two papers virtually  at the 21st International Society for Music Information Retrieval (ISMIR-2020) from 11 – 16 October at Montreal, Canada. TAG2RISK: Harnessing Social Music Tags for Characterizing Depression Risk. In Proceedings of 21st International Society for Music Information Retrieval – Surana  A, Goyal Y, Srivastava M, Saarikallio S, and Alluri V.  Towards Multimodal MIR: Predicting Individual differences from Music-induced Movement. In Proceedings of 21st International Society for Music Information Retrieval – Agarwal Y, Jain S, Carlson E, Toiviainen P, Alluri V.

Vinoo Alluri and her students Suranra  A and  Goyal  Y presented a paper virtually on Static and Dynamic Measures of Active Music Listening as Indicators of Depression Risk at Speech, Music, and Mind – a satellite workshop of Interspeech 2020 conference on 23 October at Nanjing,  China. SMM-2020 focused on detecting and influencing mental states, with an emphasis on multi-modal approaches with diverse applications across culture, languages and music.  

Dr.  Zia Abbas and his students presented the following paper virtually at IEEE International Symposium on Circuits and Systems (ISCAS-2020) at Seville, Spain from 10 – 21 October 2020. ATM: Approximate Toom-Cook Multiplication for Speech Processing Applications, M S Ahmad and Zia Abbas   67ppm/ºC, 66nA PVT Invariant Curvature Compensated Current Reference for Ultra-Low Power Applications, M  Kelam, B B Yadav, A Bathi and Zia Abbas An Efficient Gradient Boosting Approach for PVT Aware Estimation of Leakage Power and Propagation delay in CMOS/FinFET Digital Cells, D Amuru and Zia Abbas Low Quiescent Current, Capacitor-Less LDO with Adaptively Biased Power Transistors and […]

International Institute of Information Technology Hyderabad (IIITH) hosted a virtual EU Day on human centric digitalisation through policy dialogue, research and innovation between the European Union and India. The event was facilitated by Prof Sachin Chaudhari as part of CoE on IoT for smart cities activities. Speaking on the occasion, EU Ambassador, H.E Mr. Ugo Astuto said, “Covid-19 has demonstrated how important the digital dimension is to the economy, society and individual lives. We’ve seen how we can effectively perform many roles remotely, but for these IT tools to work we need adequate infrastructure. The EU and India, two of the […]

Lalit Mohan Sanagavarapu, Ph.D student of Dr. Raghu Reddy  gave a talk on AI for All: Democratizing Data Science for Financial Inclusion at ApacheCon-2020 on 1 October.  The talk covered use cases on  Credit Scoring,  Poverty Probability Index and  Chatbot,  developed in Google Summer of Code (GSOC) project, a roadmap to standardize AI platform and data democratization.  Lalit was a GSOC mentor to  AI/ML for the Credit Scoring  project of Apache Fineract’s distribution Mifos (https://mifos.org).  ApacheCon is the official conference of Apache Software Foundation. This year’s ApacheCon had 5745 registrations from more than 150 countries and speakers who delivered more […]

Durga Prasad Dhulipudi working in Honeywell and a part time Ph.D student of  Dr. K S Rajan virtually presented a paper on Multiclass Geospatial Object Detection Using Machine Learning-Aviation Case Study at the 39th AIAA/IEEE Digital Avionics Systems Conference (DASC), San Antonio, Texas from 11 – 16 October.

Aniket Joshi, CSD student and  Gaurav Mishra, an intern working under the supervision of Prof. Jayanthi Sivaswamy virtually  presented a paper on Explainable Disease Classification via weakly-supervised segmentation, at Workshop on Interpretability of Machine Intelligence in Medical Image Computing (MICCAI) 2020 at  Lima, Peru on 4 October.    Research  work as explained by the authors of the paper:  Deep learning based approaches to Computer Aided Diagnosis (CAD) typically pose the problem as an image classification (Normal or Abnormal) problem. These systems achieve high to very high accuracy in specific disease detection for which they are trained but lack in terms […]

Alphin J Thottupattu pursuing Ph.D under the supervision of Prof. Jayanthi Sivaswamy presented a paper on A fast method for shape template generation at the 27th IEEE International Conference on Image Processing (ICIP-2020) at Abu Dhabi from 25 – 28 October. The conference was held virtually due to Covid-19.  Research  work as explained by the authors of the paper:  Disease diagnosis often requires segmentation of structures from a given image followed by shape analysis. Shape analysis entails quantifying the variability in a shape by constructing a template for a given population. We propose an orientation-invariant representation using varifolds for the […]

Rishabh B. Mishra, currently working under the supervision of  Dr. Aftab M Hussain, Center for VLSI and Embedded Systems Technology (CVEST) presented a paper on Polymer/paper-based double touch mode capacitive pressure sensing element for wireless control of robotic arm at the 15th IEEE International Conference on Nano/Micro Engineered & Molecular Systems (Virtual IEEE NEMS) 2020 from 27 – 30 September. The conference was supposed to happen in San Diego, USA was however held virtually due to COVID’19. The paper was shortlisted for best student paper award.   The authors and their affiliations are:   R B Mishra and A M Hussain […]

Gave  three invited lectures at the Technical Education Quality Improvement Programme (TEQIP)-III sponsored Faculty development program (FDP) on Quantum Information and Computation from 3  – 17 October.  The programme was organised by Department of Physics, NIT Sikkim. Was one of the organizers, moderator of the panel Quantum Internet & Quantum Network and a panelist  at the Quantum Week Satellite. The event was organized online by the IEEE Quantum SIG and the IEEE India Council on 3  October. Eminent speakers from the Academia and Industry leaders participated in the event. Various topics like Photonics – Computing and Communications,  Quantum Hardware Technologies,  […]

An interaction with industry experts, alumni, students and faculty was held online on 17 October on innovations fueled by gender diversity in companies and hiring policies. The session began with an introductory talk by Prof. P J Narayanan and was moderated by Dr. Kavita Vemuri. The topic was chosen keeping in view the forthcoming placement sessions. Questions and certain perspectives  of the institute on hiring policies were placed before the panel for discussion. The panelists included Speaker from Industry: Ms. Reena Dayal Yadav, Director Garage, Microsoft India; Quantum Computing Leader at Microsoft India  Industry/Alumna: Ms. Deepti Singh Sharma, Director, Walmart […]

ReAp@CVEST, an annual one day workshop was organized by Center for VLSI and Embedded System Technologies (CVEST) on 24 October. Experts from academia and industry discussed the emerging technologies, recent research trends and applications in the area of VLSI and Embedded Systems technologies. The Theme for ReAp@CVEST2020 was Analog Technologies in a Digitally Connected World.

Faculty and students of IIITH presented the following papers at the 2020 IEEE 7th International Conference on Data Science and Advanced Analytics (DSAA). The conference was held virtually from 6  – 9  October in Sydney, Australia.  Hema Ala, MS by Research student working under the supervision of Dipti Misra Sharma and Ananya, Ph.D student working under the supervision of Manish Srivastava presented a paper on MEE: An Automatic Metric for Evaluation Using Embeddings for Machine Translation.   The researchers proposed MEE, an approach for automatic Machine Translation (MT) evaluation which leverages the similarity between embeddings of words in candidate and reference […]

In the first of a series of startup stories from the Product Labs stable, we take a look at a sophisticated Natural Language Processing (NLP) technology that has not only been successfully productized but also gained some high profile customers in less than a year. And it all started with an internship. Read On. The International Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad (IIITH) has always prided itself on having a strong research focus. So much so that it is probably one of the few tech institutes in India to actively encourage undergraduates to dabble in research. However the intent is not […]

In a move that is significantly useful to engineers, town planners, city and government officials as well as academia, International Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad in association with National Disaster Management Authority (NDMA) of India recently unveiled a primer on Rapid Visual Screening (RVS) of housing structures. It is an attempt to provide a standardised checklist for data collection which will give better insight into structural safety in the wake of increasing earthquake risks.  The move behind having a standardised RVS template can be traced back to 2005 when the Disaster Management Act pivoted its approach from a relief-centered one […]

With the large scale adoption of virtual learning, Prof. Vishal Garg takes a look at it from the teachers’ point of view. Through useful tips and pointers on making it a wholesome experience, he reveals how it’s much more than just turning on the camera.   When educational institutions were forced to shut down worldwide in response to the Coronavirus outbreak early this year, it forced educators to move to the online medium of instruction overnight. While some institutes were already following a blended learning approach, virtual classes were adopted by the vast majority of others as a stop-gap measure. The […]

IIITH hosted a virtual EU Day on human centric digitalisation through policy dialogue, research and innovation between the European Union and India. Speaking on the occasion, EU Ambassador, H.E Mr. Ugo Astuto said, “Covid-19 has demonstrated how important the digital dimension is to the economy, society and individual lives. We’ve seen how we can effectively perform many roles remotely, but for these IT tools to work we need adequate infrastructure. The EU and India, two of the world’s largest democracies are working together on various aspects of this. We have been collaborating with IIITH on a Centre of Excellence for […]

   IIITH  and National Disaster Management Authority (NDMA) have developed a Rapid Visual Screening (RVS) Primer for better insight into structural safety in the wake of earthquake risks. The primer will serve as a pioneering document to screen various kinds of buildings for their structural stability, and to assess and estimate the possible damage during an earthquake. The total number of buildings in India is well over 30.5 Crores. Structural status of buildings before and after the earthquake will provide an effective checkpoint for government institutions, industries, private organisations and local bodies against the threats posed by earthquakes. 

  Intel, jointly with the government and IIIT Hyderabad, is working on solutions at its artificial intelligence research centre to reduce road accidents and enhance its datasets for driving conditions in India, said Nivruti Rai, Country Head, Intel India and vice president, Data Platforms Group, Intel.

  IIIT-H researchers throw light on the link between people listening to sad songs and their mood. It can leave enough hints at people on the verge of getting into depression. That music heals and enthrals is not news. A number of studies across the world have studied the impact of music on human beings and animals. Here’s a new study by researchers at the International Institute of Information Technology (IIIT-Hyderabad) that throws light on the link between people listening to sad songs and their mood. It can leave enough hints at people on the verge of getting into depression. […]

The International Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad (IIITH) has set up a Smart City Research Center (SCRC) with support from MEITY (Government of India), Smart City Mission and Government of Telangana. There is a huge push for smart cities in India under the Smart Cities Mission, a new initiative by the Government of India to drive economic growth and improve the quality of life of people by enabling local development and harnessing technology to create smart outcomes for citizens. In this ambitious project, 100 cities are being covered for the duration of 5 years with a budget of Rs.100 crore […]

25th Pacific-Asia Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (PAKDD-2021)  The PAKDD is one of the longest established and leading international conferences in the areas of data mining and knowledge discovery. It provides an international forum for researchers and industry practitioners to share their new ideas, original research results, and practical development experiences from all KDD related areas, including data mining, data warehousing, machine learning, artificial intelligence, databases, statistics, knowledge engineering, visualization, decision-making systems, and the emerging applications. Important Notice: The safety and well-being of all conference participants is our priority. Depending on the COVID-19 situation, we will have the […]

Lecture Series on Evidence, Models and Explanation  The classes will be online every Saturday at 6:00pm. Key Speakers are Harolad Kincaid, University of Cape Town; Heather Douglas, Michigan State University; Elliot Sober, University of Wisconsin-Madison; Paul Humphreys, University of Virginia.  Registration is free.