As rightly said in a recent article in Deccan Chronical, a new trend of user involvement in open innovation processes has emerged and SPCRC is spearheading this trend with it's cutting edge research projects in the field of Internet of Things (IoT) under the guidance of Dr. Sachin Chaudhari. Setting up of a 'Living Lab' at IIIT-H is yet another milestone in the same direction.
As part of IIIT's discussion series 'Let's talk AI', Dr. Sachin Chaudhari discussed with Mr. Ramesh Loganathan (Prof. of Practice, Co-innovations) various facets of Internet of Things (IoT) and related research. He explained in detail about the fine line of difference between IoT, Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) and Cyber Physical System (SPC). He went to conclude that there is actually a great deal of overlap between what these three terms refer to.
What are the challenges ?
Dr. Sachin explained that the greatest research challange is ingrained in the scale of the applications like smart cities or industrial automation. These applications have milliions of sensors and actuators which are expected to work in synchronication and sometimes without failing at all, if the application is mission critical. Maintainance of such giant network becomes even more difficult when the deployment is at some remote location. On top of it, it is expected that once deployed, the netork should perform without requiring any frequent maintainance jobs like battery replacement or sensor replacement.
Another challenge lies in node's ability to communicate wirelessly. Given that all sensor nodes work in resource constrained environment, communicating sensor data over wireless channel is a big overhead and consumes majority of the available power. All the sensors collect real time data and privacy & security of this data is third major challenge. Refer to the discussion video embedded below to know about an interesting use case in this regard. While talking about interoperability in IoT, lack of a widely accepted standard for IoT deployment came into notice as the fourth challenge. As these massive networks are expected to generate valuable insights to make better decisions in real time, it is the lack of availability of standard datasets to train smart artificial intelligence models which Dr. Sachin mentioned as the sixth research challenge.
Greatest challenge is greatest opportunity
I have no doubt in my mind that IoT is going to be the future, AI is going to be the key enabler for IoT solutions and data is going to be the next Gold ! As researchers, we cannot afford to miss becomming a part of this revolution.
Talking about research opportunities and future trend, Dr. Sachin explained about his research on data reduction and transmission schemes for IoT nodes and application of Machine Learning (ML) for edge computing. He also talked about OneM2M, which is emmerging as a global standard for IoT deployment. He emphasized on the need of research on low power communication tools like LoRaWAN. He also explained about his ongoing project which involves collection of data on air pollution as well. Towards the end, the duo also talked about the newly opened Living Lab at IIIT-H. Quoting from the Deccan Chronical article, Mr. Ramesh says Living Lab at IIIT is a first-of-its-kind setup. IIIT-H has made ample provision for startups and innovators to experiment in their Living Lab. Living Labs are essentially a live setup of a building, campus or facility that gets used for its intended purposes along with being a ‘living’ test bed for research and innovation. All data coming from the Living Lab is used to develop or validate new solutions and can be tested in the same live setup.
Finally, the full length video