IMOBILE ACM Chapter Webinar on 12 July: "Creating Datasets for Environmental Sustainability Problems in Developing Countries"
July 6, 2021
Register now for "Creating Datasets for Environmental Sustainability Problems in Developing Countries", a free IMOBILE ACM Chapter Webinar to be presented on Monday 12 July 2021 at 11 am IST by Rijurekha Sen, Assistant Professor at IIT Delhi. (IMOBILE is the India Chapter of ACM SIGMOBILE.)
Duration : 1 hour
Abstract: Data analytics, big data, machine learning, artificial intelligence etc. are words dominating our research and industry discourses these days. We believe that if we had enough data, to understand our biggest problems like air pollution or climate change, we would be able to better tackle these menaces. "AI for Social Good" (Google) or "AI for Earth" (Microsoft) are example grant programs trying to develop AI algorithms to process environmental sustainability datasets. However, creating the necessary environmental datasets in developing countries is hard. Delhi-NCR, for example, covers 55K square KMs, but has only 35 air quality monitoring stations, even with the whole world’s attention focused on this city’s pollution problems. Measurement infrastructure in other parts of the country is worse. Budget constraints, lack of domestic instrument production increasing procurement and maintenance costs from foreign countries, lack of broadband network so that deployed sensors can easily send data from the field to remote servers for processing—all play a role in this data paucity problem. In this talk, I’ll highlight how embedded systems/edge computing/IoT (same thing, different names) can augment this data generation process for sustainability problems in developing countries. I’ll use two examples of air pollution monitoring using Delhi public buses and traffic monitoring at Delhi Ring Road intersections. The talk will touch upon the low-level sensing and embedded processing pipeline including embedded deep neural networks, software verification and remote attestation methods to ensure device security, privacy issues with the collected data when different industry partners are involved, and AI/ML on the aggregated datasets for urban policy analysis like odd-even traffic rule.
Speaker:
Rijurekha Sen is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, IIT Delhi, since Jan 2018. Between 2014-2018, she was Humboldt postdoctoral researcher at Max-Planck Institute for Software Systems. She works in the area of cyber-physical systems and uses interdisciplinary computer science methods for applications at the intersection of information technology and society. She completed her PhD at IIT Bombay in 2013 and worked as a research fellow in SMU Livelabs 2013-2014. Her dissertation on automated road traffic monitoring in developing regions was awarded the ACM India Doctoral Dissertation Award for 2014.
Host:
Sougata Sen, Assistant Professor, BITS Pilani
