Broad Coverage

ICT & CS pervades almost all walks of life, including education, health-care, environment management, water-resource management, to mention a few. The first task of information technology is to gather information omnipresent in different forms and languages, through sensing of data such as biological data, data pertaining to environment, education, heritage, land usage and cognitive information about users. Such information gathered from diverse field situations, has to be communicated to distant servers through secured, reliable and fast communication channels, followed by different types of processing and analytics. To carry out large scale and fast computations and in-place embedded-real-time computations, novel indigenous computational infrastructures are necessary. The IMPRINT program aims to identify the gaps and the "things to be done" in India to make India self reliant in these aspects.

Data Acquisition and Processing

A major challenge to any information processing task is acquiring the information, which presents itself in different forms, including physical signals, biological signals, voice, text, image, video and even emotions. Accordingly different means of collecting and often inferring such data in the face of noisy and uncertain environment is required. Accordingly, the following sub-themes have been considered for Data Acquisition and Processing.

• Sensors, Bio-Sensors & MEMS: Having access to indigenous sensors and actuators is of utmost importance to the process of data acquisition. Hence new ventures to develop different types of sensors and MEMS are called for. These include biomedical sensors for health care applications, chemical sensors for detection of hazardous contaminations, moisture sensor, image and video sensor etc. The sensors need to be rugged for use in extreme environment and of easy to use type.

• Multimodal and Multilingual Data: (Text, Video, Audio) Data and information is replete in the textual messages and social network exchanges, voice communication as well as video communication. In the Indian context, such information is also multilingual making it imperative to develop technology to properly acquire the information from such varied spectrum of data.

• Novel Interfaces: Keyboard, mouse and monitors being no longer the only means computer interaction, it is needed to natural interfaces for communication through touch, gestures, icons and signs. Interface design in these respects is of utmost importance, specially keeping in view the physically challenged users and the aged population.

Communication

The data and information acquired from distant, critical and difficult to access areas need to be transmitted to the computing sites in a reliable and secure manner. Bandwidth being at a premium, efficient use of bandwidth as well as speed of communication is of vital importance, in addition to reliability and security. Consequently, research thrust should be increased in:

• Data Communication and Networks: Over the years, data communication has gained a lot of importance due to its application in the areas of sensors and mobile nodes in addition to its usual role in computerto-computer communication. Efficient communication between sensor to sensor and between mobile nodes is vital for energy and security related issues. Routing and aggregation of data also needs to be improved for optimal use of power, which in most cases is a non-renewable resource or is very difficult to replace.

• Spectrally Efficient Communication: Generation and transmission of huge data demands spectrally efficient communication techniques to deal with growing demand of bandwidth. As has been established through research by various leading groups, Optical Angular Momentum (OAM) beam is capable of providing huge bandwidth as it creates orthogonal channels for multiplexing of multiple beams.

• Secured Communication: Security and reliability in data and information transmission is one of the key requirements. High security in data and information communication can be realized by infusion of principles of quantum mechanics and information theory.

• THz Technology: Identification of hidden objects is a major challenge in homeland security applications. THz technology facilitates creation of high resolution images of hidden objects and detection of remote threats.

• Wireless Frontends: The whole domain of wireless technology works on the basis of smart as well as efficient frontends, antennas, and sensors. Several new challenges need to be addressed in view of making the devices more compact, more efficient, and compatible to wideband or ultrawideband systems, especially for secured/military applications.

• Advanced Education: There are few specific areas in communication engineering which need high quality human resources in the country; but unfortunately, resource of knowledge is very very limited. Therefore, for the sake of alleviating such lacunae, a special effort is needed in the areas of 'Applied and Computational Electromagnetics" in the form of special training by international experts and thus by creating a knowledge bank.