This project proposes to organize a series of two international workshopsthat will bring together a relatively small (approximately 20) but focused and diverse group of academic researchers from the US and India to discuss, develop, and propose collaborative research projects in the area of pervasive computing and communications. A major goal is to identify and develop bi-lateral collaborative research projects, and then submit to the appropriate funding agencies in the US and India. The first workshop will be organized in New Delhi, India on March 10-11, 2011 and the second workshop will be held in Washington, DC late June or early July, 2011.
The two workshops and the collaborative US-India research they will enable, will serve as an important foundation for future collaborative international research activities in information communication technologies (ICT). Pervasive computing and communications touches on many fields of computing, including cyber-physical systems (sensor networks; embedded systems; smart environments; sensor network application areas including agriculture, water and weather), trustworthy computing (systems security, homeland security, privacy), energy and sustainability (smart grid, environmental monitoring, home monitoring); health-care (personalized and smart health care technologies), and citizen science (enabled by mobile smart phones with sensing, computing, and communication capabilities). The workshops will serve as a testbed, where specific research collaboration mechanisms can be tried. They will serve as an incubator, providing an environment in which specific collaborations can take root and begin to flourish. They will also serve as a training ground, for a diverse future generation of internationally-focused ICT researchers.
In a time of increasing globalization and inter-connectedness especially in areas of science and engineering such as computing it is increasingly important that research activities and the training of the next-generation of researchers also be international in scope. This project will itself foster international collaboration through the workshops and the subsequent collaborative research proposals generated by workshop participants. Graduate and undergraduate students, in both the US and in India would be involved in this collaborative research. More broadly, leveraging lessons learned and successful collaborations begun, these workshops will serve as foundation for more broadly-based international collaborations among scientists and engineers in a global 21st century knowledge-based world in which ICT plays an increasingly important role. Workshop reports will document workshop findings and outcomes.
In a time of increasing globalization and inter-connectedness it is increasingly important that the research activities and the training of the next-generation of researchers also be international in scope. This need is perhaps most evident in two countries – the United States and India – and in an area - information and communication technologies (ICT) - in which these two countries are global leaders. The goal of this project was to organize a series of workshops to bring together researchers from US universities and an equal number from Indian universities to discuss collaborative research efforts in pervasive communications and computing. These researchers have received funding for their work from the National Science Foundation (for US PIs) and the Dept. of Electronics and Information Technology (for Indian PIs). Three workshops were organized over the course of this project, one in New Delhi, India, one in Arlington, VA, and one virtual workshop held using audio-video conferencing. Researchers from over a dozen universities in the USA and India participated in these workshops and discussed joint research efforts in a wide range of areas such applying pervasive computing and communication techniques to mobile health, disaster response, urban air quality, smart grids, wildlife tracking, and water sustainability. Reseachers learnt about both US and Indian perspectives on these broad societal problems and also dicussed joint collaborative research. One group shared their experiences in teaching a joint graduate class on this topic at a US university (Univ of Massachusetts Amherst) and an Indian one (IIT Bombay) using web conferencing technology.
