Towards A Digital “Green” Revolution … Cognitive IoT meets Solar & Agriculture
Speaker: Shivkumar Kalyanaraman
Abstract:
Solar PV and Agriculture are “Green” sectors of the global economy. Especially in emerging markets they share a common feature: productivity is relatively low and offers significant room for improvement. This talk outlines how a combination of Cognitive IoT and digitization technologies can help transform these industries. Photonic harvesting is a technique to harvest more light and deliver it to commodity solar PV systems, driven by a range of analytics and cognitive technologies from the cloud. The growth of satellite data and local smart phone based sensing or cheap agricultural sensors offers data, which needs to be fused to get maximum insights relevant to a farmer or agri-businesses. We will present work done in India on the field with these technologies. These technologies are complementary to other fintech technology levers such as blockchain and cashless finance, and which together can be used towards compelling social and economic outcomes.
Speaker Bio:
Shivkumar Kalyanaraman is Program Director, Special Initiatives in IBM Research – India (with focus on Solar, Agriculture, IoT, Industry 4.0) and heads the Cognitive Industry Solutions department . He has served as the Chief Scientist of IBM Research – Australia (2013-2015), and served in earlier senior management roles for teams in systems, wireless, networking and smarter planet solutions at IBM Research – India since 2008. In 2010 he as part of a founding team of the UBD | IBM Centre, a nationally significant Smarter Planet collaboration between the country of Brunei and IBM; and directed this centre till 2013. Before joining IBM, he was a tenured Full Professor at the Department of Electrical, Computer and Systems Engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, NY. He received a B.Tech degree in Computer Science from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, India in July 1993, followed by M.S. and Ph.D. degrees at the Ohio State University in 1994 and 1997 respectively. He also holds an Executive M.B.A. (EMBA) degree from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (2005).
His current research interests are in large-scale cyber-physical systems (“Cognitive IoT solutions”) addressing problems such as clean energy, sustainable use of natural resources, (eg: agriculture, water) and the application of ideas from computing, machine learning, wireless, IoT and networking in these domains. He served as the TPC Co-chair of IEEE INFOCOM 2008, General co-chair of ACM SIGCOMM 2010 in New Delhi, and is the General Co-Chair of ACM e-Energy 2015 in Bangalore, India. He served on the editorial board of IEEE/ACM Transactions of Networking. He is a Fellow of the IEEE (2010), Fellow of Indian National Academy of Engineering (2015), ACM Distinguished Scientist (2010), and was recognized by MIT’s Technology Review Magazine in 1999 as a TR100 young innovator.