January 10, 2010
School of Engineering, Amritapuri
At a recent 3-day Indo-US Workshop conducted at IIT Bombay, Amrita was represented by three participants. This workshop on Geospatial Information for Developing Countries: Science and Technology, featured invited talks of speakers from around the country.
Amrita’s Dr. Maneesha Ramesh, spoke on “Real Time Monitoring of Landslides using Wireless Sensor Networks.” She outlined steps taken to deploy India’s first-ever wireless sensor network in the landslide-prone area of Munnar.
Dr. Maneesha was joined by two colleagues from Amrita’s Coimbatore campus — Dr. Latha Parameswaran, Professor and Vice Chair and Dr. Vidya Balasubramanian, Assistant Professor, both from the Department of Computer Science and Engineering.
“The main objective of the workshop was to discuss the state-of-art in GIS technologies,” stated Dr. Latha Parameshwaran. GIS or Geographic Information Sciences, is an important area of research today thanks to the proliferation of data made available by remote sensing applications and geo-sensor networks such as the one Amrita has deployed.
“Discussions centred on challenges in applying GIS technologies to problems in developing nations,” further stated Dr. Latha. “Experts and academicians both from India and the US deliberated on the best ways to manage massive spatial-temporal data and set future research directions. Synergies were brought into research programs across the two countries.”
Amrita’s wireless sensor network for landslide detection will also benefit from such synergies. Future plans are to incorporate remote sensing capability into this system and also deploy it in various parts of the country that are prone to landslides and avalanches. The use of the system will also be extended to industrial sites prone to leakages and areas with regular forest fires.
The workshop was organized jointly by the Departments of Computer Science at IIT Bombay and University of Minnesota, USA. It was funded by the Indo-U.S. Science and Technology Forum (IUSSTF). Post the workshop, Dr. Maneesha left for Thailand to participate in an international workshop in disaster risk management. See News »
Prior to participating in the workshop, Dr. Maneesha met with the senior management of Larsen & Toubro Limited (L&T), on Dec 15, 2009 in Mumbai. She discussed with them possible collaborative research opportunities in several areas including Sensor Networks and Sensor Fusion, Embedded Systems, Power Electronics and Chemical Sensors.
