Background

There is a scientific basis and growing consensus among scientists that human activities are the primary cause of the recent increase in frequency and magnitude of multi-hazards in different ecosystems. Types of ecosystems include farmlands, forests, grasslands, fresh water, wetlands, mountains, oceans and coasts, peatlands and marshes, glaciated terrain, fluvial systems and lakes, deserts and drylands, urban areas, wildlife sanctuaries and recreational woodlands, etc. Evaluation of degraded ecosystems should be addressed through near-, mid-, and long-term strategies for mitigation of and adaptation. Aside from empowering communities, international collaboration among nations will be required on the deployment of emerging technologies for the mitigation of and adaptation to climate change and ecosystem restoration. Only with healthy ecosystems can we enhance people’s livelihoods, counteract climate change, and stop the collapse of biodiversity.

Every year, June 5^th is celebrated as World Environment Day, which provides a global platform to address environmental issues. The United Nations Environmental Program (UNEP) organizes events associated with a specific theme every year. Drawing inspiration from this year’s theme of ‘ecosystem restoration’, ISIM 2021 aims to highlight the role of cutting-edge technologies such as IoT, ML, and AI to effectively monitor, detect and provide early warnings of disasters, aid in the restoration of ecosystems, and build a framework for multi-hazard resilience. The symposium will provide a platform to explore ML, AI, and IoT-based techniques and approaches that will play increasingly greater roles in developing strategies and building momentum to guide the comprehensive restoration of ecosystems and mitigate associated multi-hazards.

Symposium Objectives

ISIM 2021 seeks to provide a dynamic platform to interact and share knowledge among academia, industry, and government sectors to:

• Understand and explore emerging technologies: IoT and ML for ecosystem restoration and managing multi-hazards
• Study the multidisciplinary impact of climate change on ecosystem & adaptation techniques for protecting biodiversity and promoting community resilience
• Potentially develop a framework that will cater to multi-dimensional challenges in the application of IoT and ML for sustainable restoration of degraded ecosystem and community empowerment
• Evolve developmental strategies aimed at formulating perspectives for effective participatory approaches towards nature-based solutions to climate change and sustainable growth of communities and societies
• Analyze and provide a package of ideas on a comprehensive assessment of ecosystem and management of multi-hazards, development of agroforestry and optimum utilization of environmental resources across the world.

Themes

Day 1: Theme 1: Emerging Technologies for Ecosystem Restoration

This session focuses on understanding and addressing the emerging technologies for ecosystem restoration. It seeks to develop a framework that will cater to challenges in the regeneration of degraded ecosystems and conservation of the intact ecosystems. Studies related to the application of advanced technologies for sustainable restoration/conservation of ecosystems are invited in this session.

Day 2: Theme 2: Impact of Climate Change on Ecosystem & Multi Hazards

This session seeks to evaluate manifestations of climate change and its impacts on ecosystems and catalyzing or triggering multi-hazards. It looks into studying the multidisciplinary impact of climate change on ecosystem & adaptation techniques to protect biodiversity and promoting community resilience to mitigate multi-hazards.

Day 3: Theme 3: IoT and ML for Managing Ecosystem & Multi Hazards

The session seeks contributions from studies that are focused on the application of modern and emerging technologies like ML, AI, and IoT to build ecosystem adaptation techniques. It seeks to develop and promote techniques and strategies for disaster risk reduction, ecosystem management, and reducing the cascading effect of multi-hazards.

Day 4: Theme 4: Climate Change Adaptation Techniques & Community Resilience

The world is already experiencing a warming climate and increase in intensity and frequency of extreme events, making the ecosystem even more susceptible. This session seeks interdisciplinary studies on timely estimation and prediction of these events enabling better preparedness and empowering communities with assured livelihoods. Studies are welcome on community response and resilience against changing climate and recurring of multiple disasters like flooding, sea level rise, damming glacial lakes, drought, forest fire, heatwaves, etc for sustainable regional development.

Day 4: Theme 5: Case Studies for Ecosystems Restoration & Multi-Hazard Resilience

This session seeks to explore and document case studies from global to local scales on various types of ecosystems that include farmlands, forests, grasslands, fresh water, wetlands, mountains, oceans and coasts, peatlands and marshes, glaciated terrain, fluvial systems and lakes, deserts and drylands, urban areas, wildlife sanctuaries and recreational woodlands, etc.

Agenda

DAY 1: June 5, 2021

Inauguration Ceremony

Click Here to Download Inauguration Ceremony Agenda

We invite you to form teams, and innovate with us!

Participants can register individually or form their own team (max 3 members) and register.

The ISIM symposium is an excellent place to learn about our natural ecosystem and key issues precipitated by climate change and multi-hazard situations. Key domain experts will provide inputs throughout the ISIM symposium on key issues, ecosystem dynamics, climate change trajectories, as well as emerging technologies and multi-modal responses being adopted to address the situation.

Hackathon teams are required to attend the Symposium sessions and also the post-symposium workshop where we will provide you with information on technologies, tools, platforms, and techniques that could help you develop your innovative solution. The workshop will give you an opportunity to get some hands-on experience on platforms we will make available for the Hackathon.

Hackathon Themes:

1. Theme 1: Emerging Technologies for Ecosystem Restoration
2. Theme 2: Impact of Climate Change on Ecosystem & Multi Hazards
3. Theme 3: IoT and ML for Managing Ecosystem & Multi Hazards
4. Theme 4: Climate Change Adaptation Techniques & Community Resilience
5. Theme 5: Case Studies for Ecosystems Restoration & Multi-Hazard Resilience
6. Theme 6: Open topic

Based on these broad themes, some EXAMPLE areas to explore are:

• Solutions for measuring and monitoring our natural ecosystem. May include, but not limited to, new sensing technologies, architectures for large scale, high-resolution real-time data gathering, long term sustainable and robust low-energy sensing networks, etc
• Solutions that analyze, detect, and predict critical ecosystem changes. May include, but not limited to, the development of AI/ML models to predict ecosystem changes, prediction and advanced detection of critical hazards, emergency response management solutions, etc.
• Solutions that Enhance community Resilience to Climate Change. May include, but not limited to, solutions that help boost agricultural efficiency in the face of climate change, solutions that generate water and nutrition security for communities, solutions that help maintain community health, enhance health-seeking behaviours, enhance environment-friendly behaviors, etc.
• Solutions that repair and restore ecosystems adversely affected by climate change or Multi-hazards
• You can suggest your own theme during the workshop. If enough participants are interested in that topic, we can work on it.

Participants need to submit a short proposal (max. number words:300) based on the chosen problem and proposed methods to solve it. All submissions should follow the template provided by the organizers. In this phase, candidates should clearly identify the tools/hardware/software that they require to solve the problem.

Eligibility for participation in phase 2 is based on the evaluation by the expert committee.

Each team will be assigned with a technical mentor and regular one to one meetings will be conducted with the team to support designing. A technical support person will also be available to support the teams with the tools/hardware/software they use.

Participants should design the proposed solution and present it before the panel

The panel will evaluate and grade each presentation. Only eligible teams based on their evaluation would be allowed to participate in the next phase

Participants should implement the proposed solution in its entirety, and present the completed solution to the panel.

They will have discussions with mentors and take the necessary support.

Industry and Amrita will provide all required supports – hardware/software/tools.

The top 2 best projects in each theme will be selected and awarded.

Phase-1 Problem Identification and Definition

In Phase – 1 of the hackathon you identified a critical problem that you will address by innovating an effective and sustainable solution. Please refine and review your problem statement. An accurate and precise problem statement is the starting point for solution development. If your problem statement is too broad or vague, your solution will not be effective and will not create the intended impact.

Phase – 2 Solution Definition and Design – We recommend that you look at the following aspects of your solution in Phase-2. At the end of this Phase, your submissions should touch up on all these aspects.

In every step in Phase 2, the team should do a sort of retrospection to see if the Product or Solution Specification, Architecture Design, Implementation Strategy & Testing is in sync with the Problem Definition and applicable to the target customer.

Product or Solution Specification

We recommend that you start with documenting your product or solution specification. The product of solution specification is the document that captures all the functionality and features that the product of solution provides. It describes all the operational modes and establishes the performance metrics for your product or solution. You will need to submit a product/solution spec at the end of this Phase as a part of your required submissions to qualify for the next Phase of the hackathon.

The problem definition should be crip and should clearly mention what is the problem you are trying to solve, value (benefits) expected to the end customer. This area should reflect Empathize and Define stages in the Design Thinking Process.

By studying your product of solution specification, one should be able to tell if your solution indeed solves the problem that you have chosen in Phase-1.

Architecture and Microarchitecture Design

Establish the high-level architecture of your product or solution. This involves determining the Hardware and Software partitions (which functions will be implemented in hardware/firmware and which functions will be implemented in high level Software). Ideally, this step should result in a high-level functional block diagram of your product or solution, identifying all sub-components, both in HW and SW.

Further, you will need to work out the details of the functions each block will perform, the communications between the sub-blocks, as well as all the input requirements and output generation for successful operation.

You may also want to understand the internal timing aspects of the design, so that successful communication between sub-blocks, between HW/SW and the external world is established for robust solution performance. If this is required for your design a high-level timing diagram will be useful.

Implementation Strategy

How will you implement your solution? What off the shelf hardware can you use? Which HW sections will you need to design yourself? How will you design the HW? Which available SW platforms will you use? Which SW components will you develop yourself? What methodology will you use to schedule and track your design development?

These are aspects that you as a team should plan out in detail before embarking on Phase-3.

Theoretical Design of the Product or Solution

Once your detailed design is done, you will need to analyze its performance. Will it operate like you think it will? How do you theoretically check this? Will it meet its performance goals? How do you analyze this to ensure that your implementation will indeed work as you designed it?

The output of this activity is a report that cross checks the design functionality against the product specification, and also does performance projection for your solution.

Design Validation & Performance Analysis and Projection

How are you going to test the functionality and performance of your design? The output of this analysis will be a product or solution test and validation plan. Testing is to ensure that all components of your design function as they should under all operating conditions. Validation is to ensure that the solution works in its operating environment (real world) like it has been designed to. What are the extreme conditions that you will face? Will your solution hold up?

Phase-2 Outputs for Submission

At the end of Phase-2, we expect all teams to submit the following documents:

1. Refined Problem Statement (If you think your old statement is fine, just resubmit it).
2. Product/Solution Specification – should include at least the following:
   • All primary Inputs monitored or Data ingested
   • All primary outputs generated: Data, Control, Communication, etc
   • All functions performed by the product or solution
   • Operating conditions within with the product or solution will operate
   • Performance targets for this solution (You have to figure out how you define good performance for your own Product or solution).
3. Architecture block diagram and high level description. This should say what off the shelf components you plan to use (HW or SW), and which components you will develop Should also state how you will integrate everything together and what external communication links you will need to use, if any.
4. Validation Plan – How will you check that your solution or product works like you have specified it? What resources will you need to do the test or validation?