Dr. Ganesh Neelakanta Iyer currently serves as an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science & Engineering, School of Engineering, Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham, Coimbatore. He has received his Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science and Engineering (University first rank) from Mahatma Gandhi University, Kerala, India in 2004 and Masters and PhD degrees from National University of Singapore in 2008 and 2012 respectively. He brings in a decade of industry experience in various companies including Sasken Communication Technologies, NXP semiconductors and most recently at Progress software. He has handled several roles in the software industry including QA Architect, Technical Support Manager, Engineering development and Technology Evangelist.
He has strong inclination towards Game Theory. He applies game theory for handling conflicts, enforcing cooperation and for multi-agent systems. His technical knowledge and experience are in various areas including Cloud/Edge/Fog Computing Paradigms (including cloud platforms, Node.js and containers), Computer Networks, Software Engineering practices (Agile) and Quality Analysis, Economic models (Game Theoretic principles) and current day practices on cloud-based enterprise architectures, Internet of Things (IoT) based systems, Machine Learning and technology for traditional Indian dance (such as Kathakali) popularization. His mathematical interests includegame theory, graph theory, optimization principles etc. Over the past several years he has acquired practical knowledge and experience in various cutting-edge software engineering methodologies including Agile framework and has experience formulating and implementing various software engineering principles using Agile for large and small product development teams.
Dr. Iyer is active in doing practical industry-oriented research on the above topics of his interest. He also aspire to do research on technological innovations to popularize traditional classical arts such as Kathakali and Koodiyattam.
He has published two book chapters in the “Encyclopaedia for Cloud Computing” published in 2016 in addition to several book chapters, journals and conference publications. Dr. Iyer has delivered several practical workshops and talks on various cutting-edge technology topics in many academic and industry events in several countries including USA, Europe, Australia and Asia. Many of these were on the contributions made by him in his industry engagement for software quality analysis with current day software engineering principles such as Agile for application development involving cloud platforms, mobile platforms and IoT based systems.
Dr. Iyer is an IEEE and IEEE-CS Member. He has been a reviewer of many internationals Journals including IEEE Transactions on Computers, IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems and several international conferences. He was also the program chair for several international conferences including ICCCI and ICIWE.
Dr. Iyer has strong teaching skills and boundless passion for teaching. He was a visiting faculty at IIIT-H (International Institute of Information Technology Hyderabad), and has been teaching various subjects including “Game Theory for Computer Science”, “Computer Networks”, “Advanced Computer Networks” and “Scripting and Computer environments” for which, he has framed the syllabus, developed the materials and references, structured the grading scheme and formulated continuous assessment strategies. Further, he was a member of Board of Studies at JNTU-H (a premium university in India) where he participates in framing the syllabus for the university’s upcoming academic year.
He is also an expert in performing Kathakali, a traditional Indian dance. He has composed a story in Kathakali and he spends a considerable amount of his personal time to uplift this traditional art by organizing Kathakali performances, workshops and demonstrations and performance by himself. He has also composed a Kathakalistory “Sri Mookambika Mahathmyam” which has been staged in multiple venues in India.
Research Interests
- Game Theory, Machine Learning
- Cloud Computing, Edge Computing, Handling conflicts, Cooperation enforcement
- Software Engineering, Software Quality Analysis
- Technological innovations to popularize traditional classical arts such as Kathakali
Research Keywords
- Cloud Computing
- Game Theory
- Machine Learning
- Deep Learning
- Agile Software Engineering
- Edge and Fog Computing
- Wireless Networks
- Internet of Things
PG Students
- HarikrishnaPydi – PhD (Computational offloading for Edge computing)
- AgathiyanSannasi– PhD (AI, ML and Game Theory for ERP systems)
- Mr Kumar D – PhD (Pervasive Computing, Agriculture)
- Ms.Tulasi – Masters (Deep Learning and Computer Vision for hand gesture recognition in Kathakali)
UG Students
- S. Bala Vignesh, Bommidi Sohan, R. Dharmesh, R. Vishal (Machine Learning and Computer Vision for automating third umpire actions in cricket)
Educational Qualification
- 2012 : Ph. D. in Computer Engineering
National University of Singapore
Supervisor : Prof Bharadwaj Veeravalli
Ph. D. awarded in December 2012
Ph. D. Title : Broker-mediated Multiple – Cloud Orchestration Mechanisms for Cloud Computing in Department of Electrical and Communication Engineering
- 2008 : Masters in Electrical Engineering
National University of Singapore
Completed M.Sc.in Electrical Engineering with specialization in Computer Engineering. Did a project under the guidance of Dr Kong Peng-Yong at A*STAR I2R (Institute of Infocomm Research, Singapore).
Thesis Title : Belief based cooperation enforcement in wireless sensor networks
- 2004 : B.Tech. in Computer Science and Engineering
Mahatma Gandhi University, Kerala
Completed B.Tech in Computer Science and Engineering with University FIRST rank.
Final year project was done as DRDO (Defence Research and Development Organization), Bengaluru, India in 2003 on Secure email transfer
Experience
| Year |
Affiliation |
| May 2018 – Present |
Associate Professor,
Department of Computer Science & Engineering, School of Engineering, Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham, Amritapuri, Kollam, Kerala, India |
| October 2012 – May 2018 |
Handled several roles during this tenure including QA Architect, Technical Support Manager, Principal Engineer and Technology Evangelist.
Dr. Iyer handled several roles here including Cloud QA Architect, Technical Support Manager, Technology Evangelist and Principal Engineer. As a Technical Support Manager, he handled a t technical support for their core products in the APAC and EMEA regions. He was instrumental in establishing a center in Hyderabad, India for support team to operate in all shifts, growing from a 6 member team to a 22 member team including hiring a senior support manager and customer success manager.
As a QA Architect, his key responsibilities include automation framework design for web products, developing strategies and reviewing strategies for key product QA initiatives, cross-team collaboration, delivering sessions on the products at various customer conferences across the globe, driving the efforts to build product PoC’s for field, conducting competitive analysis for products/features and technology evangelism. He has been instrumental in designing and developing various QA web automation frameworks at Progress. Some of them include a model driven framework and very recently POM based test automation framework on top of Selenium using Type Script. As an agile practitioner, he is active in various phases of agile software development life cycle.
He has been a key resource in several product as well as QA CoE initiatives at Progress such as 24×7 test automation framework and mechanism, robustness strategy for a cloud product, cloud integration testing and security test initiative. |
| August 2013 – May 2018 |
Visiting Faculty,
International Institute of Information Technology, Teaching, Student Supervision, Syllabus Committee Member |
| October 1995 – July 2007 |
Senior Software Engineer,
NXP Semiconductors Ltd, Protocol stack development of UMA (WLAN-GSM dual stack), Protocol stack development of RRM/RLC/MAC on Mobile for GSM/GPRS/EDGE |
| September 2004 – September 2006 |
Software Engineer,
Sasken Communication Technologies, End to End System Integration activities for GPRS/EDGE RAN |
Academic Experience
| Year |
Affiliation |
| May 2018 – Till Date |
Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham
Research:
His research during this period primarily focuses on applying game theory for cloud/fog/edge computing, cooperation enforcement in wireless networks and recently he started focusing on applying deep learning to improve the audience reach for traditional Indian classical dance drama Kathakali. This recent work involves image processing and application of deep learning to classify hand-gestures in this dance-drama and potentially identify its meaning. His another focus is on the strategies for computational offloading in edge and cloud computing. In addition, he started looking at the intersection of game theory and machine learning in areas including learning for predicting human strategic behavior, adversarial machine learning and multi-agent reinforcement learning. He has a UG level research project on applying machine learning and computer vision for automating third umpire in cricket.
Teaching :
He applies very innovative and practical oriented teaching approaches which makes his classes very interesting for students. He has been selected as AWS Educate Cloud Faculty Ambassador by Amazon Web Services in 2019 in recognition of his development, implementation and thought leadership in cloud computing programs, curricula and course. He has formulated unique teaching pedagogy for the courses Cloud Computing and Software Engineering to include industrial aspects,tools and best practices with high importance to continuous assessment which was well appreciated by the teaching and student community.Courses handled include:
- Cloud Computing and Services, 2018,2019, 3rd year UG
- Software Engineering (Project based on Agile methodology), 3rd year UG
- Introduction to Game Theory, 3rd year UG
- Game Theory and Engineering Applications
- PhD Computer Organization and Architecture, 3rd year UG
Administrative Duties :
- Teaching, Curriculum development, Examining and Grading for UG and PhD level courses
- Supervising PhD, Masters and UG students, Doctoral Committee member for PhD students
- Reviewing the project work by PG and UG students, assess and provide feedback
- Review and update curriculum based on industry requirements for several subjects
- Faculty coordinator for the PG Programme on Artificial Intelligence and Data Science
- Coordinator for Board of Studies for a PG Programme on Artificial Intelligence and Data Science
- Coordinating the research activities in the department through Research Promotion Group
- Automation of several departmental processes through software development
- Board of Studies member for the new UG programme on Bachelors in Computer Science and Engineering – Artificial Intelligence
|
| July 2013 – May 2018 |
International Institute of Information Technology, (IIIT-H), Hyderabad, Guest Faculty
- “Game Theory for Computer Science” – Four years
- “Computer Networks” – Fall 2016
- “Advanced Computer Networks” – Monsoon 2016
- “Scripting and Computer Environments”, Fall 2017
|
| October 2007 – May 2012 |
National University of Singapore, Singapore Teaching Assistant (Part time)
- CS1101C (School of Computing, Programming Methodology, Tutorials, Semester 1 AY 2007-08)
- CS1102C (School of Computing, Data structures and algorithms, Tutorials, Semester 2 AY 2007-08)
- CG2007 (ECE, Microprocessors, Tutorials, Sem 2 AY 2010-11 & AY 2011-12)
- TE3801 (ECE, Robust Design of Electronic Circuits, Lab, Sem 2 AY 2010-11 & 2011-12)
- EE2007 (ECE, Microprocessors, Tutorials, Sem 1 & 2 AY 2009-10, Sem 1 AY 2010-11 & AY 2011-12)
- EE2007E (ECE, Microprocessors, Tutorials, Sem 2 AY 2009-10, 2010-11 & 2011-12)
- TE2101 (ECE, Programming Methodology, Lab, Sem 1 AY 2009-10, 2010-11 & 2011-12)
|
| September 2004 (One month) |
Rajiv Gandhi Institute of Technology, Mahatma Gandhi University, Kottayam, India Guest Lecturer
Advanced Data Structures and File Systems for Semester 6, Bachelor of Technology |
Awards and Recognition
- Certificate earned on Probabilistic Graphical Models 1: Representation by Stanford University on Coursera
- Selected as AWS Educate Cloud Faculty Ambassador by Amazon Web Services in 2019 in recognition of his development, implementation and thought leadership in cloud computing programs, curricula and course
- Invited tutorial on “Game Theory for Networks and Telecommunications” at 26th IEEE ICT, Hanoi, Vietnam, April 2019
- Invited tutorial on “Game Theory and Engineering Applications” for IEEE INDICON 2018
- Invited workshop on “Containerization for next-generation application development and deployment” for IEEE INDICON 2018
- Invited Tutorial workshop at ICIC International conference, Bengaluru in October 2018
- Invited Keynote speaker for SAPIENCE 2018 in September 2018 at SNGCE, Kolenchery, Kerala
- Recognition for robustness activities in Rollbase QA, Progress Software, 2016
- Team Achievement Award for e-commerce integration testing, Progress, 2015
- Outstanding Contributor Award for Integration QA lead activities, Progress, 2014
- University Topper (First Rank) for the B-Tech degree examination in 2004
- National University of Singapore, Postgraduate Research Scholarship, 2009-2012
Talks/Workshops
- “Game Theory for Computer Networks and Distributed Systems”, Tutorial as part of 26th IEEE ICT 2019, Hanoi, Vietnam
- “Continuous Testing of Cloud Applications”, STAREAST 2017, Orlando, Florida, USA, May 2017
- “Building a satellite Rollbase application for an existing OpenEdge application in less than 60 mins”, Session at Exchange Australia 2016, Sydney, July 2016
- “Docker 101 – How docker works and how you can use it for development, test and production”, Session at Exchange Australia 2016, Sydney, July 2016
- “Building a satellite Rollbase application for an existing OpenEdge application in less than 60 mins”, Session at PUG Challenge Americas, Manchester, New Hampshire, USA, June 2016
- “Telerik Test Studio to Automate Web Applications”, Workshop at PUG Challenge EMEA, Copenhagen, Denmark, November 2015.
- “Game Theory for Computer Science”, Invited talk at Tennessee State University, Nashville, USA, June 2015.
- “Cloud Computing; Industry perspective”, Invited talk at Tennessee State University, Nashville, USA, June 2015.
- “Agile Testing; Principles and Best Practices, Talk at PUG Challenge Americas, Boston, USA, June 2015
- “Software Quality Analysis with Cloud; Challenges and Approaches”, Talk at PUG Challenge Americas, Boston, USA, June 2015.
- “Advanced Business Applications for the Cloud”, Workshop at Progress Exchange, Orlando, USA, October 2014.
- “Mastering Progress Rollbase – Inside Out”, Talk at Progress Exchange, Orlando, USA, October 2014
- “Using Docker for the First Time: A Hands-on Approach”, Containers and Microservices summit, BrightTALK, September 2017
- “Top trends in IoT in 2017 and their impact on digital transformation”, IoT summit, BrightTALK, June 2017
- “24×7 Continuous Testing in current day software development”, Bizdevops Master Weinar Series, SolutionsIQ webinar June 2017
- “Mobile, Hybrid, Native Cross-Platform Application Development”, BrightTALK webinar April 2017
- “Docker 101 – How Docker works and how you can use it in different product cycles”, Cloud summit, BrightTALK, April 2017
- “Choosing the right Cloud platform for addressing the right business opportunity”, BrightTALK, Cloud computing summit, November 2016
- “Resilient software design to handle unexpected situations”, BrightTALK webinar, October 2016
- “Cloud Computing and Industry 4.0 – A Match made in heaven”, Faculty Development Program at ASIET, Kalady, Kerala
- “Artificial Intelligence – The brain of Industry 4.0”, Faculty Development Program at MITS, Kerala
- Special session on “Machine Learning – A Gentle Introduction” as part of ViTECoN 2019, VIT, Vellore, Tamil Nadu in March 2019
- Special session on “Game Theory and Engineering Applications” as part of ViTECoN 2019, VIT, Vellore, Tamil Nadu in March 2019
- Session on “How to Start a Business – Become a successful entrepreneur”, at Srikrishna College of Engineering and Technology, March 2019 as part of the awareness week organized by the entrepreneurship wing
- “Dockers and Kubernetes – Scaling your application development and deployment with Cloud”, Anokha Tech Fest 2019, Coimbatore
- “Game Theory and Engineering Applications” Invited Tutorial for IEEE INDICON 2018
- “Containerization for next-generation application development and deployment”, Invited Workshop for IEEE INDICON 2018
- “Demystifying Containerization Principles for Data Scientists”, Invited Tutorial speech at ICIC International conference, Bengaluru, October 2018
- “Cloud Computing for Image Processing and Genomics”, Invited Keynote speech at SAPIENCE 2018, Kolenchery, Kerala, September 2018
- “Top trends in IoT in 2017 and their impact on digital transformation”, Invited Talk at Faculty Development Program on IoT, Cloud Computing and Big Data Analytics, ASIET, Kalady, Kerala, India July 2018
- “Dockers, Containers and Microsoft Azure IoT Edge”, Full day workshop as part of National workshop on Cloud and Fog computing, conducted by Karunya Institute, Coimbatore, February 2018
- “Simplify Enterprise IT with No Code Application – aPaaS” at Progress Exchange conference in Mumbai, November 2016
- “Cloud Testing essentials”, Step-IN Conference at Bengaluru, August 2016
- “Six Essential considerations for testing your Cloud applications”, Session at Great Indian Developer Summit (GIDS-2016), at Bengaluru, April 2016
- “Convergence of Cloud, Mobile and IoT” – Full day workshop at, K L University, Vijayawada, India, October 2015.
- “Technology disruptions of current era: Cloud, Mobile and IoT” – Full day workshop at, Dhanekula Institute of Technology, Vijayawada, India, October 2015.
- “How Internet of Things Changes our lives” – Half day technical session at, ASIET, Kalady, Kerala, India, October 2015.
- “Practical Agile Testing; Principles and Best Practices” – Talk at Decoding DevOps conference, Bangalore, India, April 2015.
- “Software Test Methodologies” – Guest Lecture at MuftakhamJah College of Engineering and Technology, Hyderabad, India, April 2015.
- “Mobile App Development using aPaaS platforms” – Full day workshop at HYSEA 2014, Seminar on Digital Enterprise, Hyderabad, India, September 2014.
- “Rapid Application Development using aPaaS Cloud environments” – Invited Full day workshop, Karunya University, Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu, India, March 2014.
- “Introduction to Cloud Computing” – Invited talk, Aryanet Institute of Technology, Palakad, 2014
