Dr. Rajesh Kannan Megalingam, Director, Humanitarian Technology (HuT) Labs and Assistant Professor, Department of Electronics and Communication Engineering, Amrita School of Engineering, Amritapuri, was an invited speaker at the recently concluded IEEE International Women in Engineering (WIE) Conference on Electrical and Computer Engineering 2015 (WIECON-ECE 2015) held at Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology (BUET) from December 19-20, 2015.

He organized a workshop on Human Machine Interface- Hand Gesture Recognition in Navigational Platform for Rehabilitation of People with Mobility Issues at the conference. Apart from conducting the workshop, Dr. Rajesh also presented three research papers at the conference which are to be published in IEEE Xplorer and SCOPUS Indexed.

Vishnu G. B. of 2015 MSc Computer Science batch, who was also a Research Associate at HuT Labs and co-author of one of the papers, travelled with Dr. Rajesh and presented one of the research papers. The remaining two papers were presented as posters at the conference.

The details of the research papers presented are as follows:

• Title of the Paper: Study and Development of Android Controlled Wireless Pole Climbing Robot
  Authors: Rajesh Kannan Megalingam, S. Venkatraj Reddy , G. Sriharsha , P. Surya Teja, K. Sai Kumar, Parvathy Gopal (5^th Semester B.Tech. students from the department of Electronics and Communication Engineering)
• Title of the Paper: Development of Intelligent Wheelchair Simulator for Indoor Navigation Simulation and Analysis
  Authors: Rajesh Kannan Megalingam, Vishnu G. B.(2015 MSc Computer Science student), Meera Pillai (2015 MTech VLSI student)
• Title of the Paper: FPGA Based Wheelchair Autonavigation for People with Mobility Issues
  Authors: Rajesh Kannan Megalingam, Meera Pillai, Athul Balan E. A., Aparna Jayakumar, Arsha Anil, Jeeba Varghese (Pass out ECE Students and current MTech VLSI students)

IEEE International Women in Engineering (WIE) Conference on Electrical and Computer Engineering 2015 (WIECON-ECE 2015) was attended by a host of international speakers from IEEE. Ljiljana Trajkovic, Ph.D., P.Eng., Fellow of IEEE President, IEEE Systems, Man, and Cybernetics Society (2014-15) was the General Chair of the conference and an invited speaker. Pau-Choo (Julia) Chung, Ph.D. Professor, National Cheng Kung University, Taiwan Vice President of IEEE Computational Intelligence Society (CIS) on Membership Activities, Margaretha A.K. Eriksson Director-Elect, IEEE Region 8 (2015-16) Irbis Konsult AB and Halmstad University, Sweden, David B. Durocher, Fellow of IEEE President, IEEE Industry Applications Society (2015-16) Manager, Global Mining, Metals & Minerals Industry, Saifur Rahman, Ph.D., Fellow of IEEE Professor, Virginia Tech, USA President-Elect (2016-17), IEEE PES, Takako Hashimoto, Ph.D. Chair, IEEE Women in Engineering (WIE) 2015 Coordinator, Professor, Chiba University of Commerce, Japan and Dr. Peter Magyar, Fellow of IEEE, Chair, IAS Chapters and Membership Department (CMD) were some of the prominent speakers at the conference.

The conference witnessed participation from 12 countries with 150 participants and hosted about 140 paper and poster presentations.