The 15th International Conference on Distributed Computing and Networking was hosted by the Department of Information Technology (IT) at Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham’s Coimbatore campus from January 4 – 7, 2014.

More than 150 delegates from all-around the globe attended the conference. Fifty papers were presented in the area of distributed computing and networking.

Delegates from the industry and academia discussed the advances in distributed computing and communication networks.

The four – day conference was inaugurated by Dr. Bharat Jayaraman, Chair of PG Programs at Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham, Coimbatore. “The institution has gained a lot of recognition especially in the south for providing quality education and innovative research projects that benefits the society,” he proudly noted.

Dr. Sukumar Ghosh, Professor, Department of Computer Science at the University of IOWA, USA, Dilip Krishnaswamy, IBM Research India, Misha Pavel, National Science Founadation (NSF) USA, Dr. Kishore Kothapalli, IIT Hyderabad, Prof. K. Gangadharan and Prof. Prashant R. Nair, Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham presided over the inaugural ceremony.

The first day of the conference witnessed tutorial sessions, keynotes, workshops and panel discussion.

“Resource Management on Clouds: Principles and Techniques”, Dr. Shrikharesh Majumdar, Professor, Carleton University, Canada discussed the various challenges of resource management in cloud computing.
 

“The resource management challenges range from handling resource heterogeneity, effective allocation of resources to requests, scheduling of jobs mapped to a given resource as well as handling uncertainties associated with the workload and the system and achieving adequate security,” he said.

Dr. Kalapriya Kannan and Angur Narang of IBM Research India in their talks during the session, “Big Data Computing Platform and Eco – system” explained the characteristics of Big Data (the term describes massive volume of both unstructured and structured data).

A couple of Computing and Networking workshops were organised by researchers. TCS Innovation Labs explored the workshop on Computing and Networking for Internet of Things (ComNet – IoT) while IBM Research India orgainsed a workshop on Smarter Planet and Big Data Analytics.

An expert’s panel including Dilip Krishnaswamy (IBM Research India), Dr. Maneesha Sudheer (Amrita Centre for Wireless Networks & Applications) and Anwitaman Datta (Nanyang Technological University, Singapore) discussed on the topic, Is Internet of Things (IoT) heading towards a Downhill on its Hype Cycle.

Internet of Things (IoT) is an upcoming technology that connects all systems, and integrates internet with physical things. The panelists pointed out that, “To handle millions of sensors, the processing and analysis of data, networking even security and privacy are main challenges in IoT in a real industry.”

Cloud computing, sensing and big data analytics all of these areas have to be developed and integrated to make a real and mature IoT.

The Keynote on Tackling the World’s Biggest Challenges with Big Data Analytics and Research Webway for IoT was carried out by Dr. Ramesh, Director, IBM Research India and Dr. Krishnashree Achuthan, Director, Amrita Centre for Cyber Security Systems & Networks through video sessions.
 

The second day of the conference began with an enlightening session on Cognitive Systems: The New Era of Computing by Dr. Ramesh, Director, IBM Research India. “The key technologies for a new era of computing are context and learning, visual analysis & interaction, software defined environment, data centric system and atomic and neuro scale,” he explained.

The conference also had demos of research projects of TCS Innovation Labs, IBM Research India and Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham on the track of Distributed Computing and Networking. Amrita presented on its distributed system network, BuddhiEdge: Taking Education to the Edge, which provides educational context access to users at the edge of the network. BuddhiEdge was the latest innovation by Amrita E-learning Research Center, Amritapuri.

The third day of the conference started with a keynote address on Model-Based Approaches in Support Future Healthcare by Misha Pavel, Program Manager, National Science Foundation (NSF), USA. He discussed on the motivation and examples of Smart and Connect Health (solutions and innovations enabling health care). “We need to propose a model of Health care using IT and other visionary things to change the traditional aspects of health care, “he pointed out.

The day four of the conference was initiated with an interactive session on Recent Advances on Classical Synchronization Problems by Prasad Jayanti, Professor, Dartmouth College, USA. In the session, he described and discussed various problems, related algorithmic solutions and its research developments.

Other conference highlights included technical paper presentation and industry track talks with speakers from TCS Innovation Labs, IBM Research India, Qualcomm, Microsoft, Google Research, Accenture Labs, and Infosys Labs.

A Ph.D. forum was conducted to encourage promising scholars to showcase their research in the presence of a panel of renowned scientists and industrial leaders.

This conference has the distinction of being one of the few conferences regularly held in India to be listed in CORE Computer Science Conference Rankings.

“The conference was organized well and was a wonderful experience. I would like to work here for some time and looking forward to come back soon,” rejoiced Nidhi Tiwari from IIT Bombay.

“The conference was well managed and it was a great experience to work along with renowned persons and industry leads, sharing their innovations and interacting with them,” shared Anirudh Chakravorty from IIT Delhi.