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The Department of Electronics and Communication Engineering is hosting a seminar on September 16, 2022, at 4 pm as part of the Departmental Distinguished Lecture Series. Dr Anurag Singh, Dean of Research and Consultancy, NIT Delhi, will deliver a talk on the topic “Federated Learning”.

Abstract of the talk

The most crucial resource for any business, individual, or person in the world is data. Everyone, whether an individual or an institution, wants to prevent a data breach. High-quality data must be subjected to machine learning algorithms. The model is trained using traditional machine learning techniques, which save data to one server. There is a chance that this method will expose personal information. A machine learning technique called Federated Learning (FL) enables machine learning models to train on various datasets located on various sites without sharing data. Without putting training data in a centralised location, it enables the development of a common global model. Additionally, it permits personal information to stay in local places, lowering the risk.

A new area of machine learning called federated learning already offers greater advantages than conventional machine learning techniques.

Data Security: Training data is kept locally on the devices, negating the need for a data pool.

Data variety: Heterogeneous data since it incorporates information from various users.

Real-time continuous learning: Client data is used to enhance models continuously.

Federated Learning is applied in the field of IoT, Healthcare, smartphones, Advertising, Autonomous Vehicles etc.

Speaker’s Profile

Dr Anurag Singh is currently working as the Associate Professor and Dean of Research and Consultancy at NIT Delhi. He received his PhD from the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur. His research areas are Network Theory, Dynamics on/of Networks, Opinion Dynamics, Epidemic Modeling, Intelligent transportation system etc. Dr Anurag Singh has teaching experience at both undergraduate and graduate levels. He has taught courses ranging from the introductory level to specialized courses in Computer Science and Engineering, and Mathematics. Currently, he is mentoring students at graduate and undergraduate levels at the National Institute of Technology Delhi, India. In addition, he has also been supervising PhD students. He has around 70 publications featured across various leading journals and three DST-funded projects to his credit.

Utilising the student phase of life to the maximum is paramount in every ambitious individual’s career. Investing a definite amount of time and effort in acquiring and honing knowledge is necessary for building a better future. To create your identity in a multifaceted academic milieu, one needs to get a grip on how the world works. Affording different values and mindsets of the world outside one’s homeland is a well-opted way to reach this goal. There lies the relevance of studying abroad.

The Office of International Relations and Higher Studies is conducting a seminar on Glimpse on Abroad Studies to discuss the University Admission Process and the importance of GMAT, GRE & IELTS. Mr Prabhu T L, Regional Head, Jamboree Education, South India, will handle the session.

Date: September 15, 2022

Time: 4.00 PM to 5.00 PM

Venue: Admin block, Third floor, ALC -1

About the speaker

Prabhu holds an MBA in International Business from Pondicherry Central University and is currently the Regional Head – South with Jamboree Education, India’s leading institute for helping students achieve their dreams of studying in Global Universities. His focus areas include the practice of 21st-century education curriculum, the use of technology for academic excellence, and enabling students to realise their potential by choosing suitable careers, courses, and colleges in India and abroad. He is a teacher at heart and enjoys spending time with students inside and outside the class. He guides students to achieve their dreams of pursuing higher education in the top Universities worldwide.

The Office of International Relations and Higher Studies is organising a Mega Passport Drive to assist students in applying for new passports and renewing their existing passports. The event is scheduled on September 15 and 22, 2022 from 10.00 am to 04.30 pm.

SRM University-AP offers umpteen opportunities for students to study abroad and gain international learning exposure. The various outbound mobility programmes introduced by the university are Global Immersion, Semester Abroad Programmes, Overseas Internships, Summer and Winter Schools, etc. What makes the abroad learning opportunities at SRM University-AP unique is the customised variety of overseas learning avenues introduced here keeping the differing requirements of its students in mind.

A lot of students have expressed their interest in being part of such study abroad ventures. However, a majority of them are still groping in the darkness when it comes to various technical procedures associated with travelling abroad. Applying and securing a passport is one of the hurdles on their way. The Mega Passport Drive is an opportunity to walk students through the passport application procedure.

Students can submit their applications to the university itself. All the individuals who are looking for a new issue or reissue can avail this opportunity.

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The Office of International Relations and Higher Studies in collaboration with Isha Foundation conducted a workshop “Save the Soil” for the students of SRM University-AP. The workshop intended to create awareness among the student community on the necessity of soil conservation. The Save Soil Movement is a global campaign spearheaded by the visionary, Sadhguru, to address the soil crisis and take a pioneering initiative towards the restoration of the planet.

As part of the workshop, students were given awareness classes and lectures on soil conservation and the deteriorating scenario of nature such as agricultural degradation, land pollution and soil erosion. An elaborate overview on the extensive damage inflicted on soil due to various human activities was discussed during the workshop. The soil extension and soil management ventures initiated recently brought attention to the degrading status of soil health due to excessive carbon footprint.

Students were also introduced to numerous techniques to improve the soil condition and reinstitute its fertility. The Save Soil movement advocates traditional conservation practices such as crop rotation, contour farming, conservation tillage etc., to retain and enhance the organic content of soil. The movement aims at establishing long-term policies that give special emphasis to addressing the soil crisis by uniting people, associations, and governments on a global scale. Raising awareness among students is the need of the hour to give rise to a conscientious generation capable of instigating a preservative outlook towards nature unlike in the past.

Around 60 students from different departments attended the three-day workshop that was held on September 05, 06, and 09. The Senior Programme Coordinator, Mr Sandeep Samala, encouraged the students to be part of the Save Soil campaign by registering on the portal. Dr Naga Swetha Pasupuleti, Associate Director, appreciated the Save the Soil – Isha volunteers for successfully conducting the workshop.

The Engineering students of SRM University-AP never failed to excel in the competitive placement drives with their unrivalled fervour. The Department of Computer Science and Engineering students are beyond thrilled about their placement with Marquee offers up to ₹26.50 LPA. G Lakshmi Sai Bhargavi, Sneha Teja Sree Reddy Thondapu, Addepalli Srilekha, Jaya Ganesh Kumar Gudipati, V S S Mani Saketh CH, Sashank Venkata Challapalli, Nallanukala Tejaswini, and Satti Venkata Rama grabbed marquee offers with incredible salary packages.

The placement team of the university considers and analyses major recruiting companies’ criteria to equip our students to meet the various levels of constantly transforming industry demands. Students are instructed and trained from the very beginning of their programmes to know the pulse and challenges of the tomorrow they are exposed to. “The Placement team helped me a lot by introducing many Marquee companies at the beginning of academic years, which made me work faster on my skills”, says Mani Saketh with gratitude. “The way they helped us by conducting constant training sessions and responding very quickly whenever we had a single doubt or concern is commendable”, he added.

Making students industry-ready has always been a significant concern of the university. The courses provided in the university are supported not only by soft skill training but also by professional training. “There is always the possibility of starting from scratch here. Daily technical assessments helped us understand the industrial standards and requirements”, said Srilekha as she recollected her training days.

The Directorate of Corporate Relations and Career Services firmly believes that the latest placement offers marks just the beginning of the 2023 placements. Year after year, there is a considerable increase in the number of students recruited from the university. The placement team expects much more quality offers in the new placement season.

Research at the Department of Electronics and Communication Engineering is currently developing defect detection algorithms. Assistant Professor Dr V Udaya Sankar, Professor Dr Yellampalli Siva Sankar, and their BTech student Ms Gayathri Lakshmi have published a paper, A Review of various defects in PCB, in the Journal of Electronic Testing: Theory and Applications with an impact factor of 0.795.

Abstract

Printed Circuit Boards (PCBs) are the building blocks for all electronic products. Fabrication of a PCB involves various mechanical and chemical processes. As obtaining accuracy in the mechanical and chemical processes is very difficult, various defects/faults are formed during PCBs fabrication. These fabrication defects lead to performance degradation of electronic products. This paper describes multiple defects present in PCBs under the Through-hole and SMD categories. To understand the frequency of occurrence and reason for defects in both manual and machine, PCB fabrication data was collected and analysed from April 2017 to July 2020 as a part of industry collaboration.

The research is a review done on the defects present in PCB. Researchers surveyed various papers on PCB defects and their detection. Based on the literature review and information obtained from Efftronics systems Pvt. Ltd, they classified the defects, gave a detailed explanation for each, and provided some analysis of their occurrences.

While doing the literature review, researchers observed that no paper mentioned all the defects that can occur in the case of PCB fabrication. For this reason, they came up with this paper which provides detailed information regarding the defects. Information is also obtained from the industry. Comparing the defects can help focus on the critical defects for future research on defect detection methodology.

The project is done in collaboration with Efftronics Systems Pvt. Ltd. Through the partnership, the company supported sharing images, insights information related to defects and involved in discussions. Also, the company allowed visiting their premises to understand more about PCB defects. Researchers look forward to creating a prototype that detects all the defects mentioned in this paper for a given PCB.

Dr Soumyajyoti Biswas, Assistant Professor from the Department of Physics, has been keenly involved in intense research around areas like the statistical physics of fracture and breakdown in disordered materials and machine learning methods in predicting the imminent breakdown in disordered systems. He has recently published two articles titled “Success of social inequality measures in predicting critical or failure points in some models of physical systems” and “Evolutionary Dynamics of Social Inequality and Coincidence of Gini and Kolkata indices under Unrestricted Competition” in the journals Frontiers in Physics and International Journal of Modern Physics C respectively. The research was done in collaboration with various academicians and undergraduate students (BTech CSE and BSc Physics) from the Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata and Saha Institute of Nuclear Physics, Kolkata.

It is known that physical systems behave erratically near critical points. Since the 1970s, the ‘erratic’ behaviour has been explained in terms of critical phenomena, and it was found that there are some robust patterns in classes of systems, e.g., all liquid-gas transitions have something in common. Those common patterns were quantified in terms of critical exponents – some numbers that belong to a particular class of systems.

The research shows that if the ‘erratic’ responses of systems near critical points are quantified by some measures of inequality indices (higher the values of the indices, higher the inequality), then such indices behave in a near-universal way for different physical systems, even if they belong in different universality classes. The articles have shown such behaviour in models of physical systems. They have also shown that in socio-economic data, which are also the systems that were conjectured to be in the self-organized critical state. The behaviour from real data matches very well with those from the model simulations.

The researchers have tested their observations from the model simulations to various socio-economic systems that were long conjectured to be in the state of self-organized criticality. Specifically, they have looked into the income inequalities in the US, inequality in citations of authors, inequality in income from movies, and inequality in fluctuations of Bitcoin markets. In all these systems, the participating agents compete among themselves without much external intervention.

In fact, the only system among these where there are some interventions is income inequality. They have shown that through data from the IRS in the US, that inequality has consistently grown in the 1980s till date and has been following the path predicted in our model simulations.

In future, they plan on continuing along this line of looking at critical behaviour in physical systems through inequality analysis. Particularly for the systems where the critical point can represent a catastrophic event (say, fracture) and it is important to quantify the distance from such a catastrophic point.

Abstract of the Research

In many physical systems, experimentally measurable quantities vary drastically near the critical point of such systems. For example, in liquids turning into gas, the densities fluctuate, similar fluctuations happen for magnetisation near critical temperature. We have shown that in systems where the critical point is self-organized i.e., the system reaches the critical point on its own, the unequal nature of their responses show nearly universal trends, even if the models belong to different universality class. This observation could then be used in physical and also socio-economic systems, to quantify their distance from critical point.

The right hand side figure illustrates the variation of the inequality indices and the circle indicates the critical point where the system is evolving towards. On the left hand side, the picture presents the same indices for income inequality in the US. It has been observed that the inequality has grown over the years and tending towards the saturation value (about 0.86) in a very similar way that is seen in models.

The promotion of sustainable growth of agriculture is one of the primary concerns of developing nations. The agriculture domain in Southeast Asia has undergone rapid transformation and structural changes over the last few years. Assistant Professor Dr Ghanshyam Pandey from the Department of Economics discusses the reasons for this changed scenario in his latest publication “Transformation and Sources of Growth in Southeast Asian Agriculture”. The research conducted in collaboration with International Food Policy Research (IFPRI) and the Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR) was published in the Q2 journal Southeast Asian Agriculture having an Impact Factor of 1.7.

Abstract of the Research

Over the past few decades, agriculture in Southeast Asia has experienced robust growth and undergone a significant structural transformation, albeit at a different pace in different countries in the region. This paper aims to understand the agricultural transformation and growth process in Southeast Asia. The findings of this study show that driven by technological change, area expansion, and diversification, agriculture has grown faster in low-income countries in the region. In contrast, agricultural growth in high-income countries has been slow and driven by price increases, mainly of export-oriented commercial crops such as oil palm, rubber, and coconut—alongside an expansion of cropped areas under these crops. In view of the fixed supply of land and high volatility in global food prices, the area- and price-driven growth is not sustainable in the long run. For efficient, sustainable, and inclusive growth, exploiting the potential of existing and frontier technologies and diversification of production portfolios holds greater promise.

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