SRMAP Departmental Events

The Department of Civil Engineering is all set to kick start their first Industry Guest Lecture Series on April 21, 2022. The lecture is scheduled from 9.45 am to 10.45 am followed by a Q&A session. Renowned aviation professional Mr Ashok Madhu Reddy, who has an experience of 25 years in airplane or airport operation, will deliver the talk on Airport Pavement Engineering.

The viability of the airport infrastructure is indeed a challenge in airport engineering. Airport pavement plays an important role in this scenario. The lecture intends to discuss the History of ICAO, airport planning, design, and maintenance in detail.

About the Speaker

Mr Ashok Madhu Reddy is an aviation professional with 25 years of experience in Airline/Airport Operations and Management. He is presently working as the Vice President of Aerosimple Technologies Pvt. Ltd., Visakhapatnam, AP which is an IT software company that specialises in SAAS for Airport operations and Management, serving 35 airports across the globe.

He was India’s first personnel who attained the “International Airport Professional” certification jointly issued by International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) and Airports Council International (ACI) Montreal, Canada. This was the only program in the world recognized by the United Nations (UN) to bring global standards worldwide. He is also a Board Director of the American/International Association of Airport Executives (AAAE/IAAAE).

Mr Ashok has two post-graduation degrees in management from India and UK. Previously, he worked with Air India, Srilankan Airlines, GMR Hyderabad and Delhi Airports, and AP Airport Development Corporation in various management capacities. He is also having multiple aviation certification courses to his credit.

Register for the webinar and get to know about Airport Pavement Engineering from the professional himself.

The Department of Mathematics is arranging the fifth instalment of the Departmental Distinguished Lecture Series on April 25, 2022, at 3.45 pm IST. Reputed Mathematician, Prof A Adimurthi will deliver an informative lecture on the topic ‘Controllability of Scalar Conservation Laws with Discontinuous Flux’.

About the Talk

Navier-Stokes and Euler equations play an important role in studying the flow of incompressible fluids. Weak solutions to these equations can be obtained by Galerkin method but the uniqueness is a big open problem. It is a big challenge to obtain an extra condition for the class of functions, so that in this class obtain the existence and uniqueness. To understand this phenomenon, it is better to look at a one-dimensional case where the equation turns out to be viscous Burger’s equation or Burger’s equation with non-linearity is of quadratic order. In this talk, we will restrict to Burger’s type equations called the Scalar Conservation Laws in one space dimension with strict convex flux. Way back in the 50’s, this equation was studied by Lax and Oleinik and obtained an explicit formula for a solution. Oleinik showed that this satisfies an extraction called the Entropy Condition and then showed that in this class, the solution is unique. Later Kruzkov, in an ingenious way, generalized this to obtain a unique solution for Scalar Conservation Law in higher dimensions and Lipschitz fluxes. This result was taken up by Zuazua and his collaborators and studied the Optimal Controllability for Burgers equation. They showed the existence of optimal control and to capture this, they derived a numerical algorithm whose convergence is still open. In a different direction, this was attacked, and the problem was completely solved. Getting the optimal solution is via projection method in a Hilbert space. Recently, this was extended in a non-trivial way to conservation laws with convex discontinuous flux. The talk will explain the main ideas of this work.

About the Speaker

A mathematician of repute, Prof A Adimurthi has been associated with the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Centre for Applicable Mathematics Bangalore. At present, he is working as a visiting professor at the Department of Mathematics and Statistics, IIT Kanpur. He has authored more than a hundred research articles on a wide range of topics including Partial differential equations, Functional analysis, Numerical analysis, Calculus of variations, Optimal control, and many others. Prof Adi Adimurthi has been elected as a fellow of; The Indian Academy of Sciences (F.A.Sc) Bengaluru (1996), The National Academy of Sciences (F.N.A.Sc), India in 1997, The Indian National Science Academy (F.N.A) in 1998, The World Academy of Sciences(TWAS) in 2018, Raja Ramanna and DST J.C. Bose National. Along with these fellowships, Professor Adimurthi has also been honoured with the prestigious Dr Zakir Hussain Award in 2013.

Join this informative talk with Prof A Adimurthi on April 25, 2022 at 3.45 pm IST.

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Allowing students to explore more into their learning domain will invariably enhance their quest for knowledge. The more students are encouraged to experiment with problems, tools, and substances they will work with, the better prepared they are to face any challenge head-on. It is also a better rewarding alternative as against the conventional book learning method.

Taking the current scenario into account,imparting hands-on training on cutting-edge developments is an excellent exercise to inculcate scientific spirit in young minds. Such initiatives should be actively promoted to equip students on par with the fast-evolving technological realm. We are delighted to announce that the SRM-Amara Raja Center for Energy Storage Devices, Department of Electronics and Communication Engineering, collaborates with NSS Cell-SRM AP to organise a “Hands-on Session on Lithium-ion Battery: Assembly and Testing” with the sponsorship from the DST-SERB Start-up Research Grant (SRG).

Date: April 14, 2022

Time: 9.30 am to 12.30 pm IST

We invite all the interested students to become part of this invigorating initiative and make the best use of this opportunity to receive an enriching training session. The event is also followed by lunch for all the participants.

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The Department of Civil Engineering is organising the first physical lecture as part of the Departmental Distinguished Lecture Series on April 12, 2022 from 11.00 pm to 12.30 pm. Prof Hemant B Kaushik from the Department of Civil Engineering, IIT Guwahati is the distinguished speaker of the event. He will deliver a talk on the topic “Lateral load capacity of common building types in India”. This talk will provide detailed insights into the seismic behaviour of different building types in India. Various experimental results of full-scale model tests on shake tables and actuators will also be presented.

Speaker’s Profile

Prof Hemant B Kaushik is currently working at IIT Guwahati in the Department of Civil Engineering and Centre for Disaster Management and Research. He is also the Associate Dean of Academic Affairs and the Head of the Centre for Educational Technology. His research areas broadly include: earthquake resistant design of structures, nonlinear behavior of structures, retrofitting of structures, seismic vulnerability assessment of structures, earthquake damage surveys etc. He was the recipient of the INAE Young Scientist Award in 2010 and 2013. He also received the David Fischetti Award in 2019, presented by the Preservation Engineering Technical Committee (PETC) of the Association for Preservation Technology International (APT), USA. The award recognises an outstanding article in a peer-reviewed publication that advances the field of conservation engineering. Prof Kaushik is also a member of the Earthquake Engineering Sectional Committee, CED 39, Bureau of Indian Standards. He also holds membership in several professional bodies like Earthquake Engineering Research Institute (EERI), USA, American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE), USA, The Masonry Society (TMS), USA, Indian Society of Earthquake Technology (ISET), India and Institution of Engineers, India. He has contributed several post-earthquake reconnaissance study reports and papers in reputed journals and conferences.

All are invited to join this informative lecture on Tuesday, April 12, 2022, from 11.00 pm to 12:30 pm.

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The Department of Electronics and Communication Engineering is hosting the first instalment of the Distinguished Industry-Academia Interaction Lecture in the ECE DDIAL series. The event is scheduled on April 9, 2022, at 10.30 am. Dr. Serene Banerjee, Master Researcher, Ericsson Research, will be the keynote speaker. She will deliver a talk on the topic ‘AI/ML Based Interference Diagnostics and Mitigation for Improved Quality of Service in Radio Access Networks’.

Abstract of the Talk

For coverage and capacity optimization, Uplink Power Control is one of the key steps, in addition to antenna tilting and Downlink Power Control. For self-organizing networks, automated algorithms for Uplink Power Control are a necessity. However, Uplink Power Control affects the noise in the neighbouring cells. It is important to detect this interference to monitor uplink noise. Uplink noise due to power control manifests as static interference in the channel. The current state-of-the-art baseline model is based on regression models. We have proposed automated detection of static interference in the uplink channel of cells based on machine learning models. We have evaluated the same on customer data on LTE networks with high accuracy. The detected cells are subsequently used to correct the nominal power parameter through a proposed teacher-student model based on the primary cell and its neighbours. This approach shows better performance than the state-of-the-art baseline methods. The dual of static is dynamic interferences and can be attributed to traffic load, Passive Intermodulation (PIM) and thermal noise, etc. PIM identification is a major component in troubleshooting modern wireless communication systems. The introduction of carrier aggregation has increased PIM occurrences. Current state-of-the-art approaches include manual rule-based and hardware-based debugging. These approaches can detect the occurrence of PIM, long after the event occurrence and result in incurring incidental costs. We propose an ensemble of time series-based machine learning and signal processing approaches that can automatically identify PIM in real-time by analyzing Key Performance Indicators (KPI) of the primary cell and its nearest neighbours. We validate our results for various environmental conditions in data available from LTE and 5G consumer networks. We have further extended the work to multi-frequency time series to handle finer time granularities and detect PIM anomalies in an online learning setting. We further propose a self-supervised reinforcement learning approach to predict PIM related anomalies before it happens. We forecast environmental conditions that give rise to PIM based on offline historical data and model to predict future occurrences. Experimental results are on real-world datasets comprising 50,000+ cells which have shown to accurately predict PIM 60% of the time. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work, where we are able to predict PIM anomalies before they happen. Post PIM-identification, we propose a binary search-based solution that is amenable to real-time implementation. We show through simulations that this search in tandem with a reinforcement learning-based solution can dynamically mitigate and cancel PIM. Results show that the number of steps to converge, to identify and mitigate the PIM in uplink frequency is reduced by a large factor. To summarize, our contributions include using machine learning algorithms for: (1) robust interference classification, (2) demonstrating p0-nominal recommender as teacher-student model, (3) a times-series analysis-based PIM identification, (4) extending the approach to multi-frequency time series, and for online learning, (5) demonstrating a self-supervised reinforcement learning approach to predict PIM anomalies before they happen, and (6) mitigating PIM, in spite of environmental unknowns, by employing binary search in conjunction with ML/RL-based approaches.

About the Speaker

Serene Banerjee, Master Researcher, Ericsson Research, has 17+ years of industrial experience after completing her PhD from the University of Texas at Austin, under Prof Brian L Evans in 2004. She has completed BTech(H) in Electronics and Electrical Communications Engineering from IIT Kharagpur in 1999. At Ericsson, she is focusing on developing AI/ML algorithms for Radio Access Networks. Prior to Ericsson, she has worked with Texas Instruments, HP, and Johnson Controls. She has 23 peer-reviewed publications, 9 granted patents, and several pending.

Join the webinar for an informative interaction with Dr Serene Banerjee.