The EE Research is the annual event organized by the Department of Electrical Engineering and Electrical Engineering’ Association showcase exciting research done by PhD students from the EE department. The 2023 edition of the EE Research Day 2023 was held on Oct 7, 2023 (Saturday) at L19 in Lecture Hall Complex. The department witnessed the culmination of the relentless efforts, intellectual prowess, and ground-breaking research undertaken by our sincere Ph.D. scholars.

The Electrical Engineering Department at IIT Kanpur holds a legacy that spans over six decades, marking its inception as one of the pioneering departments when the institute took its first steps in 1960. Through the years, the department has evolved, expanded, and excelled, becoming the largest multidisciplinary department at IIT Kanpur. In this journey of the Electrical Engineering Department, PhD Scholars have always been integral parts and at the core of the research ecosystem of the department. The Research Day serves as a tangible manifestation of this commitment, bringing together scholars who are at the forefront of innovation and discovery. The presented research covered a spectrum of disciplines, ranging from traditional domains like Power Engineering, Control Systems, Signal Processing, Communication & Networks, Microelectronics & VLSI, RF & Microwave, Photonics and to contemporary fields such as Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, and Future Wireless Networks like 6G. EE Research Day is a celebration of the rigorous training imparted to our Ph.D. scholars, who represent the epitome of academic rigour and research excellence. The Research Day showcased not only the outcome of our research endeavors but also the journey of collaboration, mentorship, and academic growth.

The event also had two distinguished keynote speakers Dr. S. Gogineni, Professor at the University of Alabama and Dr B. Mishra, Microsoft India who will share their insights and expertise in the area of machine learning for mobile devices and RF/Microwave sensors for polar research. The event had 40 number of poster presentations to witness the cutting-edge research our PhD scholars and faculties are doing. The goal was to provide an environment and initiate collaboration among the researchers of the department and strengthen our interdisciplinary research.

Schedule: 7th Oct 2023

Keynotes

ML for mobile devices at Microsoft, India: scenarios, challenges, and opportunities.

Speaker: Dr Bamdev Mishra

Abstract: Mobile devices are ubiquitous and powerful platforms for delivering various applications and services that leverage machine learning (ML) techniques. However, developing and deploying ML models for mobile devices also pose significant challenges, such as resource constraints, privacy concerns, network variability, and device heterogeneity. In this talk, we present an overview of the ML scenarios, challenges, and opportunities for mobile devices at Microsoft India. We also discuss some of the key technical and research challenges that we face in our work. Finally, we highlight some of the emerging opportunities and directions for ML for mobile devices, such as multimodal interaction and LLMs.

Bio: Dr. Bamdev Mishra is a Principal Applied Scientist at Microsoft India in the Office India Intelligence team. He develops machine learning (ML) solutions for Kaizala, Office Lens, Operations, and Information Protection for Office365, to name a few. Before this, he worked on various ML problems in the retail domain including competitive price prediction, review abuse detection, and style recommendations.
Bamdev looks into problem domains that allow to use and build ML solutions for industrial applications. On the research side, his primary research interests include nonlinear optimization, stochastic learning, and matrix and tensor learning methods. He has published many technical papers in ML, NLP, and numerical optimization.

He received his BTech and MTech degrees in Electrical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay (IIT Bombay), India, in 2010, and his Ph.D. degree from the University of Liège, Belgium, in 2014. He was a Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Liège and a Visiting Research Associate at the University of Cambridge from 2014 to 2015.

RF & Microwave Sensors for Polar Research

Speaker: Dr Shiva Prasad Gogineni

Abstract: Polar regions are warming much faster than rest of the earth. The warming is causing melting and retreat of the large ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica, thawing of permafrost and thinning of small glaciers, and a significant reduction of sea ice extent and thickness. Human population is heavily concentrated in coastal regions, and accelerating sea level rise threatens both the infrastructure and way of life. The impact of rising sea level on coastal regions will depend on our ability to adapt to and mitigate its consequences. This in-turn will depend on our ability to accurately project the rate of sea-level rise. RF and Microwave Sensors have been playing a major role in monitoring of polar regions. An overview of the current state status of systems and improvements needed to obtain data needed to improve models to predict future response of ice including that in the Himalayas will be discussed.

Bio: Dr. Gogineni is a Cudworth Professor in the College of Engineering at the University of Alabama (UA). He was the founding Director of National Science Foundation (NSF) Science and Technology Center (STC) for Remote Sensing of Ice Sheets (CReSIS) at the University of Kansas from 2005 to 2016. Gogineni moved to UA to develop a remote sensing program in 2017 and is the Director of the remote sensing center. Gogineni is an IEEE Life Fellow and served as Manager of NASA’s polar program from 1997-1999. He received the Louise Byrd Graduate Educator Award at the University of Kansas and was a Fulbright Senior Scholar at the University of Tasmania in 2002. He has been involved with radar sounding and imaging of ice sheets for about 30 years and contributed to the first successful demonstration of SAR imaging of the ice bed through more than 3-km thick ice. Gogineni also led the development of ultra-wideband radars for measuring thickness of snow over sea ice and mapping of internal layers in polar firn and ice. Gogineni and his students developed early versions of all radars being flown on long-range aircraft as a part of the NASA IceBridge mission. The UA remote sensing team demonstrated first successful sounding of about 3 km thick ice in Greenland and Antarctica at 750 MHz and 1.25 GHz. Presently, Dr. Gogineni is at IIT Kanpur on a Fulbright-Kalam Fellowship.

EE Research Day Team

Dr K V Srivastava (Head, EE)

Dr Abhishek Gupta (Convenor)

Dr Abhilash Patel

Dr Rik Dey

Dr Raghvendra Choudhary

Dr Tushar Sandhan

Dr Piyush Kant

Dr Subrahmanya Swamy Peruru

Dr Alok Verma

Dr Rituraj

Shraddha Tripathi

Ajeet S. Sekhawat

Abhisha Garg

Meesam Jaffry

Athar Nazir Sofi

Sylvie Rana

Abhishek Shukla

Aditi Saxena

Shubham Saxena

Soumyadeep Datta

Shikha Singh

Siddharth Thakur

Rahul P Singh

Vinayak Kumbhar

Welcome to the Department of Electrical Engineering (EE) at IIT Kanpur. The EE department is one of the oldest departments at IIT Kanpur. It was one of the first five departments with which IIT Kanpur started in 1960. Subsequently, the Advanced Centre for Electronics Systems (ACES) came into existence in early 1970 by a grant from the Ministry of Defence to undertake manpower training and to carry out research and development related to defense. Subsequently, several sponsored projects in many subject areas with large interdisciplinary content were handled through ACES. ACES is now an integral part of the EE department and houses the majority of EE laboratories and facilities. The department is currently the largest multidisciplinary department at IIT Kanpur. It covers practically all sub-disciplines in Electrical and Communication Engineering including Power Systems, Power Electronics, Microwaves, RF techniques, Microelectronics, VLSI, Photonics, Control Systems, Robotics, Speech, and Audio Processing, Computer Vision, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Wireless Communication, Computer Networks, Future wireless networks like 5G/6G, Wireless sensor networks, and IoT networks.

The vision of the EE department is to create talented and socially responsible engineers to make a better India and, in turn, a better world. It will strive to become a hub of research excellence in cutting edge, state of the art, and contemporary areas of national and international relevance. The department also envisions itself as a center of excellence in teaching to create a well-educated, technically competent, and socially responsible workforce for meaningful, inclusive, and overall societal development of India and the world.

The department’s mission is to impart world-class training to its undergraduate and postgraduate students. It plans to create an excellent national workforce by imparting students a high-quality education, cutting-edge research exposure, and a world-class innovation ecosystem. Additionally, it plans to formulate and implement novel teaching mechanisms to provide its students a holistic exposure to a world-class education. The department plans to hire faculty, augment its teaching and research infrastructure, increase its industrial and research collaboration, and adopt modern methodologies for training students and staff to realize its stated mission objectives.

The department offers B.Tech, M.Tech, M.S (by research), and Ph.D. Programs in Electrical Engineering. The current sanctioned strength of B.Tech and M.Tech student intake during the first semester, are approximately 136 and 150, respectively. At present, 241 Ph.D., 260 MTech., 60 M.S (by research), and 620 BTech students are registered in the department, against the sanctioned intake. It may be noted that the number of postgraduate (MTech, M.S (R), and Ph.D.) students has nearly doubled in the last five years.

The department has a total faculty strength of 50, 3 research engineers, 26 technical staff, 7 ministerial staff, and a large number of research project employees.

The EE department of IIT Kanpur has always been well recognized for its excellent teaching standards in India and abroad. Several faculties of the department have also won teaching excellence awards like the Gopal Das Bhandari award multiple times. Over the years, the department has had beacons of teaching excellence such as R.N Biswas, K.R Sarma, R. Sharan, S.S Prabhu, and MA Pai.

Prof Russel Hsing, who is a pioneer in 6G communication, and Fog computing, is a visiting faculty with the department for two years. Prof. Hsing, is a Fellow of the IEEE, the British Computer Society (BCS) in the UK, and the SPIE. Currently, he is Chair Professor with the National Chiao Tung University (Taiwan), Adjunct Professor and Member of the Scientific Advisory Board for the Institute of Network Coding at the Chinese University in Hong Kong, and Member of Advisory Council at Harvard Business Review. Prof. Hsing is helping EE at IIT Kanpur develop a 6G and Fog computing research ecosystem. Plans to conduct the next IEEE 6G and fog computing summer/Fall school are also being developed. Currently, EE has 1 adjunct faculty and 1 visiting faculty. Dr. Anirudh Gautam from RDSO is an adjunct faculty in EE and collaborates with several faculty to develop and execute high net worth projects for Indian railways.

The EE department is one of the largest R and D fund generators for IIT Kanpur. Several small, medium and large R and D projects have been sanctioned to EE faculty in the last five years. This has led to the development of several large research facilities like Real-Time Digital Simulator, Smart Grid, 5G Test Bed have been set up as a result of these large projects. Faculty from EE have also been largely involved in setting up the Samtelcentre for display technologies, and the National flexible electronics centre. Several faculty in EE are also involved in industrial consultancy projects with private industrial giants like Qualcomm, LG India, Samsung India, and GE India apart from state and central government agencies like BSNL, Power Grid Corporation, CPRI.

EE has been a leader in the Institute in terms of offering outreach and continuing education programs (CEP). Several faculty have offered classroom, online, and MooCs in cutting edge areas like AI, ML, 5G communications, Future wireless networks, Microwave and RFID technologies, state of the art EMI/EMC techniques. The EE department has offered the largest number of CEPs in the last 2 years from the centre of continuing education. Additionally, several MDPs have been offered by the smart grid facility to officers from electricity regulators.

EE faculty have been traditionally contributing to administrative activities both within and outside the Institute. Currently, there are 3 faculty who are serving as Directors/Vice-chancellors at various other IIT/NIT/Universities. Several faculty from EE are currently serving as Deans, Associate Deans, and Centre Heads within the Institute.

Several EE alumni have made IIT Kanpur proud. EE Alumni have made excellent contributions in various fields like entrepreneurship, industry, and academics. A few illustrious alumni (both new and old) who have distinguished themselves are N. R. Narayana Murthy (Infosys), Prof. K. Subramanian (CEA to GoI), Dr. Ajay Kumar (DefenceSecretray, GoI), Dr.Arvind Krishna (CEO, IBM), Dr. Lalit Jalan (Director, Reliance), Prof. Anurag Kumar (Director, IISc.), Prof. UB Desai (Director IIT Hyderabad), Prof. Abhay Karandikar (Director, IIT Kanpur), Varun Khaitan (Co-founder, Urban Clap), Bhaskar Pramanik (Chairman, Microsoft), Mr. Avanish K. Awasthi (Principal Secretary UP Govt.), Prof. A. K. Chaturvedi (Director, IIT Roorkee), and Dr. Ajay Bhushan Pandey (Finance Secretary, GoI).

If you have any questions, queries, suggestions, and proposals, please feel free to contact me.

Prof. Yogesh Singh Chauhan
Head, Electrical Engineering
Email: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.