Welcome to NCC 2021

 

 

 

 

Plenary Speakers

Prof. Shrikanth (Shri) Narayanan University of Southern California, USA	Prof. Urbashi Mitra University of Southern California, USA	Prof. Ian F. Akyildiz TRUVA, Inc, USA
Prof. Vivek S. Borkar IIT Bombay, India	Prof. Shlomo Shamai(Shitz) Technion, Israel	Prof. Balaji Prabhakar Stanford University, USA

 

 

Welcome message from the General Co-chair

On behalf of the organizing committee of the 27th National Conference on Communications, it gives me immense pleasure to welcome you all to NCC 2021, technically co-sponsored by the IEEE Communication Society. We would have loved to welcome you all to IIT Kanpur, but unfortunately, it is not possible due to the ongoing pandemic. For the first time, NCC has been planned in a virtual mode, and we have tried to enliven the experience through the online platform. I cordially invite you to explore the exclusive virtual conference.

This year we have six plenary speakers featuring stalwarts in information theory, communications, signal processing, and networking. We have twelve tutorials covering active research topics such as blockchain technology, radar signal processing, UAV networks, reconfigurable intelligent surfaces, graph signal processing, streaming codes, recent advances in FFT, and design challenges in RF power amplifiers. We also have three industry talks and interactive sessions of students with industry. Three invited workshops have also been planned, in addition to the usual contributed talks for NCC 2021. For the first time, we have the Women in Engineering workshop in NCC 2021 featuring women leaders in the industry and academia. To promote standards-driven research, the Telecommunications Standards Development Society, India (TSDSI) is conducting a workshop in NCC 2021. Our third workshop is on machine learning applications, covering topics such as machine learning for sound sensing, learning on multiplex networks, and personalizing federated learning to the edge device.

We are extremely grateful to our sponsors: platinum sponsors: Qualcomm, Saankhya Labs, and Samsung; gold sponsors: Amazon, and silver sponsors: Texas Instruments, Tejas Networks, Google, Keysight, Agmatel, and Springer for their support.

We sincerely hope that you will have an enriching and fulfilling experience for the next four days. Stay Home! Stay Safe!

Adrish Banerjee, IITK
General Co-chair, NCC 2021

 

Welcome message from the TPC Chairs

On behalf of the Technical Program Committee (TPC), it is our great pleasure to welcome you to the 27th National Conference on Communications (NCC 2021).

We present the first ever online edition of NCC, featuring high-quality papers selected through a rigorous review process and covering the broad areas of Communications, Signal Processing, Machine Learning, and Networks. This time, we received 292 initial submissions, of which 249 were reviewed, and finally 110 were accepted for inclusion in the technical program. The key topics that attracted the most number of submissions include Physical Layer Communications (28%), Machine Learning (18%), Image & Video (16%), RF & Microwave (13%), and Speech & Audio (10%), with several papers spanning multiple topics. Among the papers that were reviewed, almost 44% had at least one author from an IIT of IISc, and about 16% of the total papers had at least one author from the host institutes IIT Kanpur and IIT Roorkee. Among other institutes, most valid submissions (8) were received from IIT Delhi and NIT Rourkela.

NCC 2021 followed a double-blind review process. Papers were submitted on edas, and were subsequently assigned to 160 TPC members as per their expertise. Various TPC members either reviewed the papers themselves or delegated them to other reviewers. A total of 898 reviews were finally submitted by 674 unique reviewers, resulting in an average of 3.7 reviews per paper and at least 2 reviews per paper. The reviewers scored each paper on various metrics such as novelty, technical content, quality of presentation, and overall content. When finally accepting the papers, the TPC Chairs looked not only at the overall average score but also at the content and quality of the reviews. The overall acceptance rate was approximately 44%.

Thanks to the sponsors, we have instituted two types of rewards to celebrate the review process. The best reviewer awards will be given to reviewers who have turned in at least 5 high-quality reviews. For the best paper award, we shortlisted the papers in accordance with their overall scores. Subsequently, the best paper award committee reviewed the shortlisted manuscripts and the presentation videos to decide the winners.

We would like to thank the TPC members and the reviewers for their timely and sincere efforts in ensuring a high-quality technical program. We would also like to thank the NCC 2021 student volunteers for their help in managing the edas portal, as well as helping with the scrutiny at various stages.

Ketan Rajawat, IIT Kanpur
Debashis Ghosh, IIT Roorkee
TPC Chairs

 

Best Reviewer Awards

The best reviewer awards acknowledge the efforts of outstanding reviewers, whose insightful and supportive feedback is likely to help authors to substantially improve their papers. The TPC followed a two-state approach to select the best reviewers at NCC 2021. At the first stage, reviewers who turned in at least five detailed reviews were shortlisted. Among these, the reviewers who displayed collegiality and provided constructive feedback were selected. This award is sponsored by Springer.

1. Arnav Bhavsar, IIT Mandi
2. Saumik Bhattacharya, IIT Kharagpur
3. Sumohana Channappayya, IIT Hyderabad
4. Venkatesh Gopalakrishnan, IIT Madras
5. Sibi Raj B Pillai, IIT Bombay

 

Best Paper Awards

The best paper awards recognize outstanding papers that were original, significant, and likely to be impactful. The TPC followed a two-stage approach to select the best papers. In the first stage, papers that received the highest overall and average review scores were shortlisted. Subsequently, the papers and the presentation videos were independently reviewed by the Best Paper Awards committee and the three best papers were identified. This award is sponsored by Springer.

1. Nancy Varshney, Swades De, Joint Beamwidth and Number of Concurrent Beams Estimation in Downlink mmWave Communications
2. V. Arvind Rameshwar, Navin Kashyap, Numerically Computable Lower Bounds on the Capacity of the -RLL Input-Constrained Binary Erasure Channel
3. Anand Kakarla, V. S. K. R. Munagala, T. Ishizaka, A. Fukuda, S. Jana, Spatio-Temporal Prediction of Roadside PM2.5 based on Sparse Mobile Sensing and Traffic Information

 

PLATINUM SPONSORS

 

 

 

 

 

 

GOLD SPONSORS

 

 

SILVER SPONSORS

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

TECHNICAL CO-SPONSORS