CALCON 2020 CONFERENCE

Tridibesh Nag, Chair for Kolkata Section Newsletter Committee

The 6th IEEE Kolkata Section’s flagship conference CALCON2020 was held during 28th – 29th February 2020 at Hotel Senses, Salt Lake, Sector –V, Kolkata-91. The focus of CALCON2020 was the students and young professionals from academics and industry to engage themselves in good research and engineering developments for the benefit of the society. Total number of participants were 312.

Prof. Iti Saha Misra the CALCON2020 Conference Chair and the IEEE Kolkata Section’s Vice Chair delivered nice welcome speech elaborating the objective and various aspects of CALCON2020. The Section’s Chair, Mr. Sanjay Kar Chowdhury addressed the audience, while CALCON2020 TPC Chair, Prof. Sujit Biswas outlined the technical aspects of the conference. Mr. Ambarish Dasgupta, Member, State Public Policy and Planning, Govt. of West Bengal was the Chief Guest of the conference. He delivered very insightful inaugural address outlining the present technological revolution of Internet of Things, Machine Learning, and Artificial Intelligence. Prof. Chiranjeeb Bhattacharya, Pro-VC of Jadavpur University was the Guest of Honour but could not join the session due to his other urgent occupation. Prof. Souvik Mahapatra from IIT Bombay was the conference special guest.

There were three major engineering Tracks: a) Electronics & Communications Engineering, b) Electrical Engineering, c) Computer Science and Engineering, where 203 valid submissions of technical papers were received. After rigorous reviews and registration, 100 papers were accepted for oral presentation and 9 papers accepted for poster presentation. This implies an acceptance ratio of 53.7%. CALCON2020 was a grand success as 100% of the accepted papers were presented.

Keynote Speech in CSE Track was delivered by Prof. Sanghamitra Bandyopadhyay, Director, ISI Kolkata, IEEE Fellow on “Computer Science Methods to Solve Problems in Biology: Basics & Advancements”. Keynote Speech in ECE Track was delivered by Prof. Souvik Mahapatra; Professor, Department of Electrical Engineering IIT Bombay, India, IEEE Fellow on “Introduction to CMOS Transistor Scaling & Reliability: Basics & Advancements”. Keynote Speech in EE Track was delivered by Prof. Chandan Chakraborty, IIT Kharagpur, also an IEEE Fellow, on “Renewable Energy Integration: Challenges and Opportunities”. Keynote Speech in WIE Special Session was delivered by Dr. Suparna Dhar, Ex-Industry personnel and Assoc. Prof. NSHM, Knowledge Campus, Kolkata, on “Employing Data Analytics to Monitor Organization’s Social Media Activity”.

In the Industry Session, several industry personnel from Ericsson: Mr. Indrajit Sanyal, Check Point Software Technologies Ltd.: Mr. Sanjeeb Sengupta, Palo Alto Networks: Mr. Pankaj Chawla, NTT-Cisco: Mr. Rohit Gupta, delivered lectures related to 5G Technology, Network Security, DNS Traffic, and Cyber Security. It was really a pleasant experience to have Mr. Sanjay Das, Joint Secretary, IT and Electronics Govt. of WB as the Industry Session Chair, who conducted the session in a very unique way adding value to the participants. A Student Panel Discussion on a very relevant topic “Is India ready for NexGen Technologies?” was conducted – where students from neighboring Engineering Colleges of Kolkata like Jadavpur University, NSEC, IEM and IIT KGP have joined the panel. Mr. Sanket Sarkar, CEO of a Startup company TeamCognito was the moderator.