Interview with Team Bend, Winner of IEEE R10HTC 2019 Project Competition
“GAMING IS NOT AN ADDICTION BUT A THERAPY”
A student team, Team Bend from department of Computer Science & Engineering (CSE), Amrita School of Engineering, Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham, Coimbatore Campus, India has won the IEEE Region 10 (Asia-Pacific) Humanitarian Technology Project Competition 2019 held at University of Indonesia, Depok on 12th November 2019. Team Bend developed a Virtual Reality (VR) game to reduce lower back pain which is rampant among young professionals especially for those working long hours in coding, IT and service companies. With the tagline for their project, “Gaming is not an addiction but a therapy”, Team Bend competed against student innovators from countries like Japan, China, Indonesia, Singapore, and Malaysia to emerge on top of this Engineering Festival for Humanity. IEEE R10 Today interviews this team consisting of students, B. Nehal Ram Surya, Kishore Ramesh, Mohan Karthik V., Ragul P along with their faculty mentor, Prof. Prashant R. Nair from Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham (University), India.
Q: What motivated you guys to work on this project?
Nehal: Billions of dollars are being spent annually for back pain now-a-days. Most of the people experience back pain for a number of reasons and this is for people of all ages. An average age of experiencing back pain in recent times is 16 years. We did not start thinking about this all of the sudden, it all started in a train journey. Once I was traveling to Bangalore for an event in September 2018 in a general class, which made us sit for 8 long hours in the train. It was not even 2 hours since the train started, some of my friends stood up and started walking here and there. When I asked one of my friends the reason, he said “How could one sit straight for two hours, we should have booked a sleeper seat”. That is when I started thinking about this. We are just 20/21 years old and how come back pain is so common among most of us. As an engineering student, I wanted to do something with the knowledge I had. Soon after I reached home at Coimbatore from Bangalore, and I had a discussion with my team mates.
Q: What are the reasons for back pain, especially among youngsters that motivated you to work on this problem?
Kishore: There are several reasons. But majorly, we found out in our research, the following reasons:
- Sitting in front of computer for a long time which in-turn becomes a wrong sitting posture especially gamers, IT and software professionals,
- People riding vehicles,
- To be more precise, the most common reason was people sitting at a same place in a wrong posture for a long time.
Q: But can’t these be avoided by changing one’s behavior?
Kishore: True. It’s very difficult to change one’s behavior all of sudden. You can imagine the results when we advise people to sit properly. Or not to sit in front of the computer system for long time. Or do not ride vehicles. We wanted an effective solution that is well suited for the youth. Since it is a gaming era, we thought of an interactive gaming solution.
Q: What are the technologies that you have used for the VR game?
Mohan: The technology stack consists of two hardware modules and an interactive game. One module is a self-designed IoT device, which consists of a MPU6050 (9 DOF) to track the body movements, an Arduino-nano programmed to record the readings and an nRF24l01 to transmit the signals to the game through radio frequency. Second module is the market’s readily available VR/MR headset.
Q: Sounds exciting. What about the gaming part?
Ragul: In our product for the demo purpose, we used Lenovo’s Mixed Reality headset. We created a 3D game using Unity3D. First we developed an endless runner game like Temple Run, Subway-Surfers. We created game character such that both model and camera are in the same game object. Any movement we applied was on this game object. We also made sure camera had a 360-degree field of view without obstruction. We then interfaced our hardware to move our character in-game using Unity’s Serial Communication package. After which we added SteamVR plugin to our camera. This ported our game to VR and with the help of SteamVR we can play with almost all Mixed/Virtual Reality headsets available in the market. So at last it becomes a portable and compatible product with all the available headsets.
Q: What is your plan for the next two years?
Mohan: The team is in the full-fledged product development phase and we face a significant amount of challenges here; we estimate to complete a full-fledged product by the end of October 2020. After which, we have planned Beta testing of our MVP (Minimum Viable Product) with all clinical trials under the supervision of physiotherapist, adhering to the medico-legal guidelines of the Indian government. After the successful trials, we will initiate the process to get accreditation from IMA (Indian Medical Association) and also patent our product design which will be by end of May 2021. Then the product will be ready for market sales, where we have planned a subscription-based revenue model for our B2B customers (Health Centers, Physicians) which excludes the initial setup cost of the equipment. In the mean-time, we are also looking for some potential investors. Then we can go global.
Q: How did your university support this project?
Prashant: Our University, Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham, which is India’s number one private university, is very supportive of student innovation. We have been very much encouraged by the success at the prestigious IEEE R10HTC2019 project competition. This student innovation not only addresses the UN Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) of Healthcare but is line with the vision of our University Chancellor, world-renowned humanitarian leader, Sri Mata Amritanandamayi Devi’s vision of compassion-driven research. The university is supporting team Bend in patenting the idea as also publishing this work. Till now, we have also got support from our University’s Cisco ThingQbator IoT makerspace program for all the equipment and technical support for our proof of concept.
Nehal: Our team would like to place on record the encouragement of our university’s senior administration especially, Chief Operating Officer, Prof. C. Parameswaran and Dean, Faculty of Engineering, Dr. Sasangan Ramanathan.
IEEE PESGRE2020
A highly successful inaugural edition!
Written by Biju K, Vice Chair for IA/IE/PELS Jt. Chapter Kerala
The first biennial IEEE International Conference on Power Electronics, Smart Grid and Renewable Energy (PESGRE2020) was held from 2nd to 4th January 2020. The conference was productive three days of non-stop activities, stimulating discussions, and prolific exchange of ideas amongst 450 Power Electronics and Energy Systems professionals and researchers from 15 countries. This conference was organized by IEEE IA/IE/PELS Kerala Jt. Chapter and co-sponsored by IEEE Industry Applications Society, IEEE Power Electronics Society, and IEEE Kerala Section. The conference focused on the challenges, latest developments and upcoming technologies in power electronic systems, electric drives, renewable energy resources and the operation in the smart grid environment. With this year’s conference located in Cochin, Kerala, India, PESGRE2020 emphasized the theme of “Power Electronics and Renewable Energy for Sustainable Development” and the conference opened with an inaugural address from Prof. Wang Peng of Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.
PESGRE2020 received 483 submissions from 19 countries and after a rigorous review process involving 38 technical program chairs and 386 reviewers, 320 papers were accepted for camera-ready submission. Special care was taken to ensure a very good peer review stage with quality reviews for the benefit of the authors. Subsequently, 301 camera-ready submissions were received and finally, 298 papers from 15 countries were presented in the conference. All the presented papers in the conference are eligible for submission to IEEE Transaction on Industry Applications, subject to further round of review by the journal editors.
The technical program of PESGRE2020 consisted of four tutorials, four plenary talks, two student forums, one industry session, and 44 technical sessions. The tutorials were delivered by well-known experts, Prof. Prasad Enjeti, Prof. Krishna Vasudevan, Dr. Dinesh Kumar, Prof. Anurag K Srivastava, Prof. Sukumar Kamalasadan, and Prof. Sheldon S. Williamson. Plenary lectures were delivered by Dr. Tomy Sebastian, Prof. Wang Peng, Prof. Kashem Muttaqi and Prof. Biplab Sikdar on topics of interest to power engineering community. The sessions were chaired by active researchers from reputed institutes. There was a lot of interaction and exchange of information during the technical program and during industry exhibits.
The Young Professionals also had variety of activities at PESGRE2020. There was a YPP student forum led by Dr. Sanjib K Panda, Dr. Anurag K Srivastava, Dr. Harish S Krishnamoorthy and Dr. Akshay Rathore followed by a social gathering. Thirty young professionals received travel grant from IAS society to attend PESGRE2020.
The conference proved to be an excellent forum for technical exchange among researchers from academia, research groups, and industries. The next edition of the conference, PESGRE2022 will be held at Kovalam, Kerala, India from 2nd to 5th January 2022.
| Oral Session |
| Poster Session |
| Inauguration |
| Keynote |
| Tutorial Session |
| From Oral Session |
| Exhibit Stalls |
| Industry Session |
CONFLUENCE2020
29th to 31st January 2020
Report by Abhay Bansal
The department of Computer Science and Engineering, Amity School of Engineering and Technology (ASET), Amity University, Uttar Pradesh organized the 10th International Conference CONFLUENCE-2020, on the theme of “Cloud Computing, Data Science and Engineering” at Amity Campus, Sector-125, Noidawith the support of IEEE. The three-day enthralling conference was organized in industry partnership with AWS and academically with The University of Queensland, Australia; University of Florida, USA; Western Sydney University, Australia; RMIT University, Australia; University of Canberra, Australia; Memorial University of Newfoundland, Canada; Deakin University, Australia; La Trobe University, Australia; University of Essex, UK; Liverpool John Moores University, UK; Iowa State University, USA; ESTP Paris; Curtin University, Australia; University of Salford Manchester, UK; University of South Alabama, USA; CITANDA; Melbourne Clouds Lab and Network N+i Educational Institution, France.
Confluence has been regularly held in the last ten years to ignite young minds and to be the change of tomorrow as per the vision of Honourable Founder President Dr. Ashok K. Chauhan, who himself stands as a visionary leader and an inspiration for all Amitians. The summit got initiated under the dynamic leadership of Honourable Chancellor Dr. Atul Chauhan and support of the Vice-Chancellor, Prof. (Dr.) Balvinder Shukla.
| Honourable Chairperson, Amity Group of Schools, Dr. (Mrs.) Amita Chauhan speaking during the Valedictory session of Confluence 2020 |
Confluence witnessed 30+ international speakers from across the globe including University of Michigan, USA; Honda Research Institute, Japan; Technical University of Madrid, Spain; Deakin University, Australia; University of South Florida, USA; Monash University, Australia; University of Waikato, New Zealand; Liverpool John Moores, UK; Cranfield University, UK; Emory University, Atlanta; Universiti Putra Malaysia, Malaysia; University of Pretoria, South Africa; University Technology Petronas, Malaysia and Open University, UK.
600 research paper submissions were received on the conference theme from faculty members and Ph.D. scholars from across the globe such as United States, United Kingdom, Australia, Argentina, South Africa, Malaysia, Greece, Spain, United Arab Emirates, Indonesia, Myanmar, Nigeria, Oman, Saudi Arabia, South Korea, Bangladesh, Guadeloupe, and Yemen to name a few. With an extensive review process, 147 manuscripts which met stringent requirements of high scientific quality and significance, originality, and priority were accepted and got registered for presentation during the three days of the Conference in various technical sessions. All the papers registered will be sent to IEEE Xplore Digital Library for publication and all published papers would be indexed in SCOPUS.
The guests of honor included Prof. (Dr.) Parosh Abdulla, Uppsala University, Sweden; Prof. (Dr.) John Domingue, Professor, Open University, UK; Prof. (Dr.) Mike Hinchey, Director of Lero & Professor, University of Limerick, Ireland; Dr. Kazuhiro Nakadai, Professor, Honda Research Institute, Japan and Prof. (Dr.) Bernhard Pfahringer, Waikato University, New Zealand, alongside Prof. (Dr.) Balvinder Shukla, Vice Chancellor, AUUP & Patron, Confluence 2020; Prof. (Dr.) Abhay Bansal, Jt. Head, ASET & HoD CSE; Prof. (Dr.) M.K. Pandey, Jt. Head, ASET; and Dr. Abhishek Singhal, Deputy HoD(CSE), ASET.
Prof. (Dr.) Balvinder Shukla shared Confluence’s vision to promote the spirit of waving the flags of research and innovation in order to infuse one and all with the essence of being the change of the globe and to build a solid foundation in technology. Prof. (Dr.) Abhay Bansal motivated the students to use this golden opportunity through concrete interactions with the renowned academicians.
Through a range of keynote speeches, special sessions like CXO Forum and plenary sessions, participants witnessed new ways to deal with the challenges faced in cutting-edge areas of cloud computing, data science and engineering. The conference highlight was the first ever AWS Workshop on Cloud Computing, wherein it’s speaker Mr. Pratap Singh, a technical instructor at AWS, sparked a sense of motivation in the students by telling them about Amazon’s journey and how it caters to million+ customers, comprises of a vast ecosystem of products and is a part of the leader’s quadrant for the 9th year.
During the Conference, Amity University signed MOUs with University of South Florida, USA; Eastern International University, Vietnam and LOI with University of Waikato, New Zealand to augment the ties between the organizations and profit from the inter disciplinary research. The MoU signing and collaboration session was chaired by Prof. (Dr.) Gurinder Singh, Group Vice Chancellor, Amity University. Valedictory Session was graced by Chairperson, Amity Group of Schools, Dr. (Mrs.) Amita Chauhan. Top officials from Ministry of Human Resource Development Innovation Cell, Government of India and National Board of Accreditation (NBA) graced the event. Amity Researcher Awards were conferred upon distinguished researchers and academicians for their significant contribution in their respective fields. Amity University also conferred Honorary Professorship to following eminent scientists, during Confluence 2020:
| Prof. (Dr.) Parosh Abdulla, Uppsala University, Sweden | Prof. (Dr.) John Domingue, Open University, UK |
| Prof. (Dr.) David Chesney, Michigan State University, USA | Dr. Kazuhiro Nakadai, Honda Research Institute Japan |
| Prof. (Dr.) Frada Burstein, Monash University, Australia | Dr. Sushil Chandra, Scientist ‘G’- INMAS, DRDO, Delhi |
| Prof. (Dr.) Bhuvanesh Unhelkar, University of South Florida, USA | Prof. (Dr.) Shanika Karunasekra, Melbourne University, Australia |
| Prof. (Dr.) Bernhard Pfahringer, University of Waikato, New Zealand | Prof. (Dr.) Ankit Agrawal, Northwestern University, USA |
The colloquium concluded by presenting leadership awards to the leaders in business excellence from Microsoft, ASUS, Inxee, Gesture Research, Lakshmi Kumaran & Sridharan Attorneys, Nokia, SSRX, Hungama Digital and THALES India. Showcasing the heritage of India, the audience was entertained through an exceptionally well performed series of cultural events. Further, to help foreign delegates explore and get a taste of the diverse Indian culture, the university arranged a trip to Taj Mahal, Agra.
| Prof. (Dr.) Balvinder Shukla, Vice Chancellor, AUUP & Patron, Confluence 2020, Prof. Dr. Abhay Bansal, Jt. Head, ASET & HoD, CSE Dept., Dr. W. Selvamurthy, President, Amity Science, Technology & Innovation Foundation and International Delegates releasing the Proceedings of Confluence 2020 |
| Prof. (Dr.) Gurinder Singh, Group Vice Chancellor, Amity University and Prof. (Dr.) Abhay Bansal, Jt. Head, ASET & HoD, CSE Dept. with the International Speakers and faculties during MoU Signing and International Collaboration Session of Confluence 2020 |
ICISCT2020
Written by Saifullah Baloch, Sectional Student Representative for IEEE Karachi Section
IEEE Karachi Section Computer Chapter organized the 2nd International Conference on Information Science and Communication Technology (ICISCT) on 8th – 9th February 2020 with more than 400 participants. There were 35 volunteers involved in making this event successful. 202 papers were submitted, in which 48 papers were accepted. The acceptance rate was 23%.
Leila De Floriani, IEEE Computer Society President send a video message in which she congratulated the organizing team (https://www.facebook.com/DCS.UOK.ICISCT/videos/720286991834983/). The Chairman of Prime Minister’s National Task Force on Science and Technology, Prof. Dr. Atta-ur-Rahman, was the Chief Guest and he shared the importance of the 12 disruptive technologies. He informed the audience that the Pakistani Government would spend around Rs 50 billion in areas such as Artificial Intelligence, IoT, Big Data etc. The guest of honor, member of the National Assembly, Dr. Syeda Shahida Rehmani remarked that IT is changing the world. Acting VC of KU, Prof. Dr. Khalid Mahmood Iraqi emphasized on shaping the future of sustainable development in the area of ICT.
Prof. Khalid Iraqi said that unprecedented advancements in IT and communications had their strong impact on social, economic, political and all other fields of life. Chairman for DSC, Prof. Dr. Muhammad Sadiq Ali Khan shared the areas of the conference, with the Conference Co-Chair, Prof. Dr. B.S. Chowdhry, appreciated the broad platform offered by ICISCT. Prof. Dr. Jonathan Andrew Ware from the University of South Wales, United Kingdom presented keynote address and shared the health and safety issues of construction workers. Dr. Jim Buckley from the University of Limerick, Ireland focused on helping software developers to undertake the complex tasks. Dr. Raziq Yaqub from the Alabama A&M University, US delivered his keynote address on Cyber Secure Electric Areal Vehicles (Drones), while Mohammad Helmy Abd Wahab from Universiti Tun Hussein Onn Malaysia, enlightened the audience on Internet of things: Moving Forward to IR4.0. Last but not least, Dr. D.M. Akbar Hussain from the Department of Energy Technology Section for Power Electronics Systems presented his keynote address on ‘Bayesian Framework to Determine Strengths and Weaknesses of Nodes in Social Networks’.
iCoMET2020
Written by Saifullah Baloch, Sectional Student Representative for IEEE Karachi Section
With the theme “Idea to Innovation for Building the Knowledge Economy”, the 3rd International Conference on Computing, Mathematics and Engineering Technologies (iCoMET2020) was held at Sukkur IBA on 29th -30th January 2020. Technically sponsored by the IEEE Karachi Section, the conference attracted 450 participants and 19 Keynote speakers from more than 30 countries including USA, UK, Italy, Canada, France, Netherlands, Norway, China, Poland, Spain, Korea, Turkey, Malaysia, Pakistan etc. 490 papers were submitted to the conference, with an acceptance rate of 30%.
Day 1 began with the address by the Conference Chair Dr. Rida-e Zenab, followed by a welcome speech from the VC Sukkur IBA University Prof Nisar Ahmed Siddiqui. Prof. Asghar Qadir from Abdul Salam University of Lahore gave the opening talk on Quantum Mechanics. Dr. Paolo Bottoni from Sapienza University of Rome addressed on the model for reasoning on transactions and smart contracts. Dr. Yasar Ayaz, Chairman of NCAI, Pakistan talked about AI for everyone. Prof. Izzatdin Abdul Aziz from UTP Malaysia talked about the applications of AI in oil and gas industries. Dr. Nouman M Durrani gave a keynote on distributed suspicious activity detection using lightweight deep learning models.
Dr. Umer Hayat from QAU, Islamabad shared his research on cubic curves geometry and its applications. Dr. Kijti Rodtes from Naresuan University, Phitsanulok, Thailand gave a talk on generalized matrix functions. Mr Roozbeh Aliabadi, CEO of US ReadyAI spoke about AI and the future of higher education. Prof. Dr. Mukhtiar Unar, Dean MUET addressed on swarm intelligence and its engineering and scientific applications. The Chief Guest, the Chair for IEEE Karachi Section Prof. Dr. Bhawani Shankar Chowdhary appreciated the efforts of the VC Sukkur IBA University and said this conference offered help in establishing Sukkur Subsection.
Day 2 started with a keynote speech by Dr. Peter Hines, University of York, UK on inverse semigroups in mathematics and computer science, followed by a talk by Dr. Dil Muhammad Akbar Hussain, Aalborg University Denmark on renewable energy conservation by wind. This is followed by Dr. Woojin Seok from KISTI Daejon, Korea who lectured on government-driven research network for science knowledge. Dr. Zeeshan Bhatti from UOS Jamshoro addressed the current trends and practices in graphics animation and game development. Dr. Sadiq Ali Khan of UOK Karachi delivered talk on security challenges for the future computing systems.
Prof. Dr. Saeid Azam from University of Isfahan, Iran gave his keynote talk on group of lie type in extended affine lie theory. Dr. Imran Ashraf gave his speech on memory and communication profiling for accelerator-based platforms. Dr. Imran Anwer from G.C University Lahore gave his talk on algebraic characterization of discrete geometrical objects. Finally, Mr. S. Suleyman Turnaoglu from Dantec Dynamics gave a keynote on the latest post-processing techniques in experimental fluid mechanics. The conference was concluded with thanking remarks by Registrar SIBA University and Conference Chair Ms. Rida Zehra.
IEEE President Elect 2021 – K J Ray Liu
IEEE President Elect 2021 – S K Ramesh
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