Women in Computing « HiPC – High Performance Computing

Computing has become a ubiquitous influence in current times and is set to have an ever-increasing presence in the coming years. This will have a huge impact on the kind of technology that is going to be available to the layman. Given the young population, an emerging economy like India has, it is important that they are aware of the various technological advances that are being done, the huge amount of computing power that is available now and the means to leverage the two to resolve significant social issues that exist in the country.

The goal of the “Women in Computing” event is to provide a platform for technology enthusiasts who are using compute power to design and invent solutions to problems pertaining to social good, and for women technologists, both current and prospective, to participate, present their work and popularize opportunities, challenges, and solutions, in the realm of responsible use of computing. The participants will have the opportunity to interact with experts in HPC and Data Science, leverage their expertise and form collaborations.

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Schedule: 3:15 pm – 6: 15 pm, December 18, 2019

Introduction (02min)

Keynote-Talk-01 (30min)
“Internet of Things – Reshaping our future”, by Deepthi Lakkaraju, Qualcomm.

Keynote-Talk-02 (30min)
“Technology Innovation for Social Good,” by Madhuri Duggirala, Google.

Keynote-Talk-03 (30min)
“Technology for meeting the SDGs by 2030”, by Dr. Suman Kapur, Xcellence in Bio Innovations and Technologies Pvt.Ltd and BITS Pilani Hyderabad.

Poster session + Break (15min)

Paper-01: (20min)
“Disastro – Real Time Twitter based Disaster Response System for Indian Scenarios”, Krishna Kanth, Abirami S, Chitra P and Gayathri Sowmya G.

Paper-02: (20min)
“An Empirical Study on Efficient Storage of Human Genome Data”, Diksha Chaudhary, Bratati Kahali and Yogesh Simmhan.

Paper-03: (20min)
“Anomaly Detection in Surveillance Videos”, Malika Makker, Aakanksha Ashok and Anala M.R.

Open discussion with keynote speakers, event organizers, and audience. (10min)
Closing Remarks. (02min)

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[Keynote-Talk-01] Internet of Things – Reshaping our Future

Deepthi Lakkaraju,

Director, Technology Program Management, Qualcomm.

Abstract: The Internet of Things (IOT) is bringing massive surge of smart, connected devices that will enable new services and efficiencies across industries. IOT is transforming businesses, changing the way people live, and continuing to fuel innovations for many years to come. Over the next decade, it is predicted that there will be tens of billions of connected devices deployed globally growing at unprecedented speed to generate multi-trillion dollars of economic value, across many key markets, not to ignore the fundamental way IOT is going to have a profound social impact in every fabric of life. IOT thus is the foundation to a totally interconnected world, and it is only a matter of time before it evolves into the Internet of Everything. The talk will also go over creating and enabling the ecosystem across body & wearables, Home and cities with smart devices that can interact seamlessly and provide a platform for applications and services.

Speaker bio: Deepthi Lakkaraju has about two decades of experience in areas of Technology Product Development, Technology Program Management and Engineering Operations delivering sophisticated engineering solutions in embedded systems software. She has been with Qualcomm India for the last 13 years, heading India Camera Software engineering division for first 10 years. Deepthi is currently the Director, Technology Program Management responsible for delivering state of the art Multimedia Engineering solutions such as Cameras, Video/Audio codecs, GPUs, Display and Sensor technologies. Prior to Qualcomm, she was with General Motors USA working on embedded software for GM Powertrain division.

Deepthi is very passionate about many aspects of campus engagement towards building a strong pipeline of workforce, Women in STEM and diversity & inclusion, industry-academia interaction, faculty research & development, curriculum revision. She also serves as a senate board member for IIIT Trichy and Kurnool.

Deepthi has a Masters in Electrical Engineering from Purdue University, West Lafayette Indiana, and an undergraduate degree in Electrical Engineering from NIT-Warangal, India. On a personal note, she cherishes her role as mother of two confident young women.

[Keynote-Talk-02] Technology Innovation for Social Good

Madhuri Duggirala,

Senior Director, Scaled Services, Google.

Abstract: We all know the positive impact technology can have on the world, but leaps in medicine, business, and even self-driving transportation have demonstrated how technological advances can benefit the nonprofit sector as well. Today, many tech innovators are tackling some of the world’s toughest global challenges.From real-time sensors that monitor clean water access to DNA barcoding that can help stop wildlife trafficking to forecasting floods, protecting whales, and predicting famine, there are opportunities to develop technology for positive societal impact. Extraordinary opportunities emerge when people and devices connect. We are innovating in ways never before imagined possible. The challenge now lies in learning to leverage these exponential technologies to develop creative solutions that will address some of our toughest real-world problems. This talk gives you an overview of how Technology can be the key to build a thriving, resilient world to bring a sustainable and affordable transformation for societal needs.

This talk gives an overview of how technologies powered by software and hardware can be the key to building a thriving, resilient world to bring a sustainable and affordable transformation for societal needs in the areas of healthcare and sustainable environment.

Speaker bio: Madhuri Duggirala has 20+ years of technology industry experience across the globe, with a strong experience in managing, building and delivering end user products and services, cloud platform solutions and Scaled Ad services that serve millions of customers resulting in high revenues for the organization while staying on the leading edge of the technology landscape. She describes herself as an engineer by profession, a singer by passion, globe trotter by interest and a social volunteer by choice!

Madhuri joined Google in 2016 and currently, she leads Scaled Services organization which is a globally spread out team with a presence in 10 countries, 4 continents managing services and operations across multiple regions and languages to support advertisers on campaign implementation, optimization, reporting and creative excellence across products and customer segments. Their team vision is to be “Trusted Experts enabling world class vendor operations to drive customer success”

Her last stint was as the Senior Director of Engineering at Microsoft where she spent 12 years, 8 of which was spent in Seattle. Prior to that, she worked at a Broadband wireless startup and services organization for 6 years primarily in Europe, India and North America.

Madhuri is a strategic thinker, highly results-driven, passionate mentor who values inclusiveness and diversity and deeply believes in aligning teams around common mission and goals to deliver high impact. Built and led strong, high performing and talented teams, created an environment to empower and motivate team members to bring their best and achieve maximum potential.

On the personal front, Madhuri is married to Satya, who is an Engineering Director in Salesforce, Hyderabad. They have ten year old twins, a boy and a girl, Nirvaan and Moksha. As a family, they thoroughly enjoy traveling across the world. In her free time, she enjoys music, meditation and reading. She also spends time during weekends teaching Math and English to high school kids in rural areas of India through internet with a hope to inspire them to utilize education to build a better future.

[Keynote-Talk-03] Technology for meeting the SDGs by 2030

Dr. Suman Kapur,

Director and Promoter, Xcellence in Bio Innovations and Technologies Pvt. Ltd.,

Professor and University-wide Dean, BITS Pilani.

Abstract: Information and communication technologies (ICTs) have enormous potential to fast forward progress on the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and improve people’s lives in fundamental ways. Building the next generation of ICT infrastructure will power the evolution of smart, sustainable cities and communities worldwide. Making modern ICTs more widely available will foster the local innovation needed to spur domestic economic growth, provide decent work and reduce inequalities. Singh is just one of millions of Indians who’ve seen their lives improve in fundamental ways since the government started a biometric identification system called Aadhaar in 2010. The early success — and tremendous scale — of India’s efforts are especially important to note at a time when digital financial services are increasingly seen as a key driver in the fight to alleviate poverty, the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goal No. 1 (SDG 1). Globally, 1 in 9 people go hungry every day, according to the World Food Program. That’s nearly 800 million people. And yet, some 1.3 billion tonnes of food are wasted every year. To combat this problem — and to make progress on the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goal No. 2 “Zero Hunger” — information and communication technologies (ICTs) are now increasingly being deployed to better connect the hungry to excess food at a scale and speed never before possible. The five-day old baby weighs just 1.5 kilograms — too small to breathe on her own. She is still in critical condition, but doctors at Kalawati Hospital in Rewari, India, hope she will be home in a few days. Integrated Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (iNICU), is a “combination of all the buzzwords which are in the market, like IoT, cloud, predictive analytics, artificial intelligence — can help save the lives of numerous babies in iNICU and so on. This presentation will cover widespread global attempts to use ICT for affordable healthcare which touches 11 SDGs the mantra of “leaving no one behind”.

Speaker bio: Prof. Suman Kapur is currently a Senior Professor at the Department of Biological Sciences, BITS Pilani Hyderabad campus. She is also currently serving as the Dean of International Programmes and Collaborations at BITS Pilani Hyderabad campus. She has research and training experience of around 35 years. She has been involved in developing technologies, such as a point-of-care device for measuring blood (plasma) triglyceride levels and blood (plasma) HDLc levels, respectively. Both devices are based on finger-prick micro-needles, involving no loss of sensitivity.

She has received several honors for her entrepreneurship efforts, teaching and research work. More recently, she has received the National Technology Startup award bestowed by the Technology Development Board, the Department of Science and Technology, Government of India, on May 11, 2018.

Prof. Kapur has authored more than 200 peer-reviewed papers in national and international journals, garnering over 2958 citations, h-index of 28, and i10-index of 70. She has given over 200 keynote presentations and lectures in several national and international conferences. Her research contributions have also resulted in eleven patents, 8 books, and others. She has been the investigator on several projects, receiving funding to the tune of INR 80 million, through 4 ongoing and 19 completed projects. She has Life membership in several national and international professional bodies, such as ISBRA, SFN, IPS, to name a few. She is also a member of the Food Safety and Security Authority of India in the scientific panel. She has a Ph.D. from the All India Institute of Medical Sciences, New Delhi.

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[Paper-Abstracts]

Paper-01: “Disastro – Real Time Twitter based Disaster Response System for Indian Scenarios”

Krishna Kanth, Abirami S, Chitra P and Gayathri Sowmya G.

Abstract: Twitter is a popular social media platform with more than 1 million daily active users. Mostly, all breaking news is posted earlier in twitter than any mainstream media. Hence, this micro-blogging social network experiences a deluge of information flow during natural disasters. Situation based mining of information from the twitter data, can play a significant role in disaster response and recovery. The large volume and velocity of data flow on twitter during disaster makes it tedious for the disaster rescue volunteers to manually analyze and retrieve information from them. An automated system that could retrieve relevant information from this enormous twitter data during a disaster, could be useful for the disaster relief volunteers to accomplish their duty efficiently amidst the chaos. During disasters, the volunteer’s team may service more efficiently, if

they had a classification based on the victims who request for donation and those who request rescue. In this paper, we propose an artificial intelligence based real time disaster response system – Disastro, which assists the volunteers by identifying the relevant tweets from the real time twitter data and classifying them under the domains “rescue” and “donation”. Disastro is empirically validated across various machine learning algorithms for classification using the tweets posted during Chennai rains and Kerala floods. The versatility of Disastro across different disasters and its improved classification accuracy makes it flexible and robust to handle any location-based emergencies.

Paper-02: “An Empirical Study on Efficient Storage of Human Genome Data”

Diksha Chaudhary, Bratati Kahali and Yogesh Simmhan.

Abstract: Next-generation sequencing (NGS) has become affordable and fast, facilitating large scale population-level Whole Genome Sequencing (WGS) studies. NGS and its processing

pipeline generate 100’s of gigabytes of data per human subject, which can grow to petabytes for large studies, such as the upcoming GenomeIndia program. At these scales, affordable and reliable storage of data becomes a challenge. Here, we propose a preliminary data management architecture for storage and querying of data from the GenomeIndia project. In this initial empirical study, we focus on existing generic and domain-specific compression techniques for reducing the storage space of genome sequence data and compare erasure coding and replication in providing reliability on commodity hardware. We report the time and space complexity of these approaches, and this will inform the future design of our architecture.

Paper-03: “Anomaly Detection in Surveillance Videos”

Malika Makker, Aakanksha Ashok and Anala M.R.

Abstract: Every public or private area today is preferred to be under surveillance to ensure high levels of security. Since the surveillance happens round the clock, data gathered as a result is huge and requires a lot of manual work to go through every second of the recorded videos. This paper presents a system which can detect anomalous behaviors and alarm the user on the type of anomalous behavior. Since there are a myriad of anomalies, the classification of anomalies had to be narrowed down. There are certain anomalies which are generally seen and have a huge impact on public safety, such as explosions, road accidents, assault, shooting, etc. To narrow down the variations, this system can detect explosion, road accidents, shooting, and fighting and even output the frame of their occurrence. The model has been trained with videos belonging to these classes. The dataset used is UCF Crime dataset. Learning patterns from videos requires the learning of both spatial and temporal features. Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) extract spatial features and Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) networks learn the sequences. The classification, using an CNN-LSTM model achieves an accuracy of 85%.

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[Posters] (to be printed in A0-portrait):

Poster-01: “Disastro – Real Time Twitter based Disaster Response System for Indian Scenarios”

Krishna Kanth, Abirami S, Chitra P and Gayathri Sowmya G.

Poster-02: “An Empirical Study on Efficient Storage of Human Genome Data”

Diksha Chaudhary, Bratati Kahali and Yogesh Simmhan.

Poster-03: “Anomaly Detection in Surveillance Videos”

Malika Makker, Aakanksha Ashok and Anala M.R.

Poster-04: ”Design of Intelligent Fog based Framework for Dengue Prediction”

Divya V and Leena Sri R.

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Call for Papers (CLOSED)

Computing has become a ubiquitous influence in current times and is set to have an ever increasing presence in the coming years. This will have a huge impact on the kind of technology that is going to be available to the layman. Given the young population, an emerging economy like India has, it is important that they are aware of the various technological advances that are being done, the huge amount of compute power that is available now and the means to leverage the two to resolve significant social issues that exist in the country.

Topics of interest related to methodologies include, but are not limited to the following:

● IoT-based, and/or data-driven analysis,

● Real-time decision making for edge computing,

● Visual analytics for large-scale and/or high-dimensional data,

● Machine learning or deep learning algorithms or systems,

● Artificial intelligence and/or robotics,

● Distributed and cloud-based systems.

These methodologies must be used in solutions stemming from unique ideas to solve pertinent socially relevant problem scenarios. Scenarios in interdisciplinary domains of interest include, but are not limited to the following:

● Traffic planning and control,

● Monitoring infant health in primary health centers,

● Large-scale medical diagnosis for reducing the requirement of skilled doctors,

● Low-cost ways of determining air/water quality and improving the quality,

● Food processing methods that reduce wastage of produce,

● Methods to reduce pesticide usage,

● Solid waste collection, and management,

● Women safety,

● Accessibility and differently-abled inclusivity.

Manuscript Guidelines

Submitted manuscripts should be structured as technical papers and may not exceed six (6) single-spaced double-column pages using 10-point size font on 8.5 × 11 inch pages (IEEE conference style), including figures, tables, and references. See IEEE style templates at this page at this page for details. Electronic submissions must be in the form of a readable PDF file. All manuscripts will be reviewed by the Program Committee and evaluated on originality, the relevance of the problem to the conference theme, technical strength, rigor in analysis, quality of results, and organization and clarity of presentation of the paper.

Submitted papers must represent original unpublished research that is not currently under review for any other conference or journal. Papers not following these guidelines will be rejected without review and further action may be taken, including (but not limited to) notifications sent to the heads of the institutions of the authors and sponsors of the conference. Presentation of an accepted paper at the event is a requirement of publication. Papers will be selected for full-paper and short-paper types. Any paper that is not presented at the conference will not be included in the proceedings of HiPC Workshops.

We require that the submission include at least one female author.

Important Dates

Paper Submission: September 30, 2019 October 15, 2019

Notification to Authors: October 20, 2019 November 5, 2019

Camera-ready submissions: October 31, 2019 November 15, 2019

Submission Portal

Easychair Submission Link: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=hipc2019

After entering the above-mentioned Easychair page, use the hyperlink on “enter as an author”, which will redirect to a list of tracks in HiPC. Choose “Women in Computing” to make your submission.

Organizing Committee

Dr. Nitya Hariharan, Intel Technology India Pvt. Ltd.

Dr. Chitra P, Thiagarajar College of Engineering

Dr. Jaya Sreevalsan Nair, International Institute of Information Technology, Bangalore

Please contact wichipc2019@gmail.com for any queries.