IIT Madras has started an online diploma and BSc degree in the area of programming and data science. All information about this initiative can be found at the portal onlinedegree.iitm.ac.in. The first batch of students were admitted in Jan 2021.
My role: Led the founding of the initiative and have been coordinating it since Jun 2020
NPTEL (National Program on Technology Enhanced Learning, a project of IITs and IISc) through the MOOCs portal onlinecourses.nptel.ac.in and the MHRD's SWAYAM portal, runs a highly successful outreach program by the IITs to improve higher education standards across the length and breadth of India.
My role: National MOOCs coordinator for NPTEL under SWAYAM since Dec 2015
This programme funded by the Ministry of Human Resource Development (MHRD) under its NMEICT initiative is responsible for the online education portal http://nptel.ac.in. 40-hour courses for a complete engineering curriculum are available through this portal. Since March 2014, NPTEL has launched the online courses and certification portal http://onlinecourses.nptel.ac.in.
My role: Institute coordinator for NPTEL since Nov 2011
This project, funded by Renesas Corporation, aims at designing practical codes for bidirectional or two-way relays. Dr. Srikrishna Bhashyam, the principal investigator, is the main collaborator in this project.
This project, funded by the Reliance Telecom Centre for Excellence at IIT Madras, aims at demonstrating secure key distribution between a WiFi access point and a remote terminal using the physical layer. Ideas from coding for the Gaussian wiretap channel are the main primitives in the key distribution protocol. Drs. Steven McLaughlin (Georgia Tech, Atlanta) and Matthieu Bloch (Georgia Tech Lorraine, Metz) are collaborators in this project.
Iterative codes such as Turbo codes, Low Density Parity Check (LDPC) codes and Turbo product codes (TPC) will be the de facto standard in most of the future digital communication systems. Codecs for turbo and LDPC codes in the popular wireless standards such as LTE and WiMax have been implemented in VLSI (FPGA and ASIC) targetting high-speed as well as low-area, low-power applications. Codecs for TPCs have been implemented on low-end digital signal processors (DSPs). Most of these implementations were done as MTech and MS student projects with the collaboration of Drs. Nitin Chandrachoodan and Devendra Jalihal.
In addition to modern iterative codes, traditional RS codes and convolutional codes have been implemented in VLSI and DSP.
This project, funded jointly by the international cooperation wings of DST, India and the Science Foundation of Portugal, is to enable collaboration with Dr. Joao Barros of the University of Porto, Portugal. The area of research is information-theoretic security.
This project was completed jointly with Drs. Anil Prabhakar, Balaji Srinivasan and Shanti Bhattacharya of the optics group in the Electrical Engineering department at IIT Madras. The funding was about Rs. 50 lakhs received from the Department of Science and Technology (DST), India and the Indo-French Centre for Promotion of Advanced Research (IFCPAR). Our collaborators were Drs. Jean-Marc Merolla and Matthieu Bloch from the FEMTO lab of CNRS in Besancon France.