Participants choose their desired topic from the following list:
Owners: Chinmaya Nanda and Debashish Mishra
Cloud is the new way of achieving elastically scalable, self-service computing and applications. Growth of ‘Cloud Infrastructure’ is helping organizations to adopt a ‘Cloud-first’ strategy by moving their on-premise applications safely to the cloud. Cloud is enabling organizations to focus on their core business by minimizing expenditure on computer infrastructure and maintenance, without compromising on the computing requirements of their organizations. It has firmly established itself as the new normal for enterprise IT and business. Ranging from startups to enterprises, it is difficult to find an organization that does not have its workload on the cloud.
Some of the areas of interest for students to work on innovative projects:
The convergence of cloud and mobile computing will continue to promote the growth of centrally coordinated applications that can be delivered to any device. Cloud is the new style of elastically scalable, self-service computing, and both internal and external applications will be built on this new style which employs Software as a Service (SaaS) model. In the near term, the focus for cloud/client will be on synchronizing content and applications across multiple devices and addressing application portability across devices. Over time, applications will evolve to support simultaneous use of multiple devices. In the future, games and enterprise applications alike will use multiple screens and exploit wearables and other devices to deliver an enhanced experience. Example: As the need for cloud based apps and services continues to grow, there will be a need for a development model for these applications and services, which will support the cloud based software development lifecycle.
Microservices
For simple and limited scale applications monolithic architecture is still relevant. Modern cloud application that requires agility scale and reliability, Microservices Architecture offers great promise. A Microservices application is composed of independent components called ‘Microservices’ that work in concert to deliver overall functionality of the application. Unlike monolithic applications, Microservices applications enable the separation of application from underlying IT infrastructure.
Students are encouraged to propose projects on Cloud Applications and Microservices. Projects should be complete in all features and demonstrable while keeping the data secure during rest and during transit.
Some of the areas of interest for students to work on innovative projects:
Owner: Rajesh Mudlapur
Depending on the security landscape and attack vectors, security hardening is important for various use-cases of technology implementation. A range of security technologies exist for various domains and their use-cases. Enhancements/improvements and innovations in these security use cases for specific implementations are also required to keep up with the changing landscapes and postures. Software innovations around security technologies that can handle various use cases are welcome. You can also consider hardware-assisted security models as part of PoC.
Some of the areas of interest for innovative projects, which also meet the standards/compliance mandates such as, HIPPA, GDPR, ISO 27001, or PCI DSS, are:
Owner: Arghya Goswami
Multi-modal biometrics is fast becoming the go-to security option for enterprises that want to offer the most secure and convenient authentication for their customers. Multi-modal authentication benefits the enterprise in specific ways. It vastly improves the customer experience with no cumbersome passwords to remember. It also improves the security of traditional authentication and prevents hacking and data breaches. We are looking for new ideas around it for use cases such as electronic Know Your Customer (eKYC), user identification/verification, image recognition/verification, or design ideas that can be used across multiple industry/business domains ranging from financial services, transportation and logistics, social services, safe cities, and life sciences and healthcare. All the use cases must also consider meeting the standards/compliance mandates such as HIPPA, GDPR, ISO 27001, or PCI DSS.
Voice biometrics is the science of using a person's voice as a uniquely identifying biological characteristic to authenticate them.
Voice-based authentication is quickly gaining popularity as an additional modality along with traditional biometric modalities such as face and fingerprint due to the emergence of various devices and contact points for touchless authentication.
Some use cases are as follows:
Owner: Sanket Panchamia
Fifth Generation Networks (5G), the Internet of Things (IoT), and Edge Computing are essential infrastructure enablers for a range of new business and technology developments. They are together termed as Industry 4.0 that covers areas like autonomous vehicles, smart city grids, e-health, automated factories, mobile content streaming, and data analytics. This marks a significant step on the journey to genuine digital transformation.
5G and Edge computing, along with IoT platforms and frameworks, are key enablers for Industry 4.0. Without these, there will be network problems, not only in providing connectivity for the 20 billion IoT devices currently being used, but also in transferring and processing the huge volumes of data that will be generated. The problems are not just about bandwidth. Different IoT solutions will have different network requirements. Some devices, like autonomous vehicles and medical equipment, demand absolute reliability where low latency will be critical. Other use cases will see networks having to cope with a much higher density of connected devices than seen from traditional 4G networks. The promise of 5G, the development of Network Function Virtualization (NFV), and the ability to process some transactions and store data near the source of that data, i.e., at the Edge, will be key determinants of the success of Industry 4.0.
Use cases:
Owners: Bharathi Athinarayanan and Abhilash Chakkan
Digitization and cheap storage have led to a myriad of data - both structured and unstructured - which we call Big Data. This, along with advances in Machine Learning and Deep Learning, has enabled us in two primary ways. One is to be able to understand the complex interrelationship of data, thus helping in deriving hidden patterns in data. It enables us to make better business decisions through predictive and prescriptive analytics. The second is to automate processes and bring in intelligence into digital things. With faster data management and computing technologies available, it has also become imperative to come up with intelligence based on data and information that is real-time or near real-time. The use of analytics to come up with cognitive (human-like) and intelligent interactions in a B2C scenario is becoming more prevalent. This helps in better personalization and reduces operations costs for businesses. Other than customer-generated data which include open data sources, and the dark internet, sensors, chips, machines, and other digital devices generate time series/stamped data which also interact with each other for various outcomes.
The best way to get started with Cognitive solutions and AI is to enrich current technology and create intelligent combinations. By bringing together AI and cognitive technologies we could immediately bring improvements to search solutions, automatic tagging of metadata, understanding natural language, automatic translations, knowledge management, semantic extraction etc.
We are interested in students developing solutions in each of the areas mentioned such as:
Useful links:
Owner: Sanket Panchamia
Web3 (also known as Web 3.0) is an idea for a new iteration of the World Wide Web which incorporates concepts such as decentralization, blockchain technologies, and token-based economics. Web3 revolves around the idea of decentralization and often incorporate blockchain technologies, such as various cryptocurrencies and non-fungible tokens (NFTs). Web3 as an idea "would build financial assets, in the form of tokens, into the inner workings of almost anything you do online".
Some visions are based around the concept of ‘Decentralized Autonomous Organizations’ (DAOs). Decentralized finance (DeFi) is another key concept; in it, users exchange currency without bank or government involvement. Self-sovereign identity allows users to identify themselves without relying on an authentication system such as OAuth, in which a trusted party has to be reached in order to assess identity. Technology scholars have argued that Web3 would likely run in tandem with Web 2.0 sites, with Web 2.0 sites likely adopting Web3 technologies in order to keep their services relevant.
Blockchain is an important part of Web 3 and the decentralized internet. Blockchain, as the backbone of Web3, redefines the data structures in the backend of the Web now that we live in a connected world. It introduces a governance layer that runs on top of the current Internet, that allows for two people who do not know or trust each other to reach and settle agreements over the Web.
Use cases in the field of Web3 and Blockchain are as below but not limited to:
Some useful links
Owner: Amitabh Srivastava
Mobile Ad-hoc Network, a.k.a. MANET, is a kind of wireless network, where there is no need for any access points or routers, and each mobile node participates in routing data to other nodes. This makes it a decentralized and dynamic network, where these nodes can join and leave at will. Having a constantly changing network topology makes it an interesting area of research. Routing protocols have been developed for different purposes, scale, and performance, like AODV, DSDV, DSR, etc., and many niche use cases have emerged in areas like military, rescue and smart cities. With the advent of 5G, new possibilities have come to the fore, like in AR/VR, drones, vehicles (VANET), IoT, connected devices at home, etc. and this will only intensify in the future. With that comes the valid concern of security, against malicious behavior or compromise of mobile nodes, traffic snooping, man-in-the-middle, etc. Adding to that is the use of AI/ML algorithms in preventing, detecting, and fixing the network as well as re-structuring the topology dynamically for better performance. Research on MANETs has again picked up with the onset of 5G, and also WiFi 6. Some of the topics but not limited to could be:
Owners: Rajesh Mudlapur and Arghya Goswami
Identity management (IdM), also known as Identity and Access Management (IAM) ensure that authorized people, and only authorized people, have access to the technology resources they need to perform their job functions. It includes polices and technologies that encompass an organization-wide process to properly identify, authenticate, and authorize people, groups of people, or software applications through attributes including user access rights and restrictions based on their identities.
The rapid changes across technologies, organizational priorities, user expectations, business opportunities and risks require Identity and Access Management (IAM) architectures to be flexible. Furthermore, as digital businesses rely on digital trust, that is enabled by IAM, security and identity are, more than ever, an essential foundation of an organization’s business ecosystem.
Some of the trends and topics in IAM are as follows:
Owner: Sanket Panchamia
As organizations grow across borders, they must increase their spending and staffing to provide services in new languages. Providing services in a customer’s native language is important to reaching them where they are at.
Real-time Bi-Directional Voice Translation has the potential to revolutionize the way people from different regions of the globe communicate. It can benefit customer service departments and B2B interactions. It can also enable sales teams to communicate with buyers in new regions.
Bi-Directional Language Translation uses MT methods to translate communications between two or more parties into each party’s desired language. These technologies allow for seamless communication through language barriers and can help an organization extend their services to any part of the world. Real-time Bi-Directional Voice Translation (RBVT) extends the capabilities of language translation to be used with voice. This means one party could speak in their native language and the other could hear it in their own native language as well, and vice versa. Having a real-time system is especially important for Bi-Directional Voice Translation as long delays for computation can create problems in conversation.
Some of the trends/use-cases in this area are:
Owner: Amith KK
Quantum computing is a rapidly emerging technology that harnesses the laws of quantum mechanics to solve problems too complex for classical computers. Quantum machines promise to outstrip even the most capable of today’s and tomorrow’s supercomputers.
Using a classical machine will still be the easiest and most economical solution for tackling most problems. But quantum computers promise to power exciting advances in various fields, from materials science to pharmaceuticals research. Companies are already experimenting with them to develop things like lighter and more powerful batteries for electric cars, and to help create novel drugs.
Quantum computers also pose a risk to contemporary cryptosystems in wide use such as RSA RSA-EC, DSA, DH, and DHEC. The problem with the currently popular algorithms is that their security relies on one of three hard mathematical problems: the integer factorization problem, the discrete logarithm problem, or the elliptic-curve discrete logarithm problem. The security of these algorithms relies on the assumption that it would take even the most powerful classical computers thousands of years to solve certain mathematical problems. Attacks on these systems were considered to be ineffective because they are too computationally expensive. With quantum computing, these fundamental underlying assumptions, upon which our entire security architecture is built, are no longer true. All these problems can be solved with ease on a sufficiently powerful quantum computer. Hence institutions such as NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology) are in the process of finding newer, better algorithms which are quantum resistant.
Quantum computing also enables advances in the cryptographic space by enabling tamper-evident forms of key distribution in the form of Quantum Key Distribution (QKD).
Use Cases utilizing the power of quantum computing
Additionally, there are other use cases that stem from the need to protect against this monumental increase in computing power such as the Post Quantum Cryptography.
Some useful links:
Owners: Sanket Panchamia and Visagan Santhanam
Problem:
Industry best practices dictate that companies should keep software up-to-date as part of maintaining a healthy security posture. Yet, many companies struggle with managing vulnerabilities, especially when it comes to vendor and third-party software. Third party vulnerabilities include vulnerabilities in software dependency packages e.g., Javascript packages, java packages, and docker images. Third-party vulnerability management is often a balance between ensuring that critical patches are reviewed and applied quickly, while reducing the risk of downtime due to a potentially unstable patch, also protecting systems from potential security exploits.
The vulnerabilities are identified and published by various organizations such as NIST, GitHub Advisory, mitre. These vulnerabilities are accompanied by information that helps with the remediation.
Examples:
Solution:
The solution designed must have the following:
Owner: Bharathi Athinarayanan
Passwordless authentication is the process of verifying a software user’s identity with something other than a password. The most common passwordless authentication methods include verifying the possession of a secondary device or account a user has or a biometric trait that is unique to them, like their face or fingerprint.
Typically, there are three types of canonical authentication factors:
Something which only the user knows:
Something only the user holds:
It could be:
Something only the user is or does:
This includes morphological biometrics and behavioral biometrics. Biometrics has advantages over passwords and tokens in that they:
This could be:
We invite students to bring in innovative solutions to showcase in this area with breakthrough methods. Students are free to use any existing technologies (AI/ ML/ AR / VR / Hardware based solutions / Mixed Reality) etc., to innovate in this domain.
Key links:
Owners: Arghya Goswami and Sanket Panchamia
Problem:
Machine learning and deep learning methods can find their use in anti-counterfeiting applications. Artificial intelligence (AI) companies use computer vision to recognize fakes. Data scientists design machine learning algorithms to detect details. To a human observer, two shoes can look identical, with one being legit and the other fake. But, data science methods defeat the human eye in detecting details. If the fabric pattern is off, deep learning algorithms will identify and report it as a fake.
Why are anti-counterfeiting solutions required?
Solution:
Visualization of anti-counterfeiting solution
Owners: Sanket Panchamia, Arghya Goswami and Rajesh Mudlapur Potential Mentors: Pavan Manchiraju, Ankit Jain, Ramabitharan Krishnan
Problem:
When there are large gatherings and conferences, there is always additional threat from unknown sources that often go undetected through traditional systems. Especially when you host the event, you assume a degree of responsibility for the people who attend it. Failing to do so can have a wide range of negative outcomes including impact to your group’s reputation or worse, a potential lawsuit. Throughout the years, countless events have had unfortunate outcomes.
With a large event, the potential for risk often grows with the number of people in attendance. Unfortunately, people can be unpredictable. The more people that there are at an event, the more likely it is that something will go wrong. Being able to recognize security threats, particularly on a level that is proportionate to the size of the event and in a way that suits the various event details, is crucial for ensuring the safety of all guests.
Solution:
The proposed solution should use some form of analytics to be able to profile the individuals within a video stream. There are multiple ways to mitigate the risk. Some of them are discussed below
Owner: Thangathen Ponnusamy and Grant McCauley
Problem
Organizations are struggling to meet the growing demand for software enhancements. Developing and deploying custom software is a critical element of how companies innovate. Top-performing organizations develop many of their most important software solutions in-house. Recent studies have found, more than half of all software projects are late and over budget, with another 20 percent canceled outright. The application of AI in the software development process promises to mitigate many of these problems.
Solution
AI can be immensely useful for both new application development and existing applications. In this use case, we will focus on the application of AI to existing applications. The global application modernization services market size is expected to grow from USD 11.4 billion in 2020 to USD 24.8 billion by 2025, at a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 16.8% during the forecast period. AI based solutions can play a significant role in modernizing existing applications and make them cloud native.
AI can be used to refactor applications. Refactoring is defined as “the process of changing a software system in such a way that does not alter the external behavior of the code yet improves its internal structure”. Identifying refactoring opportunities is the first important stage in the refactoring process. The solution should provide developers, refactoring recommendations with very few false positives, making developers confident use them. As a next step, automatic refactoring should be done to make the solution cloud native. For this project, an existing COM+ application can be refactored and converted to a cloud native application.
Machine learning can be harnessed to predict and automate refactoring operations in COM+ application and refactor them as cloud native applications. ML algorithms should show promising results when applied to different areas of software engineering such as code comprehension, code smells, and automatic refactoring from COM+ application to Cloud native code.
Many organizations still use legacy systems, which create hurdles in the adoption of new cloud native technologies. This AI based solution can help clients cross the hurdle and AI can help them maximize cloud native use with confidence and a higher rate of success.
Participants choose their desired topic from the following list: