IEEE International 5G Summit on IoT & Cybersecurity: July 2017, Kerala, India

By Lillykutty Jacob - Kerala Chapter Chair, India

The 18th IEEE International 5G Summit on IoT & Cybersecurity was held on Saturday, 1 July at the Mascot Hotel, Trivandrum, under the leadership of Dr. Ashutosh Dutta, IEEE 5G Initiative Co-chair (in absentia), Mr. Munir Mohammed, Senior Programmer, IEEE India office, and Dr. Lillykutty Jacob, IEEE ComSoc Kerala Chapter Chair. In addition to the talks from industry, government and academia, there was a research forum dedicated to ongoing research in these areas, organized by Dr Sabu. Thampi of IIITM-K Trivandrum, Dr. B S Manoj of IIST Trivandrum, and Dr. Vineeth B S of IIST Trivandrum.

The event was sponsored technically/financially by the ISOC Trivandrum Chapter, KSCSTE, Texas Instruments, and Lab Systems. This event was attended by approximately 85 people onsite and was watched by approximately 370 online viewers. The IEEE 5G Initiative sponsored the streaming. A recording of the streaming event is available at the http://estv.in/ieee5gkerala/. The program details are available at www.ieee-5gsummit.org/kerala. The chief guest for the inaugural event was Dr. K. Suresh Das, executive vice president, KSCSTE and Principal Secretary S&T Dept., and it was presided by Dr. K.R.Suresh Nair, Chair, IEEE Kerala Section. There were 10 invited speakers.

The first speaker of the day was Dr. Jomy Jose, an alumni of NIT Calicut, Head-Telecom Solutions, L & T Technology Services. The session was on the topic “5G:Standardisation Status and Pre-Standardisation Activities.” Topics covered included 5G requirements, 5G roadmap, 5G key technologies, and the status of 5G standardization. A very informative session was administered by Dr. Sastri Kota, President of SoHum Consultants on the topic “The Role of Satellite in 5G: A Perspective.” In the next session, Mr. Rajesh Banda, Head of the 5G India Office at Nokia, spoke about “5G Key Technology Components Enabling the Future.” It was suggested that if 5G will be used in the right scale, 6G will not be required. Mr. Veera Manikandan Raju, CTO Software & Systems, Embedded Processing and distinguished member technical staff at Texas Instruments, spoke on the topic “5G Connected Intelligence Era Applications and Security Challenges.”

A section of the participants in the Mascot Hotel auditorium.

In the fifth session, Mr. Nishant Krishna, Consulting Engineer at Avaya, spoke on the topic “Real-time Onsite Operations Facilitation (ROOF) for the Internet of Things.” His comments started with the quote, “There are two types of organization in today’s world, those that have been breached and those that just don’t know about it.” It was followed by a very live session by Dr. Prasant Misra, Scientist, Embedded Systems and Robotics, TCS Research and Innovation, on the topic “Balancing the needs vs. the wants in IoT.” Mr. S. Venkatesan, CEO & Managing Director, Lab Systems, delivered a talk on “Digital Forensic Case Study.” Dr. Soman K P, Professor and Head of the Department of Computational Engineering and Networking at Amrita University, Coimbatore Campus. and Dr. Prabaharan Poornachandran, Professor & Security Researcher at Amrita University, Kollam, spoke about “Security Issues of Internet of Things and the Way Forward.” As the speakers were from academia, the session was more academic oriented and student targeted. The final talk of the summit was by Mr. Satish Babu, InApp, ISOC-Trivandrum Chair, on the topic “IoT, Blockchain and Security.”

The Research Forum was chaired by Dr. Ciza Thomas, College of Engineering Trivandrum. The presented topics were: 1) “A fault-resilient approach for underwater sensor network localization,” by Anjan P Das, CET; 2) “Fake news detector: a tool for detecting fake news in online social networks,” by Indu V, IIITM-K; 3) “A random projection based image encryption and dimension reduction technique for big image analytics,” by Sidharth Ravindran, NIT-Puducherry; 4) “Android malware detection mechanism based on Bayesian model averaging,” by Roopak S, IIITM-K; 5) “Image forensics techniques for revealing image forgery,” by Divya Vidhyadharan, CET; 6) “Improved P2P communication in IoT using the LOADng routing protocol,” by Deepthi Sasidharan, NIT-C; 7) “Development of embedded systems for secure biometric authentication using IoT,” by Annies Joshy, GEC-Idukki; 8) “Authorship analysis framework for a clutter-free online social media account,” by Athira U, IIITM-K; and 9) “On the scope for hardening the security of V2X communication,” by Nandakumar, NIT-C.