5G, More 5G, and Even More 5G! Updates from the Garden City of India

By Dilip Krishnaswamy - IEEE ComSoc Bangalore Chapter Chair, India

Lately, there has been a surge in the number of 5G Summits being hosted around the world. Now, we had hosted only one 5G workshop in Bangalore in 2018, and we felt that that was a little too few. Not wanting to be left behind, we decided to host not just one 5G summit, or two 5G summits, but a whopping three 5G Summits in 2019!! Well, we are done with two, and we had a third one in late November to round out our spectacular 5G show in Bangalore! Sincere thanks to the IEEE 5G Summits and the IEEE Future Networks team at IEEE ComSoc for indulging us for all three summits!! Now, we wish we could have a record fourth summit this year, but Santa Claus would have none of it. Well, we have tried our best and we must say that the summits were very well attended, and by more people than just the speakers and the IEEE ComSoc volunteers, and hopefully they did come for 5G and not just the marvelous vegG and nonvegG food that we served them.

As we started plotting for more 5G Summits for 2020 (we were thinking of seven 5G Summits actually), our chapter was asked to host the third IEEE 5G World Forum on 10–12 September 2020 in Bangalore. Now, we are all excited and looking forward to it, and we do hope that the momentum from the recent 5G Summits will help culminate in a nice 5G World Forum next year. However, we will be so busy with the 5G World Forum that we will not have time to host any more 5G Summits in 2020. The conspiracy theorists among us think that this was a deliberate move from IEEE ComSoc to arrest our march on hosting more 5G Summits. Perhaps we will just have a 6G Summit instead after the 5G World Forum.

Now, we all love each other so much in the Bangalore chapter that we just want to meet each other more often than the 5G Summits and the boring regular chapter team meetings would permit. So we started a Study Group starting with a cool topic on “Massive MIMO”. These study group discussions have been informal in nature, and inevitably everyone’s ignorance came to the fore, but it was enjoyable learning! We now plan to move on to “Quantum Communications”, another funky topic to lure the truly last remaining folks on the fence who have not yet paid the chapter fees to join the chapter. Now as we lure them in, we hope they stay. As regards the Quantum realm, none of us know whether Schrodinger’s cat is truly alive or not, but Quantum is cool, and we are looking forward to exploring it. These study groups are fun, and we hope that you folks in other chapters try them out too!

Now we are on to more cool stuff, such as hosting a fun Drones conclave, and an ITS workshop related to autonomous vehicles. We held research methodology workshops to encourage students to pursue research, and we are planning to host a summer school for students in 2020. We hosted a graduate student thesis competition for M.S./Ph.D. students (all the awards were won by brilliant women engineering students). Many volunteers participated in a WiE Leadership summit that was held this year as well.

So we are all having fun, giving un-invited talks, barging into keynote slots at local conferences, and the like, and we are keenly engaged with local academia, government, and industry and exploring new areas such as IoT, Smart Cities, 5G, AI/ML, Robotics, Blockchain, Drones, and Data Privacy. So please do come to Bangalore and visit us, and be sure to submit a paper to the IEEE 5G World Forum next year! Cheers!

Dilip Krishnaswamy is Chair of the IEEE Comsoc Bangalore Chapter, India, and Reliance Fellow and VP (New Tech R&D), Reliance Industries Ltd.