Technical Colloquium Conducted by the ComSoc Chapter of Hyderabad Section

By N. Venkatesh - Chair, ComSoc/SPS Joint Chapter, IEEE Hyderabad Section

The IEEE Hyderabad Section includes a large and vibrant student community. On 29–30 January 2016, the Student Chapter of CVR College of Engineering, Hyderabad, organized a technical colloquium jointly with the ComSoc/SPS Joint Chapter of the Hyderabad Section. This event had several distinguished speakers from industry, apart from the IEEE Hyderabad Section, who addressed 330 participants, including 240 students and 50 faculty members from the college and 40 participants from other colleges. More than 130 of the participants were IEEE Members or Student Members, with the event providing the others with a good insight into IEEE and the motivation to join.

An objective of the event was to acquaint the students with current technology. This colloquium provided two days of plenary sessions for formal discussions and presentations on current technical topics that made the students aware of many technologies from different streams, such as emerging trends in 5G communications, VLSI technologies, wireless communications for indoor positioning, the Internet of Things, electronic warfare, and radar target detection, among others.

Mr. N. Venkatesh, Chair of the ComsSoc/SPS Joint Chapter and a Sr. Vice President at Redpine Signals, provided technical insight into the technologies of indoor positioning. The session covered historic and current navigation methods, and their current move into indoor use. It included details of wireless techniques in locationing using time of flight, received signal strength, and angle of arrival. It provided details of applications of indoor positioning: the locationing of people and assets and the benefits accruing for safety and operational efficiency in various environments. The session also covered the implementation of such systems using RTLS devices and software.

Abhinav Kumar talking about 5G.

Dr. Abhinav Kumar, a Professor at the Indian Institute of Technology, Hyderabad, conducted a session on 5G communications. The session covered 5G scenarios and their challenges. The speaker compared various mobile communications and emerging trends in 5G communications. This lecture gave the audience an insight into future communication scenarios, the technologies involved, the emerging applications served by 5G, and the roadmap ahead.

The event also included a workshop on building devices for the Internet of Things that was conducted by Milan Tandel and Rajasekhar Reddy of Redpine Signals. The workshop was based on the WyzBee IoT platform created by Redpine Signals. One of the highlights of the workshop was a demonstration of the use of multiple wireless technologies within an IoT device. The hands-on example showed how data from sensors could be gathered using the Bluetooth Low Energy wireless protocol and transferred to a cloud server using a standard Wi-Fi link.