Ubiquity

Challenges

Technological development has led to the emergence of multiple devices which perform one task or the other. In order to bring in the concept of convergence across the various devices and improve the quality of experience for the end users, the concept of Ubiquity has been stressed upon.  

Overview  

Ubiquitous computing seamlessly integrates digital and physical devices by making many computers available throughout the physical environment, while making them effectively invisible to the user. Users can access digital data and applications from the environment as easily as, (if not easier than) accessing them through their personal computers. Since ubiquitous computing exists in the user’s environment, the technology is sustainable if it is invisible to the user and does not intrude the user’s consciousness. This requires functioning of a multitude of devices in the environment to be oblivious to the users.

Current Research

The areas of focus at Kolkata Innovation Labs extend across the following areas:

• Focus on four different types of Platforms
• Sensor Nodes:
• Aggregator platforms
• Mobile / Portable visualization platforms
• Large storage and distributed computing  

In the current year extensive work has been done on the following areas:

Home Infotainment Platform as a Ubiquitous Home Gateway: The Home Infotainment Platform (HIP) is a generic multimedia framework based platform that can decode and render multimedia and information content from the internet.

Connected TV for Content Analysis: Connected TV uses sophisticated multimedia processing techniques to understand the context of the broadcast TV video and audio. Once the context is extracted, several value-added applications can be provided to the end-user.

Complex Event Processing: Context Awareness enables automatic detection of the user and usage scenario based on real-time processing of sensor and network event streams and thereby enables a rich user interaction and experience. Complex Event Processing is one technique of discovering context and is therefore an important capability that we are building into the TCS ubiquity story.

Open Storage Solution: While streams processing is used to perform analytics on data that is “in-stream”, data still needs to be stored in a storage media for traditional data mining and analysis. This area has received fair amount of interest both academia and industry. In this regard the following are of importance:

• Creating low cost, high availability storage infrastructure for sensor data using commodity hardware
• Using clustered file systems for building massively scalable file serving infrastructure
• Building parallel data warehouse infrastructure for large scale data mining tasks
• Using programming models such as Map-Reduce along with clustered file systems for performing parallel number crunching tasks

Error Control and Erasure Coding: In order to address the requirement for robustness requirement, advanced error control & erasure coding schemes for adaptive error correction and error tolerance in the communication and storage is of substantial value. A multi-application framework for multisensory data fusion is under development.